Letters Across the Sea by Genevieve Graham (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

around him, the wounded writhed on the ground, tangled among many who lay perfectly still. As their medic, Max knew he had to help them, but he was injured as well, and the enemy still lurked. A bullet chipped into the rocks nearby, and David dropped lower beside him.

Max made a decision. “Go, David. I’m okay.”

“Leave you? How can I do that?”

“It’s all right.” He looked out at the wounded. “I have to try to help the others.”

“I can stay.”

“For what? You know how to do what I have to do?”

David said nothing.

“Go on. I’ll see you at the rendezvous.” When David stayed in place, obviously torn, Max shoved him. “Go! Get outta here! I need you to stay alive or else Hannah will kill me. And then where will we be? Go on.”

David scowled, reluctant. “You be careful, Max.”

“You too. Get going.”

David took off, and Max shimmied on his forearms toward the closest body, but he didn’t recognize what was left of the man. When the gunfire paused, he struggled to his feet, breath hissing through his teeth at the pain in his thigh. He checked unsuccessfully for a pulse on another man then moved on again, knowing time was running out. He couldn’t stay out here alone for long; he had to get to the rendezvous. The pain from his leg suddenly knifed through the rest of him, and he stumbled onto one knee. Come on, he told himself. It’s just a cut. You’ll get worse if you stay here.

“Max.”

Richie lay thirty feet away, flat on his back.

Max didn’t hesitate. Steeling himself, he rushed to Richie, flinching and dodging as bullets rained around him. Hang on, Richie. His friend’s face was smeared black and bloody, and his green eyes were dim with pain. Gasping at the burn in his own leg, Max dropped to the ground and took in Richie’s wounds, swallowing back his grief. Richie’s arm was mangled and pulsing blood, he had a long, deep gash under one eye, and his trousers were slick with blood. Max knew immediately that there was little he could do for him. Not here, anyway.

But Richie’s red-rimmed eyes stared up at him, so old and so very young all over again, and so full of trust.

Max lowered his face to his friend’s. “I can’t lie. It’s bad.”

“I know.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he promised.

The arm was Richie’s worst injury by far, and it was really bad. A grenade had done this. Bone, muscle, tissue, all of it mashed together from halfway down his upper arm to what was left of his fingers. Max scrambled to stop the bleeding, furtively watching for enemy soldiers as he worked, rocked by explosions and hunted by random machine-gun fire. He had to get Richie out of here. Normally the army would have set up a field station to take in the wounded, but there had been no chance to do that. That’s when Max remembered the old cement tunnel near the bunker. It wasn’t guaranteed safe, but it could at least provide some kind of shelter.

“Richie,” he said, but Richie’s eyes were closed, his jaw slack.

Max jammed his fingers against his friend’s neck, searching for a pulse, then relaxed slightly. It was there, just weak. He’d lost consciousness, which was a blessing. When there was a lull in the gunfire, Max grabbed Richie’s good arm, hauling his dead weight backward, the way he’d come. The movement jarred Richie awake, and he screamed, reaching for his wounded arm, but Max couldn’t stop.

“Hang on, Richie. Don’t touch your arm. Just gotta get you under cover.” Shooting started up again, and Max dropped onto his stomach beside Richie. “We’re almost there.”

Richie howled, every tendon in his neck strained. “It’s too much!”

Max grabbed for his pack, searched through it, then closed his hand around one of the five tubes of morphine tartrate. Richie never felt the needle go in, but Max saw its effect almost immediately.

When the gunfire moved off, Max resumed his mission, and when he finally reached the tunnel, he discovered he wasn’t the first one there. Someone had thought of its protective walls already, and half a dozen men clustered inside, most of them badly wounded. Others stood guard.

The man who seemed to be in charge directed Max to a spot near the back, eyeing Richie as he went. “We’ll stay here as long as we can, then we’ll take him to St. Stephen’s.”

Max reluctantly lowered Richie to the ground. St. Stephen’s College hospital was in Stanley, at the very south end of the island, and Max had serious doubts that Richie could wait that long before having something done. He was pale as ice, his breathing catching as he laboured through the pain.

Max hesitated, feeling sick. He knew what he had to do to save Richie, or at least to try. He’d done it once before at the hospital in Kingston. But he could never have imagined doing it in this humid, filthy environment with enemy soldiers firing on them. And never, ever to a friend.

“I can’t save your arm,” he told him. “There’s not much left of it. It’s gotta come off.”

Tears squeezed from the corners of Richie’s eyes. “Just don’t leave me, Max. Don’t leave me here to die.”

“I’m right here, Richie. I won’t leave you.”

Max didn’t have a lot of time, and he didn’t have the right instruments. He pulled out what he had, then shoved a folded leather strap into Richie’s mouth.

“Bite down hard,” he said.

Richie passed out almost immediately, and Max was glad of it. As he worked, cutting the remaining tissue, severing the bone, he tried not to remember running the bases with his old friend, chasing each other through the neighbourhood, wrestling just for the fun of it. He needed to focus, to remember his training, not his past. When the worst of the rough surgery was done, he bound the wound as tightly as he could, then tossed the ruined limb deeper into the tunnel before