Rescue by Fanetti Susan

Author:Fanetti, Susan [Fanetti, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-01T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kelsey came awake suddenly, into her dark bedroom. Though the setting was perfectly familiar, the adrenaline fading from her blood told her she’d been startled awake. Something was wrong.

Lifting her head from her pillow, focusing on her senses to try to determine what was there that shouldn’t be, she looked around the room, and her heart stopped. Drawn on the canvas of a streetlight shining through her closed drapes: a silhouette. Sitting on her bed.

It took one more second for her to wake fully enough to relax. It was Dex. Just Dex. Sitting on the side of her bed, where he’d been sleeping, because she’d invited him.

In the next second, she understood that there might still be something to worry about. In his posture—slumped, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands—there was still something to worry about.

“Dex?”

The dark form of his silhouette twitched at the sound of his name, but he didn’t acknowledge her.

Kelsey scooted over to sit behind him. She could just barely make out the ink across the top of his back: the word BULLS in Gothic lettering, each letter as tall as her hand, and wider. She stroked one hand across that word, out to his right shoulder, and felt the rough skin of a scar. A rounded, ragged ridge like a tiny crater. The exit wound of a bullet. Its mate sat on the front of his shoulder, with another, much larger scar—a bullet that had entered but not left on its own.

Kelsey’s medical expertise was dramatically different from a human doctor’s expertise, but it shared some fundamental similarities. For example, by the shape and grouping of those three scars, she could make an informed conjecture that he’d been wearing body armor when he’d been shot; the bullets had entered right at the edge of that protection. Also, the bullet that had not gone through, assuming—as she did—that it had been fired in the same barrage, the same incident, as the through-and-through, had then clearly been stopped by something in his body.

Stopped by his shoulder. And, no doubt, shattered his clavicle or humerus. Or both.

That was a thing people who’d never been shot, or seen someone shot, or treated a gunshot wound, people whose experience with such things was limited to fiction, didn’t realize: a bullet that didn’t go straight through, assuming it hadn’t been fired from such great distance that simple physics stopped it, usually did incredible damage inside the body. It wasn’t a matter of simply digging in the entrance hole and plucking out a slug, and then whipping in a couple sutures. A bullet with enough momentum to go straight through could also wreak fatal havoc. But a bullet that didn’t was often a pinball, ricocheting off bone and tearing through tissue, possibly fragmenting to do even more damage.

The matched craters on either side of Dex’s shoulder showed a bullet that had gone through soft tissue. Painful, certainly. But relatively uncomplicated and easily healed. The long, ragged scar along the shoulder joint, from the top down into the meat of his armpit, that had laid him up for a while.

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