The Enemies of My Country by Jason Kasper

Author:Jason Kasper [Kasper, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn River Publishing
Published: 2021-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

The final gunshots were still echoing as Reilly sprinted across the courtyard, scanning bodies until he located Elias. Unslinging his aid bag, Reilly dropped to his knees before the prostrate man.

Elias was lying on his stomach, shuddering faintly like a car running out of gas. Reilly said, “Hey, brother, you with me?” as he drew his knife, using it to slice the man’s shirt down the middle and expose a backside free of obvious injury. Still, Reilly swept both palms down Elias’s back, feeling for any deviation—some wounds closed almost completely, and other internal injuries were only detectable from abnormalities in the skin surface.

The second his initial sweep revealed nothing unusual, Reilly rolled Elias onto his back, seeing the bloody smear of a gunshot wound, his face an eerie purple hue.

Reilly tore Elias’s shirt open, exposing a torrent of blood issuing forth from a bullet hole on the right side of his chest. But that part didn’t matter—Elias’s problem wasn’t blood loss. Instead, the bullet’s path had carved a one-way valve in his chest, allowing air into the pleural space and causing the lung to collapse. The resulting condition was known as a tension pneumothorax, and judging by the state of Elias’s face, Reilly had a minute or less to stop it if he wasn’t too late already.

He quickly unzipped his aid bag, telling Elias, “You’re all good, pal, just a little flesh wound.” Retrieving his supplies, he wiped the wound free of blood with a gauze pad and then applied a clear adhesive chest seal directly over the bullet hole. Then Reilly plucked a 14-gauge needle shrouded in a catheter from his aid bag and tossed aside the plastic cap.

Running his fingers across Elias’s chest between his right nipple and the center of his collarbone, he stopped halfway and probed for a gap between bone—the space between the second and third rib along the mid-clavicular line.

“Bit of pressure,” Reilly said, forcing the needle into Elias’s chest.

It disappeared into his torso, and Reilly withdrew the needle to leave the catheter inside, the only sign of it a small circular valve emerging from the entry point. Sticking the needle into the dirt beside him, Reilly leaned down and listened for the hiss of air from the valve—there was none.

He grabbed a second needle and felt along Elias’s right side, finding the midaxillary intercostal space that was lateral to the nipple. Forcing the needle inside, he performed his second thoracostomy in the span of fifteen seconds, pulling the needle back out and listening for air hissing out of the catheter valve.

But it too was silent, indicating that internal bleeding had flooded the space previously occupied by air. With no exit wound, there was a much greater danger of the bullet having struck a major blood vessel—and while two needle thoracostomies were enough for most stateside doctors to declare the patient dead, Reilly had one last-ditch effort to drain the internal bleeding that he now knew was preventing Elias’s heart from beating.

He found

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