The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) Read Free Page A

extracted a plastic bottle and unscrewed the top. The heady aroma of high-octane alcohol caused his nostrils to flare. Triple-distilled by his grandfather from corn he grew on his ranch, the white lightning in the bottle came in at 160 proof. Besides being a hotly sought-after barter item, it made an ideal disinfectant, although his grandpa frowned at the idea, mocking it as a waste of good liquor.
    Lucas lifted a plastic sheet from inside the case and laid out the kit. After inspecting the chest wound again, he sterilized a pair of long-handled forceps. When he was satisfied he wouldn’t cause any infection from the instrument, he first examined the thigh wound, noting that the entry and exit were clean. She’d been lucky on that one, but not so on the chest. The round had missed her lung, but there was no exit, and he was hardly prepared to perform surgery by flashlight in the great wide open.
    He probed the entry, trying to see if he could feel the slug, but after several minutes of fruitless effort, gave up. The best he would be able to do was sterilize the wound with the alcohol and rig a pressure bandage. If she survived the night, he’d try for the nearest trading post, where someone more qualified could help. Lucas was no stranger to blood and had tended to a few wounds since the collapse, but nothing this severe, and even though he’d read an army manual on emergency first aid, he was out of his depth.
    The blood loss was probably more dangerous than the chances of the bullet moving and causing any further damage. Judging by the flow, it hadn’t hit any major arteries, but he couldn’t be sure. He watched for any telltale arterial spurting and, when he only saw a faint pulse of red, reached into the kit for the syringe of morphine that he’d liberated from a medical clinic after the collapse. He’d never had to use the drug before and hoped for the woman’s sake that even though it was well past the expiration date, the caramel liquid would still pack a wallop.
    Lucas poured some more alcohol on her arm and emptied three-quarters of the syringe into her, and then immersed the needle in the alcohol, using the bottle top as a receptacle. After thirty seconds of disinfection, he capped the syringe and replaced it in the kit.
    The woman’s breathing eased and became more regular. Lucas removed his hat and held his ear to her chest in an effort to determine whether her lungs were congested, but couldn’t make out much. Her chest sounded clear, but he was winging it at this point – if she were drowning in her own blood, there was nothing he could do for her but offer a prayer and the rest of the morphine.
    Lucas sat back and reached for the alcohol, resisting the urge to take a swig to steady his hand. He splashed some on the leg wound, rinsing the drying blood away, and she barely stirred. Before attending to her chest, he opened up one of the sealed packages of bandages and affixed two to her thigh, wrapping them with gauze to hold them in place after generously dabbing them with expired antibacterial ointment.
    Better than nothing , he reasoned and then moved to her traumatized chest. This time the alcohol produced a pained moan and a squirm, but the woman didn’t open her eyes. He slathered the wound with ointment, leaving some of the alcohol in the cavity for good measure, and then improvised a pressure bandage to quell the bleeding.
    Five minutes later he was repacking the kit, enshrouded in darkness and anxious to extinguish the bright beam of the flashlight before it drew any danger. He strode back to Tango and replaced the kit in the pouch, and then switched off the flashlight and slid it back into his pocket.
    Lucas stood by his steed as his eyes adjusted. Over the far hills flashes of lightning forked from the thunderheads, followed by the occasional shuddering boom. He counted between the next large flash and the arriving explosion, and figured the storm was still at least fifteen miles away, maybe