Four Found Dead, page 12
Hudson exhales hard. “Getting more convinced by the minute that a chainsaw would solve all our problems.”
“Let’s try to check behind the counters,” I say. “There might be other exits.”
Hudson and Naomi start off to the right, and Quincy tries to pick his way to the left, where there are fewer obstacles to deal with. I follow him.
“I think I see a light,” he says.
I swing my flashlight toward Quincy and see him walking toward a huge stack of plywood, one with two or three pieces of glass stacked on top.
“Quincy, be careful,” I say. As if on cue, Quincy trips. He catches himself but wobbles left to find his balance. His hip bumps the pile, and my breath catches as it shifts. There is a hissing scrape, something heavy sliding across the top of the pile. Quincy puts his arm out to steady it—and then the whole thing collapses.
My hands fly up to protect my head as a shower of wood and metal and glass rains down. It feels like an endless cacophony of splintering crashes, but it is over in the span of a breath.
The silence is as sudden as the noise, and wherever Quincy was before, he’s gone now. I pull a breath into my tight lungs.
“Quincy!” Hudson and I call his name together, but I am closer. I am right here, staring at the rising plume of dust where he was standing.
“Where is he?” Hudson shouts. “Do you see him?”
“I—”
The wreckage shifts on the ground, and Quincy lets out a raspy cry. It is unlike any noise I have ever heard him make. And it tells me something is terribly, terribly wrong.
The secret I knew is about the two of them. I had seen them a few weeks earlier in the locker room. They moved apart quickly, trying to hide what they were doing, but I knew. When you’re quiet, you see lots of things people try to keep hidden.
Chapter 20
“Oh shit.” Quincy’s voice is wrong. Too high and too breathy. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
My heart leaps into my throat. It isn’t just his voice that’s wrong. Quincy never swears. Not ever. Not when he saw Lexi. Not when he saw Hannah. He is quiet and calm and composed. And now he’s groaning and swearing, and he’s not getting up from the floor. I can’t quite see him through the scatter of miscellaneous construction debris, but I know he’s hurt.
“What happened?” I ask, spotting his silhouette through shifting pieces of wood and trash.
“Don’t, there’s glass,” he says, and then he makes a terrible, animalistic sound of pain.
My stomach twists itself over and over. I want to cover my face and curl into a ball. I want to disappear right out of this room, this mall, this entire moment in time. But I can’t. I can’t keep freezing when terrible things happen. If I’m going to save people, I have to learn how to move.
“What did you hurt?” I force the words out, and they are wooden and strained.
He doesn’t answer, but he shifts, and I realize he is curled over on his side. He’s moving, but he isn’t trying to get up. He’s writhing in pain.
My throat tightens, and I use my foot to carefully push some of the boards and glass out of my path. I see a dark drop in the beam of the flashlight. Blood. Oh God, he’s bleeding.
“Where is he?” Naomi asks. “Is it bad?”
“You’re all right,” I say automatically, ignoring Naomi to focus on Quincy. In truth I have no idea if he’s all right. My gaze follows the first drop of blood to the next. Memories flash through my mind. Plastic lighters next to smears of blood. My father’s gurgling breath. The smell of copper and salt. My hands—still sticky from the Lemonheads we ate—pressed over my sister’s eyes.
That’s how my dad died. He bled out on a dirty floor while I covered Cara’s eyes and turned to stone.
Move. You have to move!
My heart pounds so fast and hard I feel sick with it. But I force my feet forward inch by terrifying inch.
“I’m almost there,” I say, my knees knocking harder as I carefully move things out of my way. “Almost.”
“What happened?” Naomi asks.
“A pile of shit fell on him,” Hudson says. “Is he trapped?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. But he’s injured. How badly, I can’t tell, so I keep it to myself.
Hudson’s moving this way. I can see him through the murky light. “Is he all right?”
Quincy groans, and I’m closer now. Almost close enough to reach him. I crouch low and try to assess him through the scatter of wood and glass and random old restaurant menus.
There are stools and chairs and tabletops. At first I can see nothing but restaurant detritus. Behind the black pole of a table base, I see a terribly jagged hunk of window glass.
And more blood. So much more blood.
Hudson’s flashlight beam darts around like a disco ball. He makes no effort to cover it. “Where is he? Where are you?”
“I’m fine,” Quincy says with another groan. He is absolutely not fine. In first aid class, one of the first things I learned is that you can bleed a lot more than you’d suspect before you’re in trouble. And I still think this is too much blood.
“We’re fine,” I say, willing myself to believe it. “Everything is fine.”
I don’t think I’ve convinced anyone, but there’s no more time to worry about it. I push a stack of small round tabletops out of the way. Broken glass litters the floor like glitter, and streaks and blobs of crimson stain everything in sight.
“I need a broom,” I say. “Something I can move this glass with.”
Quincy is now sitting awkwardly in that glittery mess, one knee up and one leg bent to the side. I can’t tell where he’s bleeding because his shirt is dark.
I smell salt and old pennies. I see my father again—mouth open and eyes losing focus. I shake my head because I am not nine years old, and this is not my father, and there are things I have to do. I have books and certificates and more than thirty hours of first aid training, and it is time to use them.
I try to look for Quincy’s wound again and realize his shirt isn’t dark like I thought. It’s pale blue, but the entire right sleeve and part of the right torso are soaked dark with blood. Did he fall? Did something fall on him? I try to remember the moment just before the pile collapsed.
He tried to steady it with his hand. His arm stretched tight to hold it in place.
I crouch, and Quincy rolls his head to look at me. “Jo?”
I have never wanted to disappear more in my life. Adrenaline pushes through my veins, contracting every muscle. I wrench my mouth open, but no sound comes out. I can’t do this. I absolutely cannot.
“Jo!” I whirl at the sound of Hudson’s voice. He is shoving something between two of the piles beside us. A piece of cardboard? “Try this for sweeping the glass.”
Sweeping the glass. I can do that. I take the cardboard, and the simple task shifts me into gear. I can sweep a path to him, so I do. I can lay down the cardboard to sit beside him. So I do. And I can look to see where he’s hurt.
“I’m going to take a look and help, okay?” I say, my voice shaking.
There is something on his bloody sleeve—something he’s holding. I scooch close, ignoring the blood on the tile, the sour, salty smell that hangs heavy in the air.
Quincy looks at me with glazed eyes. There’s a smear of blood on his glasses. On his cheek. His fingers move near his bicep, feathering over whatever is on his sleeve. I move my flashlight to see better, taking care not to scare him with the light, but his pupils are blown wide. He’s going into shock. The symptoms come back to me—bullet points on a dry-erase board. And notes I’d furiously scribbled in my notebook.
The vibrant red of his sleeve is ghastly under the direct light, but it’s the triangular glimmer of glass jutting out of his sleeve that turns my body to ice. Quincy has a large hunk of glass wedged in his bicep. The giant shard that fell didn’t just cut him—it impaled him.
He is bleeding profusely, and if he takes that glass out, he may very well bleed to death.
Quincy grabs the glass as if he can feel me staring at it. My throat squeezes like it’s caught in a fist. “Quincy, whatever you do, don’t—”
Quincy yanks the glass with a terrible cry. The jagged piece drops with a clatter, and blood gushes from his arm. I lunge for him, pressing my palm directly to the wound even as he cries out and writhes underneath me. I do my best to hold him fast.
“Oh shit,” Naomi says, and I hear her quickly backing away.
Quincy is squirming. Twisting. “I know it hurts,” I tell him. “I know, but you have to be still.”
“I can help,” Hudson says. His feet shuffle behind us. “Do you need me to hold him?”
“Quincy!” My tone does nothing. He is absolutely not listening to me. His breath has turned fast and shallow, like a panting dog. And his hands are shaking.
“Quincy,” I repeat, shifting to my knees for better leverage and finally getting a good angle on the wound. Quincy is backed against a stack of heavy wallboard. He has nowhere else to go, so he goes still and then limp.
I press hard, having no choice but to use my bare hand for now.
“Tell me what to do, Jo,” Hudson says.
I keep the pressure on the wound. “I need you to wedge my flashlight into that chair so I can see. And then I need you to find a first aid kit. There has to be one in one of the kitchens.”
I hope.
Hudson is already moving. He props the light and rushes to search the kitchens. I hear rustling, banging, and swearing.
Quincy makes a mild sound of protest. “I’m fine.”
Things definitely don’t look fine, and worse still, I don’t know if I can make this fine. Is it even slowing? I can’t tell. There’s no way to quantify the blood drenching everything in sight, but it’s so much. Too much. I have to slow it down.
“Just be really still, okay?” I say again, forcing a smile I’m sure is weak as hell. My hands are shaking, and I feel queasy and terrified. But I do not ease the pressure on his arm—not even for a second. “Once Hudson stops messing around, we’ll get you patched up.”
But Hudson isn’t messing around, and we both know it. He swears again in one of the kitchens. I hear him stomping back our way.
“Want the bad news or the worse news?” he asks.
“Just spit it out.”
“The kitchens are empty—there are no emergency exits, just signs sending us to the hallway.”
“The one that’s boarded over,” I guess.
“That’s the one.”
“The T-shirt kiosk,” Naomi says. “It’s the one diagonal from the weird one that sold creams, right?”
I’m confused, and my hands are sticky. I need supplies, not riddles.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Hudson asks.
“Even without a first aid kit, if we can find some clean T-shirts…”
“That will help,” I say. “Clean cloth will definitely help.”
I want to tell them to rush, but Hudson is already halfway through the food court, and before I can say a word, he is pushing through the plastic with Naomi.
“Alone at last,” Quincy jokes.
We laugh, but then his face pales, and his eyes roll up. I start to say his name, but it is too late. Quincy is unconscious.
Chapter 21
“Quincy?”
His head lolls to one side, and fear scales my spine with icy hands. My vision blurs, and all I can see is my father, the pool of blood beneath his outstretched arm. The strange shift in his eyes when his last breath was exhaled.
This can’t be happening again.
Daddy? Daddy?
I shake the memories back and push my hands harder against Quincy’s arm—hard enough to jostle him. Hard enough to hurt. He gasps, and his eyes fly open.
“Stay with me!” I say. It’s a thing TV doctors say, but not everyone agrees it’s medically necessary or in some cases even the best course of action. But I say it again anyway. “Try to stay awake, okay?”
“Yes,” he says, nodding a little. “I can do that.”
He hisses when I slightly adjust my hand on his wound.
“I’m sorry,” I say with a wince. “I need to keep the pressure on this.”
“Did I get all of the glass out?”
“I’m not sure. I honestly haven’t looked.” I don’t add that it was the most dangerous thing he could have possibly done; it’s too late to bother with that now. And unless my eyes are deceiving me, I think the bleeding has significantly slowed.
“Doesn’t this bother you?” he asks, his eyes drifting vaguely over my body.
I look down and take in the carnage. Blood stains my jeans, and my hands and arms are a grisly mess. It should bother me, I think, but I’m shocked to find it doesn’t. Maybe because this time I’m not watching it happen. I’m fixing it. Or, at the very least, I’m trying.
“Not really,” I say. “Is that weird?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” he says. “Are your parents doctors too?”
I shake my head. “No. Uh, my mom is an airline attendant. She travels a lot.”
That’s putting it lightly. My dad was the glue that held our family together. Without him, the three of us drift along, Cara and I together and my mom floating in and out on weekends and slow travel times. It’s not a bad relationship, per se, but we mostly communicate through text messages and Post-it Notes on the fridge.
“And your dad?”
My heart sinks. “My dad owned a gas station. I lost him when I was nine.”
Quincy’s face contorts. “I’m sorry, Jo.”
“It was a long time ago,” I say. Because nine years is a long time. Even if some days it feels like seventy years won’t be enough to make me stop missing him.
“My brother died when I was seven. Diabetes.”
I’m afraid to meet his eyes now. It’s easier to talk about my father’s death with people who don’t understand. There are polite ways to talk about it. You use words like lost or passed because dead and died make people squirm. They’ll inevitably tell you they’re sorry, and then you’ll assure them that it’s been a long time or he didn’t suffer or whatever other bullshit line works. You can always find a line that will hit the brakes on the whole topic. People who haven’t lost anyone are happy to pretend death doesn’t exist at all.
But talking to someone who’s grieved? It’s harder to hide in that conversation.
“Was your father sick?” he asks.
I swallow hard, my throat dry. “It was… He was shot.”
I do not explain that I was eating Lemonheads when it happened. I don’t explain that when the bells jangled overhead, I didn’t think anything of it. I don’t tell him what it felt like when Dad pushed at me—when he whispered to get my sister. To hide.
Are we in big trouble?
I didn’t understand until I heard the men. Until my dad opened the register drawer and told them it was all okay, that they could have it, that it would be—
He never even finished his sentence. They shot him three times, took the money, and ran. And I sat motionless in that small space beneath the counter.
My hands covered Cara’s eyes.
My knee pressed into the side of the safe.
My body and mind and soul turned to stone.
“It was hard,” I say. I hated myself, is what I mean. I’ve wondered forever if there was some way I could have changed it. If I had known to put pressure on the wounds. If I had at least called 911. I could have tried, but I did nothing. I was paralyzed.
“It’s hard when you’re young,” Quincy says. “I’m sorry it happened to you.”
I smile weakly, noticing the sickly yellow color he’s turning from losing so much blood.
I need clean cloth and bandages. We need a real doctor. What we don’t need is a deep examination of the fact that tonight wasn’t the first time I witnessed a murder. We don’t need to ponder why I’ve seen two people die without doing a single thing to stop it.
“I’m very glad you’re here,” Quincy says, casting a lightning-quick glance at his arm. “You seem like you know how to handle this.”
“A little. I’ve taken all the first aid classes I could find.”
“I wholeheartedly agree with that decision.”
I laugh again and decide it’s time to check the wound. “Why don’t we elevate this arm now that you seem a little steadier? Let’s use these chairs. We can prop your arm up before I cut away the sleeve here when they get back.”
Which had better be soon. We need supplies. This is like trying to treat a wound on a Civil War battlefield.
“I will try. I’m not sure how much I can help,” he says, but I’ve already eyeballed it, and I know the seat of the chair should be a good height for how he’s sitting.
I help him maneuver his arm onto the padded seat, and though he grits his teeth and breathes hard, he doesn’t cry out. After he’s situated for a minute or two—long enough for his heart rate to slow back down—I slowly lift my palm from his sleeve.
It’s impossible to see what’s happening. Everything is a sticky, bloody mess, but even with him covered in blood, I can see there is a three-inch jagged gash in his arm. It’s deep too, but nothing is spurting, so thankfully he didn’t hit a major artery that I can see.
Still, this is not a situation that can be left as is. He’s going to need stitches. And in the meantime, I need to do something to keep the wound a little bit closed.
“Do I get to keep my arm?” he asks.
I chuckle. “Pretty sure your arm is safe, but you lost a fair bit of blood. It’s not gushing or spurting though, so I don’t think you hit an artery. Which is a miracle, really. Are you feeling dizzy or faint?”
