Bye, Mr. Ex! novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Lane

The casualty lane was a gravel strip behind the hangar with a smoke machine, a speaker playing rotor noise, and a dummy named Gerald.

Every medic in the company had a time to beat on Gerald, and the whiteboard behind him held thirty names.

Mine was not on it.

"Pickens," Darden said, tapping her stopwatch. "You're up. Gunshot to the thigh, arterial, under fire, with a pilot yelling in your ear."

"Who's the pilot?"

"Me," said one of the warrant officers, a big bearded man leaning on the fence. "I yell very well."

Somebody in the line laughed.

I took off my watch, knelt in the gravel, and the smoke machine blew a gray wall across my face.

Darden hit the button.

The speaker screamed.

Gerald's thigh was a rubber sleeve full of fake blood.

I found the wound by feel, jammed two fingers in, and pinned the artery against the bone.

I tied the tourniquet one-handed with my teeth on the tail.

The pilot yelled, "Medic, we're taking fire, we have to lift now!"

I got the dummy on the litter, buckled, and covered, and I called, "Lift!" before I realized I'd said it like the old days.

Darden clicked the stopwatch.

"One minute, forty-one."

The company went quiet.

The whiteboard record was two-ten.

"Is that a typo?" the bearded pilot asked.

"It's a Pickens," said Darden, and wrote my name at the top.

Somebody whistled, and somebody else started clapping, and I felt my face go hot in a way I had missed.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Bye, Mr. Ex! from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.