The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,114
so we kept going.
Even with a bullet in his leg, Gentry was faster and stronger than me. I’d wrecked my hip fighting with LaReigne, and my foot was numb, so every step of the way, Gentry was pulling me and holding me up, and all the time blood was running down his leg.
I’d told him I could walk from the truck to the cabin, but for some stupid reason I’d never thought about the fact that I would have to walk both ways. Thinking I should tell Edrard we were coming, I pulled the phone out of my pocket. Somewhere along the way it had gotten disconnected, so I redialed the other burner number. There was no voicemail, so it kept ringing as we got closer to the trucks. Finally, he picked up.
“Jesus Christ,” Dirk said. “Where are you? You gotta get up here. They shot Edrard.”
“Go. I’m coming as fast as I can.” I let go of Gentry’s hand and he ran ahead of me.
I was still dragging myself up the hill when I heard Gentry’s voice over the phone.
“Edrard, my brother,” he said. Like a coward, I hung up before I could hear anything else. A couple minutes later, I got there anyway and saw what had happened.
Edrard was lying next to the open door of his truck, with Gentry and Dirk kneeling on either side of him. Gentry had pulled his blouse off and was pressing it against Edrard’s stomach, but there was so much blood. We’d left Tague and Scanlon at the cabin, and Dirk must have killed Ligett down the hill. The fourth one—Gentry had said there were four—had followed Edrard to the trucks. Edrard had put two arrows in him, one in his leg and one in his shoulder. Not to kill. The guy had an AR-15 kind of rifle, and even with two arrows in him, he’d managed to shoot Edrard. Dirk must have finished the guy off with a bullet to the head.
Out of the cab of Edrard’s truck, I grabbed anything that looked like it could be used as a bandage—an old beach towel, a T-shirt—and tossed it out to Gentry, who was doing the only thing he could, applying pressure to the wound. I did the only thing I knew to do. I unlocked Gentry’s truck and got a tampon out of my backpack. It wouldn’t do anything for Edrard, but it would work for Gentry. I’d read it in some survivalist book that said as the tampon swelled up, it would put pressure on the bleeding arteries. I knelt down next to Gentry and ripped open the edges of the hole in his pants. I didn’t ask him. I just unwrapped the tampon and jammed it into the hole in his leg. Based on the sound he made, it hurt a lot, but he didn’t stop me, so I pushed it in until the string was hanging out.
I thought it might bother me, but I’d been practicing for that ever since I got my period for the first time. I just didn’t know it.
“We have to get him in the truck and get him to the hospital,” I said. Without even talking about why, the hospital in Ashdown was one of the things Gentry had marked on the map. “Dirk, you go with Gentry. You’ll go west into Oklahoma, then head back to Missouri. I’ll take Edrard to the hospital.”
“Nay. He is my brother. I shall take him,” Gentry said.
“No. Whoever takes him is going to have to answer a lot of questions.”
“Yeah, she’s right,” Dirk said. “Gunshot wound, they’ll have to call the cops.”
“The cops are going to be coming soon enough. Maybe LaReigne already called them,” I said.
“Where is LaReigne?” Dirk said.
“She’s not coming. She’s staying here with that asshole.”
“Holy shit. I wondered, you know.”
“Oh, shut up. You didn’t wonder shit,” I said. “Now, come on, we need to get Edrard in the truck.”
We tried. Even though Edrard screamed, even though the edge of the bath towel shifted and I could see his insides, we tried to move him. Gentry was strong enough, he could have done a fireman’s carry, but not without killing Edrard. After we gave up, Gentry went back to pressing the soggy bath towel over the place where the blood seemed to be coming out fastest. Dirk and I watched. The sun had set and the only light was from the cab of the truck.