put a tourniquet on Rafael’s wounds?”
Benito yelled back, “We cannot allow doctors onto the sands yet.”
“Can I do first aid?”
Claudia came jogging toward me, her long strides making the distance nothing. “You may only use what you have brought with you onto the sand. We can’t call in any of the medics.”
I let go of Rafael’s hand and said a prayer of thanks that I’d brought the tourniquet and combat gauze with me.
Claudia said, “You brought a tourniquet with you?”
I got the other rubber-banded pack out of another pocket. “Do you know how to use a rapid-application tourniquet? It’s a Gen 2.”
“Yes,” she said. I handed the second package to her. I put three fingers through the loop of the RATS tourniquet, then realized I was going to have to lift Rafael’s leg so I could slide the tourniquet under before I put it over my hand. My hand was too small to lift his thigh, so I knelt down and slid my arms underneath to lift. Blood gushed over my arms, and it was the usual surprise that enough blood was hot against my skin. His leg was too light, or too heavy, or just not weighted right. Nothing moved like it was supposed to, and when a piece of the meat of his leg swayed and hit my hand, I had to swallow hard. I would not throw up, damn it. If Rafael could endure it, I could handle helping him get through it. If he’d been human, he’d have lost both legs below the knees, but he wasn’t human. If we could get him out of here alive, he would heal.
I put three fingers back through the loop and cinched it tight. Rafael groaned, which I took as a good sign. Claudia’s bigger hands and longer arms were making it quicker for her to encircle his leg multiple times. It wasn’t the blood that was slowing me down so much as the pieces of his leg swinging in against my body at odd moments. The amount of damage that Hector had done to his legs was disturbing. You never know what will bother you until it does. This bothered me. I swallowed hard and was taking deep, even breaths as I finished the last round of the tourniquet until it was tight enough and hooked the end into the little clip. The only thing the RATS Gen 2 didn’t have that most other tourniquets did was a place to write the time you put the tourniquet on. If you left it in place, you could destroy the limb you were trying to save, but the rule was life over limb, though I wasn’t sure Rafael would agree. But I knew that for him and any shapeshifter, if we could just keep him alive, then they could chop off the leg above the dead point and he’d grow back the legs. There were options if we could just keep him alive.
The blood trickled to a stop on the leg I was working on. I glanced over at the other leg and the blood had stopped there, too. I felt a moment of triumph and then wished like hell I’d thought about the simple first aid sooner. I started to open the gauze packet, then stopped and asked, “Will this work on you guys?”
“Yes,” she said.
I tore the packet open and then didn’t know where to put it. The leg was dismembered, so it was like there were too many wounds. I was happy I’d brought two packets of both gauze and QuikClot, but looking at Rafael’s legs, I wanted an armful of QuikClot. Jesus, I’d never seen anyone who lived through wounds like this, and then I realized that I’d never seen anyone who was just cut up this way here; when a shapeshifter went bad, they didn’t stop at the legs. They didn’t stop until there were pieces missing that we’d never find. It’s not like that scene in Jaws where the body parts come spilling out of the shark. Mammals digest things faster and have to chew them up into smaller bites to eat them.
“Put it here,” Claudia said. She guided my hand and I let her do it, because I’d never tried to treat a wound with this many moving parts. Rafael moaned as we shoved the QuikClot gauze against his wound. Again, I took it as a good sign. As long as he was reacting, he was still alive.
Benito came to stand above us.