gripped the buckle and the worn end of leather in each of his hands.
Better me than Justin. Better me than him.
He bellowed as the five men charged him in the middle of the highway.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Justin?”
He started, sliding his phone into his scrubs pocket. Why wasn’t Wes answering? Had he fallen asleep? Maybe that would be for the best. He needed a year of sleep to recover from the past few months. And then another year to recover from this day. But Justin still wanted to hear from him. Get a text back. Connect, just a little bit. Recenter his world. The only thing that mattered anymore was Wes. Them, together.
He turned to his supervisor, Tammy, the charge nurse for the emergency department, and pasted a smile on his face.
“You haven’t been a part of a Life Flight transfer yet, have you?” Tammy asked, rubbing hand sanitizer into her palms.
“No. None have come in while I’ve been on.”
“We’ve got one coming in now. A John Doe transfer from Blanco County. Hit and run. Pedestrian versus vehicle.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Trucker called it in to the state police. Found him lying in the middle of the highway.” Tammy passed him a surgical gown, goggles, and a pair of gloves. “Come observe. There’s a lot of moving pieces in these, but when it comes down to it, Life Flights are the same as ambulance admissions. They just arrive on the roof and not in the parking lot.”
He followed Tammy and four other nurses into the elevator. Tammy briefed the team as they rode to the roof, and when they got there, they waited with Dr. Williams in the arrival bubble, a glass-encased vestibule. The landing pad was painted with a giant white cross, a red H in the center. Lights ringed the cross, and a wind cone flapped in the night breeze.
Justin bounced on his toes. He hung back, staying out of the way of Tammy and her team. As they waited, his thoughts drifted back to Wes.
Behind him, the radio built into the wall crackled. The pilot, announcing his final approach. Justin craned his neck as Tammy confirmed she had a visual on the helo coming down.
“All right, let’s roll.” Dr. Williams led the team out to the edge of the pad, ducking when the chopper touched down.
It wasn’t as fast as Justin thought it would be, based on Hollywood. This wasn’t the military, though, and it wasn’t combat. The crew chief helped power down the helo, and the flight nurses on board prepped their patient for transfer. Tammy and Dr. Williams guided the team forward, then conferred with the flight physician as the nurses transferred the patient. Justin held the gurney steady as four nurses huffed, hauling the backboard out of the helicopter.
Whoever the patient was, he was huge. His feet hung off the bottom of the backboard. He was shirtless, and his bare chest and tree-trunk arms were covered in smears of blood. More dried blood caked his hands, almost up to his wrists. Bruises littered his torso. His eyes were swollen shut and ringed in bruises. His face was cut, lip split, flesh torn open across his cheekbone. His neck was wrapped in a cervical collar, but there was some deep bruising under there, a wide band that ran all around his neck and up under his jaw.
Justin held the gurney as the nurses carefully slid his backboard up, until Justin was gazing down into the patient’s battered face.
Everything stopped, like someone had pressed pause on the world. The humming helo engine, still turning over on standby, faded to a dull buzz. The wind, the rotors, even the people slowed around him. “Wes?”
It couldn’t be.
It couldn’t be Wes lying in front of him. It couldn’t be, because he’d left Wes in the hotel room, and Wes was going to stay there and wait for him. “Wes?” His voice rose, panic shredding his vocal cords.
Wes hadn’t responded to his texts for hours.
“Justin? You know this man?” Tammy appeared at his shoulder. Her hand was steel on his shoulder, trying to pull him back.
He didn’t budge. He ran his hands down Wes’s bloody cheeks, brushed his thumbs over Wes’s swollen eyelids. “This is Wes Van de Hoek.” He gasped as every broken part of Wes’s body came together in front of him. He’d been looking only at the injuries before, cataloging cuts and bruises. He hadn’t been looking at the man like he was someone Justin knew, someone he loved.