Regeneration (Mad Swine Book 3) (5 page)

The pain was ferocious, but I tried
to block it out. I found my grip on Kieran’s jacket and tugged him
along as I struggled to drag my own body under the shelter of the
trailer bed. My feet and elbows kept sinking into the wet soil and
I felt the cool earth sliding down into my pants. Cody was nuzzling
at my ear now, and I slapped at him, pushed him away.

I continued to crawl-pull Kieran the
last few feet, while Cody danced around, barking sharply. Having
reached the safety of cover, I shifted my position so that I could
have a view of Kieran’s wounds while not inflicting more pain on my
own.

“You’re going to be fine,” I said to
Kieran, although I had no idea if that was true. I hadn’t been able
to examine his wound and now I had to deal with my own
situation.

“It hurts so bad,” Kieran said. When
he coughed, there was blood on his lips; that was a very bad
sign.

“Hold the shirt tight on your
stomach, Kieran. You have to hold this really tight for a
minute.”

As I struggled to remove my
belt—careful not to put any pressure on my leg wound—I could hear
the voices of the other men between evenly spaced gunfire. Brian
was yelling for someone to move on a flank under covering fire. I
couldn’t think about that now, though, as I had my own crisis. I
had to trust that they knew what to do and would get it done.

Cody kept pushing his face in to see
what was going on. He was a ball of nervous energy, moving, moving,
moving. He kept nudging at my arms as I tried to get the damn belt
off. I shoved him away again and yelled, “Cody, stay damn it! Lay
down!”

Finally, he lay down and whimpered as
I got my belt off my waist and wrapped it around my thigh, just
above the gunshot wound. I slid the end of the belt through the
buckle and pulled it as tight as I could. Pain, clear and present;
for a moment, my vision began to tunnel and I felt myself losing
consciousness.

Kieran’s grip on my hand began to
loosen. The voices around me muffled, muted, as though I was
hearing through cotton wads. I could not pass out or Kieran might
bleed out and die. Gritting my teeth, I focused on my breathing,
deep in through the nose, out through the mouth, in and out, cold
air filling my lungs. With every breath, I felt my pulse beating in
my ears. In seconds, the tunnel vision dissipated.

I tied a knot into the loose end so
that it would keep the buckle as tight as possible. This was not a
proper tourniquet, but it would serve its purpose for now. Turning
back to Kieran now, his eyes were open but he stared blankly up at
the undercarriage of the trailer. The shallow hitch of his chest
alerted me that he was still breathing, though.

Pulling the flannel away from the
wound, I tore at his blood-soaked clothing trying to get a better
look at the wound. I had a hard time with his coat zipper, but
finally managed that. The buttons of his shirt popped off as I
pulled the ends of his shirt apart. I lifted his T-shirt and wiped
away the pooling blood to get a look at the entrance wound. The
hole was relatively small, about the size of a quarter. The skin
around the wound was dark purple and the flesh was ragged where the
round hand entered.

Steeling myself, hoping I would not
pass out, I managed to push Kieran onto his side so that I could
get a look at the exit wound. Even as his body turned, I knew this
was going to be bad; the amount of blood that accumulated on his
clothing and the ground below was astonishing. I gagged when I saw
the horrible pulp of mutilated flesh where the bullet had torn free
from his body.

I don’t know how long I sat looking
on as his blood flowed freely form the decimated flesh, but it was
probably only seconds. I was probably in shock; I felt like I could
not focus. My mind was trying to access the information about
dressing a gunshot wound, information I knew was there, yet I could
not grasp the knowledge. All I could think to do was try to stop
the bleeding; he seemed to have already lost so much blood I was
surprised he was still alive.

As I finally reached for the soaked
flannel shirt with the intention of putting it on the exit wound to
try to plug the flow, I felt hands pulling at me, trying to drag me
out from beneath the trailer. I gripped Kieran as I was being
dragged, but my bloody hands slipped from his jacket and within
seconds, I was out from under the darkness and lying under the
morning sun. Brian was leaning over me, his long hair hanging down,
tickling my cheeks.

“Are you hit? Matt are you hit, damn
it?”

“My leg.” I indicated my wound but
then grabbed Brian by the shoulders. “Kieran is dying. Help
him.”

“Let me check you out first.” He
tried to examine my leg, but I pushed him away.

“Help me up. Now!”

Instead of arguing, Brian got his
shoulder under my arm and together we struggled up and got my feet
under me. When I put pressure on the leg, the pain was horrible,
but I gritted my teeth and took the pain. “I’m fine. Get Kieran on
the trailer.”

Ian and Joshua were already lifting
their brother. Together, they lay Kieran’s body gently onto the
flat surface of the trailer. “Jesus and Mary,” Joshua said. His
young eyes grew wide with shock and fear.

“The sniper?” I asked as I stepped
gingerly toward the men. “Did you get the sniper?”

“He’s down. Justin is checking his
body.”

I nodded my head and looked at Ian.
He was staring at his young brother. When he turned to me, he
asked, “Can you help him? Please, can you help him?”

The boy was unconscious, whether from
pain or loss of blood, I did not know. Mindful of my own wounds, I
shifted slightly so that my weight was on my right leg. Pulling his
arm out of the sleeve of the coat and shirt, I was able to expose
Kieran’s wounds. The mass of skin and tissue, the pulp of destroyed
flesh that surrounded the wound, served to answer the question.
Without a battlefield surgeon, Kieran was lost.

I couldn’t bear to see the hurt in
the older man’s eyes but I couldn’t look away. Joshua was crying,
his young voice still sounded childish in his anguish. Before I
realized what I was doing, I pulled off my thermal shirt and jammed
it against Kieran’s back, covering the gaping wound.

“Ian get up there beside him and
apply pressure on the wound. Hold it down tight like you mean it.”
I turned to Brian and Justin who stood beside him. “Justin, get on
the tractor and get this thing moving. Everyone else, get on. Cody,
up! Let’s go, move, move, move!”

Justin hustled, climbing up into the
cab of the tractor. Joshua and Cody jumped up onto the flatbed. For
a moment, he sat looking at his two brothers before he finally
reached over and put his hands over Ian’s. Together, they held the
stained shirt and applied direct pressure to the wound. Cody
settled down beside the dying boy, his chin lying across his thigh
as his sad eyes looked on.

Brian helped me up onto the trailer
before plopping himself down beside me. In my ear he whispered, “No
matter how fast we get him back, he’s not going to survive.”

“I know,” I said. Slamming my hand
down several times against the trailer bed, I shouted, “Let’s go,
Justin!”

The tractor engine revved and the
trailer jerked and hitched roughly as Justin got us moving. While
Justin turned the trailer to the north, Brian said, “We should burn
the bodies. We can’t just leave them there.”

I nodded my head. “I’m hoping he can
last long enough to say good bye to his mother. Those things can
wait.”

* * *

Cleona Finnegan stood over her boy.
Washed clean by his family, Kieran’s body lay upon the pyre,
swathed in white linen. She stood with one hand upon the boy’s head
and the other upon his heart. We all stood around her in silence,
mourning our loss. The evening was cold but the sky was clear. The
moon was bright and the stars were brilliant against the darkness
of space. I stood beside Lara, my arm over her shoulder, her head
against my chest. We all stood together, Finnegan’s and Randall
Oaks residents, one family against the cold, hard world.

Cleona’s voice, still young and clear
even at her age, broke the silence of the night. “God saw you
getting tired, my son, and a cure was not to be. So He put His arms
around you and whispered ‘come to me’. With tearful eyes we watched
you, and saw you pass away. Although we loved you dearly, we could
not make you stay. A golden heart stopped beating, hardworking
hands at rest. God broke our hearts to prove to us, He only takes
the best.”

She leaned forward and embraced her
dead son for long minutes, her frail body bent over, and her tears
staining the sheets. Ian stepped forward then, and whispered to his
mother softly. She stood and looked at him, suddenly stern and
strong, very much the woman I had come to know the last three
months. She gripped his arm, gave him a curt nod, and then stood
beside her eldest daughter, Maureen.

Now Ian laid his hands upon his
brother, the same as did Cleona before him. With his back to us,
his voice was loud and clear. “Brother, may the road rise up to
meet you. May the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm
upon your face and the rain fall soft on your fields and until we
meet again, may the Lord hold you in the hollow of his hand.”

And each of us, in turn, sent Kieran
on his way with a prayer or words of our own device. When it was my
turn, I was at a loss for words. Nothing I could say about the
young man would bring comfort to his family and friends. I was out
of speeches and prayers seemed to be ignored. I lay my hand on the
cool sheet; it appeared to be tinted blue under the strange light
cast from the moon.

“I’m sorry.” The words sounded
hollow. I even began to doubt the sincerity in my words. I feared
that little by little, day by day, I was losing my humanity. Every
day I felt like I was standing precariously at the edge of an
emotional void, just waiting for a catalyst to push me over the
edge.

Later, the funeral pyre burned, we
drank homemade beer and celebrated Kieran’s too short life. I stood
on my own, watching the others and they talked and laughed and
shared stories. I wanted to join them, really I did, but I could
only think about the sniper that had killed the young man. I
couldn’t help but wonder if he’d actually been the target.

* * *

Separate from the basement of the
house, yet sharing one cold brick wall, the storm cellar was large
enough to fit as many as fifteen men and women comfortably in the
event of a natural catastrophe. In all of her years on the farm,
Maureen shared that only one tornado had come close enough to drive
them to the cellar to seek shelter. Now, the room stored their
canning and other root vegetables. Wooden shelves lined the walls,
filled with jars, cans, and other miscellaneous items. A large
woodworking table stood at one end of the room. In the center a
large wood table that sat ten, its top three inches thick, and its
legs even thicker. The wood was the washed out gray of old wood.
Battered and gouged, the formidable piece of furniture had lasted
nearly one hundred years, if you believed Ian, and I had no reason
to doubt the man.

Justin lifted the black backpack and
upended it on the massive table, spilling out the items he’d taken
off the sniper’s corpse yesterday. We gathered in close and spent a
few minutes looking over the contents in the bag: a compass and
snippet of torn map, two plastic bottles filled with water, some
sort of dried meat wrapped in cloth, a peanut tin that contained
some dried fruits, spare ammunition, a fixed blade knife and a
battered black notebook.

I examined the last item carefully,
but found it was written in code indecipherable to us. The code,
written in hand, was a series of five letters per word, with four
words per row. This pattern continued in this manner except for the
last entry that was a four-digit number followed by a slash and a
one-digit number. If given time and access to research materials, I
probably could have figured out the code. Bottom line, the coded
text in the journal was useless.

After taking turns examining the
items, we spread them all out neatly in front of us, not expecting
any miraculous epiphany, but hoping something would come to us to
help us figure out why this man had shot Kieran, and more
importantly, why he was scouting the farm. I had my doubts, though.
The man was alone and scouts usually operated in pairs. Perhaps the
shooter had made a mistake. There were crazies in the area and he
could have mistaken Kieran for one of them. No, that didn’t make
sense. He was using a scoped rifle and he fired on me when I tried
to help Kieran. He should have easily been able to see that we were
not infected. Last I checked, infected did not tend to repair
fences or roll up on tractors.

After a bit of silence, Brian pulled
out his own notebook and flipped open to a clean page. He turned to
Justin and said, “Tell me what this guy looked like. Whatever you
can remember, anything will be helpful.”

With the dead man’s knife in hand,
Justin said, “Well, he was about six feet tall. He wore jeans—dark
blue with a tear in the right knee—and black steel toe boots. He
had a leather biker jacket that had ‘Hoffman Estates Harley Club’
on the back. He had a knit cap on, but his hair was dark brown,
pretty long, but not as long as your hair. Thick beard and
mustache.” Justin snapped his fingers and continued. “Oh, yeah, he
had a tattoo on his neck, it was the number 59 in a circle.”

“Wait a minute,” Brian said. He
leafed through his ragged notebook as Justin continued to inventory
the bag contents. He paged through it for a few seconds until he
found what he was looking for. He held the notebook up in front of
Justin.

“Did the tattoo look like this?”