Chapter 22 - The Breath of the Fallen
Blood—bright, arterial red—was already frothing at the corner of Nathan's mouth.
A tension pneumothorax. The bullet had punched through his right pectoral muscle and punctured the pleural cavity. His lung was collapsing beneath the pressure of trapped air and blood, suffocating him from the inside out while his heart struggled to pump against the rising intrathoracic pressure.
"Leave me... Elena..." he gasped, his fingers clawing weakly at the front of my scrub jacket, his face graying under the film of subterranean soot. "Take... the drive. Get to the press... get to my father..."
"Shut up, Captain," I snarled, tears mixing with the dust on my face as I ripped his tactical vest open with my trauma shears, exposing the ragged entry wound bubbling beneath his collarbone. "You don't get to give orders while you're in my trauma bay. Hold still!"
The bulkhead groaned above us—four feet from the ground. Three feet. The hydraulic motors were screaming under the load of the crumbling ceiling. On the other side of the tunnel, Thorne was advancing, his boots splashing through the water, bringing his pistol up to finish what he started.
I had no chest seal. I had no decompression needle.
My eyes darted to my nurse’s field kit scattered in the water. I grabbed a sterile 14-gauge intravenous catheter from my pocket, ripped the plastic sheath off with my teeth, and found the second intercostal space between his second and third ribs in the mid-clavicular line.
"Breathe, Nathan!" I commanded.
I drove the long, hollow needle straight down into his chest wall until I felt the distinct *pop* of the parietal pleura yielding.
A sharp, violent hiss of trapped air and dark venous blood erupted from the catheter hub, spraying across my hands. Nathan’s back arched violently as the lethal pressure crushing his heart was released in a single burst. His eyes flew wide open, sucking in a massive, ragged lungful of oxygen as his collapsed lung expanded back against his chest wall.
"Elena..." he wheezed, color rushing back into his lips.
"We have two seconds!" I yelled, throwing his uninjured left arm over my neck and driving every ounce of strength in my legs upward.
I hauled him forward. We lunged beneath the jagged bottom lip of the bulkhead just as the steel teeth scraped along the concrete deck. We tumbled onto the slick floor of the maintenance shaft.
*CLANG-SHOCK.*
The hydraulic door slammed shut with the force of an earthquake, severing the tunnel behind us. The shockwave blew out the last traces of smoke. A fraction of a second later, two heavy rounds slammed uselessly into the four-inch armor plate from the side we had just escaped.
Marcus Thorne was locked out.
Beside us, Mera was collapsed on the lower rung of the ladder, shivering violently, her hand clutching her bleeding shoulder, but the blue LED lights on the encrypted drive were still blinking steadily.
"We're trapped in the shaft," Mera whispered, looking up the eighty-foot vertical tunnel toward a circular street grate overhead through which the distant sound of city traffic drifted down like a cruel mirage. "He'll send teams to cover every manhole on the block. We'll never climb that iron with Nathan injured."
Nathan pushed himself up against the shaft wall, his hand pressing the makeshift flutter valve I had taped over his chest with medical adhesive. He looked up at the shaft, then at the thick bundle of fiber-optic trunk lines running along the concrete wall right beside our heads.
May you like
A fierce, bloody grin split his lips.
"We don't need to climb out, Mera," Nathan said, his voice raspy but burning with renewed venom. "Look at those trunk lines. That's the federal communications relay for the District. We don't need to reach the press on the street. We can broadcast from right here inside the wall."
