Mission Dragon, page 11
Birds would fly off, circle round, and land back in their trees. Small animals would cower deeper in their hiding places and wait for the noise to go away. And big animals would move away from it.
By approaching from different directions at the end of the island, Ju-Long and Beck were sealing that end of the island off as a possible refuge. The pigs would head inland, which meant uphill, which meant going along their track towards the barriers…
That was, assuming they didn’t get so annoyed that they decided to attack the source of the noise instead. The thought of a pair of razor-sharp tusks was still foremost in Beck’s mind, and while he banged the spear and used it to make noise, he also kept both hands on it and ran his eyes ceaselessly over the undergrowth around him, always on the lookout for a hundred kilos of angry sausage meat charging at him.
And then a new noise came screeching through the trees – a high pitched squealing. It was definitely not from a human throat, and there was only one reason a pig would be making it. The trap had been sprung.
Beck hurried forwards, pushing his way through clumps of bushes, guided by the sounds. There were two reasons to hurry. Just in case the noose was loose in any way, he didn’t want the pig to get away – and assuming it had worked exactly as he intended, he didn’t want the pig to suffer either.
He made the top of the ridge and hurried along the trail towards the sound. Ju-Long emerged from the undergrowth and joined him.
The pig hung by one leg, twisting and squealing but unable to get down. The noose had wrapped itself around its upper leg and its limbs were splayed about with little dignity. Survival was never pretty, but this pig would help save three lives. It wasn’t a big porker like you would find on a farm – it was somewhere between the size of a cat and a medium-sized dog, covered in brown, bristly hair.
Beck didn’t take time to pause and admire his handiwork. He owed the pig a quick death and so he just walked up to it without stopping, spear gripped in both hands, raised over his shoulder. Without breaking step he thrust it into the pig’s body, just behind the left front leg, right where the heart would be.
He had once been given an injection by a trainee nurse, who had been so determined not to cause any pain that it seemed to take about half an hour and was excruciatingly painful. A much more experienced nurse had said that the way to do it without pain was just jab the needle in and out, in half a second, before the body even realised what was happening to it.
Beck took the same attitude when killing an animal with a knife. The blade was sharp and pointed and it slid cleanly into the pig’s flesh. He knew enough animal anatomy to avoid any bone that would divert the blade and cause the creature an extra moment’s suffering. Hot blood spurted from the wound over his hands, and he felt the animal’s tremors vibrate down the shaft for half a second. And then the pig just stopped, all life gone from it in an instant.
That was when he realised he hadn’t even been breathing for the last thirty seconds. He puffed out and took some deep, slow breaths to slow his pounding heart. Job done.
“Right,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction. “Let’s see how Jian’s doing.”
He cut the pig down and hefted it over his shoulder, and they set off.
They had left Jian putting the camp together, and Beck could hear the fire crackling away.
“Got dinner…!” he called happily as they emerged onto the flat ground by the pool. And then the smile slowly faded from his face. Jian was slumped, motionless, on the ground beside the blazing fire.
Chapter 32
“Jian!”
Beck dumped the pig and ran forward. Jian moved slightly and groaned. Together, Ju-Long and Beck helped him sit up. There was the usual hiss of pain as Jian clutched at his wrist.
“I am sorry… I felt faint…”
“Don’t apologise,” Ju-Long said immediately. “You are injured. You shouldn’t even be trying to set the camp up. We can…”
And then she looked around the camp. Then stopped talking.
“…do absolutely nothing,” Beck finished.
He had already seen the fire, but he hadn’t had time to appreciate it. Jian had arranged a circle of stones to contain the ashes and embers, and built it exactly as Beck would have, with layers of tinder, kindling and fuel. He must have done it all with one hand, one stick or stone at a time.
Then he had done what he could for the sleeping quarters. There was nowhere to build a platform here, but they needed to be off the ground, for comfort, and to keep away from insects. They also needed to avoid the cold soil sucking the warmth from their bodies as they slept. So, Jian had put three hammocks together with the last of the rope net. Beck had cut three rectangles of netting before starting the hunt. Jian had fixed a piece of wood at each end to hold them apart and make sure they didn’t just fold up on whoever was sleeping in them. With one hand, he had somehow managed to tie them up in the trees, ready for use. Beck was amazed.
The water bank looked like it was also in full production. They had brought every bottle they had from the old island, and while Ju-Long and Beck explored, Jian had found a big, empty two litre lemonade bottle washed up on the beach. The metal saucepan was bubbling over the fire with water from the pool – it needed at least five minutes from once it was properly boiling, to kill off any bugs. Once the water had cooled and settled, so that any bits could drop to the bottom of the pan, Jian could tip it into a bottle, throw away the bits, and start again.
Two bottles were already full and the next bottle in line was waiting.
“I thought,” Jian said weakly, “while it was boiling, I should go back to the beach and mark the letters in the sand out. They will look very faint, on yellow sand. I used some of the dry seaweed and some stones to make them clearer. Then I started to feel tired, and I came back here, and I…” He trailed off.
“You collapsed,” Beck said. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. “You’ve worn yourself out.”
“I want to be useful,” Jain said through his teeth.
“You are useful.” Beck smiled. But no one’s useful if they work themselves into the ground. You must rest now.”
“How is your arm?” Ju-Long asked.
“It is… strange.” Jian looked down at his hand. “I know it hurts a lot. Sometimes I feel a lot of pain, sometimes I feel nothing at all – but I still know it is hurting.”
Beck bit his lip. He wasn’t a doctor but that did not sound good. If the body was telling you that you didn’t hurt, when you knew full well you did – well, that sounded like shock. It was the body’s way of quietly shutting itself down so as not to alarm you. In extreme cases it could go all the way – you could quietly die and not even notice.
What did he know about treating shock? He ran through his memories. Unfortunately, all he could come up with sounded very simple but it wasn’t helpful under the circumstances. Keep the patient warm and comfortable, and wait for the medics to arrive. Nothing about what to do if the medics weren’t turning up any time soon.
“Thanks for everything, Jian – you’ve done great,” he said. “But doctor’s orders now are to sit back and enjoy watching us work. Right? Just keep as warm as you can and stop exhausting yourself.”
Jian didn’t have the strength to argue. Instead, he quietly sat by the fire with his head between his knees. Beck gave him a lingering sideways look that he didn’t notice. The contrast between this Jian – tired, haggard, weak – and the Jian of old was worrying, even if you counted everything he had gone through.
They had to get Jian to a proper doctor – and they had no way of doing so. Beck turned his attention to helping Ju-Long.
Beck wanted all three hammocks to have roofs, with supports made of branches and flotsam, and palm fronds for a rain-proof covering. It would be easier to make one big roof than three small ones. He remembered the hint of rain clouds below the horizon that he had seen earlier. It was impossible to know if the rain was coming, but it would be foolish not to take precautions.
With a bit of tweaking with where Jian had placed the hammocks, they found the best place. Two of the hammocks went one on top of the other, with enough space between them so that the body weight of the person on top didn’t make it sag into the face of the person beneath. The third they tied to the same tree as the other two, and the other end to a tree a little further away.
Ju-Long tested the first one by climbing in. She swung herself experimentally from side to side, and one end promptly came away from the tree. She hit the ground on her back with a laugh forced out of her by the impact. Jian’s knot had held but the rope had snapped.
“Better to find that out now than later!” Beck added, as they both laughed.
She clambered up and started to re-tie the rope round double.
“I can fix this, and sort out the others, and the shelter, if you try and help Jian, maybe?”
Beck knew the answer. Their last meal had been the oysters on the old island.
“A proper meal and rehydrating is what Jian – and all of us – need. I’m onto it,” Beck promised.
He had a pig to skin. This was going to be messy.
Chapter 33
Beck did the butchering wearing just his shorts. He didn’t want to walk around tomorrow in clothes that were stinking of pig’s blood and guts.
The first thing was to remove its guts and its genitals, because those were the bits that already had a high bacteria count and would start to go off almost immediately, spreading poison to the rest of the flesh. He hung the body up by its hind legs, so that its feet were a little higher than his head; then, with the knife removed from the spear shaft, he carefully sliced along the centre line of the pig’s stomach, back up towards its hind legs, taking care not to puncture the guts. They would be full of semi-digested food and faeces, with plenty of poisonous bacteria that it was best to keep contained. The butcher’s smell grew ten times stronger. When he was about half way up to the legs, the intestines began to ooze from the gash, sliding out like heavy, slimy balloons. They plopped onto the ground between his feet as he continued cutting.
He reached into the cavity, took hold of the guts and pulled down. Everything slid out neatly. He felt around inside for the solid lumps that were the kidneys, which he pulled out one at a time and cut free. These he set aside separately on a piece of wood to keep them off the ground.
Meanwhile Ju-Long gathered all the guts and parts that Beck said they wouldn’t need, and buried them in a hole away from their camp. Next, Beck severed the head, and last of all, he removed the animal’s skin.
He knew there was a lot of good food going to waste here. A proper butcher could have done many things with the jowls and the skin for bacon and crackling. But his concern was to give himself and his friends a proper meal.
The whole process had taken the better part of an hour, and all three of them were ravenously hungry. It was fully dark outside the circle of light from the fire. At last Beck could take the body down, run a skewer through it, and balance the two ends over A-frames that Ju-Long had tied together on either side of the fire. Ju-Long and Jian held the kidneys on skewers over the flames to cook separately. As Beck rinsed himself down with water from the pool, the smell of roasting pork began to drift over the camp. It was rich and gamey and seemed to go past their noses straight to their stomachs. It said: make me count. I am here to help save you.
And when they finally did, slicing off cuts of meat from the carcass and taking great bites out of the kidneys, they felt new strength flowing into their bodies. The warm food in their stomachs pumped out energy that was soaked up by their tired bodies. And at the same time it was as if their bodies finally gave them permission to shut down for the night. They were saying: right, you’ve done your bit, now sleep so that we can digest this nourishing food you’ve given us properly.
And sleep they did. Beck just had time to settle into his hammock, and feel it swaying beneath him, and wonder when it would stop swinging…
Then suddenly it was much later. His eyes opened and he grunted. The fire was a mass of glowing embers. Something had woken him up but he wasn’t sure what. For a horrible moment his sleepy brain jumbled its memories and he thought he was back on the old island, listening without realising it to dragons trampling their water collection.
Then Jian shouted out of the dark, from his hammock below Beck’s. A moment’s quiet, and then he began to talk instead, at a more normal volume but far too quickly. It was all in Chinese and Beck had no hope of following it. His voice rose and fell and caught in the back of his throat.
It did not sound good.
Beck swung himself out of his hammock and down to the ground.
“Jian? Are you all right?”
He heard Ju-Long ask the same question as she scrambled up from her own hammock. Jian’s voice rose to a shout again, and then dropped back down, but still he babbled. Beck tried to peer into Jian’s face. The other boy’s eyes opened and stared at him, and suddenly Jian’s good hand was clutching at Beck’s shirt.
“Hand… my… hand…” He relapsed into gabbling, tossing his head from side to side.
“He is soaked with sweat,” Ju-Long reported, resting her hand on his head.
His hand…
Beck gently took Jian’s damaged hand and studied it as best he could in the moonlight. Jian whimpered and tried to tug his hand away, but Beck held on.
“Okay. I’m going to take the splint off. See if there’s something I can do. Okay?”
But he hadn’t bothered waiting for permission – he already had the first rope untied even as he spoke. A few moments later and the splint came away.
Beck’s heart thudded in his chest.
They only had moonlight to see by, but still Beck could see the dark streaks in Jian’s skin. They were clear to see beneath his bandage and ran up from his wrist towards his elbow. Beck cursed beneath his breath and started to unwrap the bandage, though he had guessed what he would find.
The whole hand was badly swollen, starting from the dragon bites, and the skin was dark. Bacteria in the dragon’s saliva had got into his system, despite Beck’s best efforts.
He squatted back on his haunches and groaned.
“His blood is poisoned,” Ju-Long said quietly. He nodded, mutely. “It could spread through his whole body. And if it does–”
There was no point in soft-peddling this. Anyway, Jian seemed to have passed out again and wouldn’t hear a word they said.
“It will kill him,” Beck said heavily. “I know.”
He had tried to sterilise the wound – he obviously hadn’t done it well enough.
Or maybe he had done enough to buy Jian a few important hours. Maybe the older boy would have already died without Beck’s treatment.
And now he was on course to die again, if they didn’t do something. He knew what the something was.
“I’ve seen this,” he said reluctantly, “once before.” She looked at him with a mute question. “We – my parents and I – we were in this village in Indonesia. The day we arrived, there was this guy in a really bad way – fever and hallucinations, and his whole leg was almost black. A log had fallen on it and the cut had festered in the tropical heat. The same helicopter that flew us in, flew him back to the capital to hospital. Next time I saw him…” He looked her in the eyes. “He was better.” And as she started to look relieved, he finished: “Minus one leg.”
Her eyes went wider than he had ever seen them before.
“And that was a hospital,” he pressed on. He had to keep talking. He knew what he was going to have to do, and he so badly didn’t want to that he felt he had to persuade himself into it. “They had all the modern high grade multi-spectrum antibiotics and the best treatment available – and they still had to amputate.”
He looked down at Jian. The harsh fact was, some of the dragon bacteria had survived, and they had bred, and now they were nestling deep in Jian’s wrist and spreading out into the rest of his system.
“So what chance do we have?” she asked quietly. He nodded.
“If we can’t get the poison out of him then we have to remove him from the poison,” he said simply. “This hand has to come off. It’s the only way.”
Chapter 34
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
When the sun came up, it looked down on a busy scene.
When Beck had sterilised the wound the first time, he had cut a strip off Jian’s trousers to use as a bandage. They were going to need more than one bandage now. He had shredded as many of their clothes – his and Jian’s and Ju-Long’s – as decency would allow. All their sleeves and legs were gone. Beck just prayed it was enough.
And now he was sharpening the knife for its ultimate test.
Jian hadn’t regained consciousness, though he still mumbled under his breath. Ju-Long was alternately wiping the sweat from his face and supervising the boiling of the bandages.
Scritch. Scritch.
The only way to stop Jian’s wrist killing the rest of his body was to remove it from the body. Scritch. Scritch. Then, maybe, his body’s natural defences would have a chance against the bacteria that were left.
If there was an alternative, he honestly couldn’t think of it, though he was wracking his brains and trying hard. It was the hardest decision he had ever made.
Was he just risking even more infection? Despite taking every precaution they could?
Maybe. But if they didn’t do this, Jian would definitely die.
But would the shock of an operation without anaesthetic finish Jian off?
Possibly. But if they didn’t do this, Jian would definitely die.
Wouldn’t it cause Jian even more pain?
Certainly. But more pain was better than definitely dying.
Might rescue come first?
