Everything Changes by Melanie Hansen Page A

to a stop and froze in horror. A young man with black hair, probably the driver, was sprawled right next to the car, obviously having not been thrown clear with as much violent impact as the others. He was unconscious.
    A brown-haired woman with terrified eyes looked up at him from where she knelt next to the boy, her fingers pressed into his neck as if feeling for a pulse.
    “He’s still alive! Can you help him? His leg!”
    Jase’s eyes fell to the boy’s lower body, and he was suddenly trapped in a pit of molasses, unable to move, feeling like a million spiders were crawling over his skin. His breathing constricted, and he felt like he was sucking every breath through the narrowest straw.
    “Help him! He’ll bleed to death, Mister!”
    With supreme effort, Jase forced himself to kneel next to the boy and look at him, making his clinical assessment in seconds. The boy’s left leg was mangled below the knee, crushed by the shearing forces of the rolling car against unforgiving pavement. Bones, muscles, and tendons hung out of the torn flesh, the boy’s foot facing almost backward. His clothes were tattered, road rash showing through the torn fabric, blood pooling everywhere.
    This isn’t Carey. Carey is alive. Carey is safe.
    The bleeding was the biggest danger, and it had to be stopped.
    Jase opened his medical bag and pulled on fresh gloves and then tore open a tourniquet kit. He handed the woman a pair of surgical shears, hoping she couldn’t see how much his fingers were shaking.
    “Cut his shorts off, quickly.”
    While she did that, Jase applied a blood pressure cuff to the boy’s arm and assessed his pulse and breathing, trying not to focus on the spill of black hair against the ground, the skin pale with increasing blood loss.
     
    Shouts, gunfire as a small car ran the Marine checkpoint outside the firebase and barreled for the fence line. Carey had been helping to man the checkpoint, and Jase ran out of his medical hooch in time to see Carey step in front of the vehicle and fire directly into the windshield. The windshield shattered, and the car veered off at the last second, weaving erratically, the driver slumped over the steering wheel.
     
    The woman finished cutting the boy’s shorts off, and Jase quickly applied the tourniquet to the pressure point in the boy’s upper thigh, twisting it down until the blood flow slowed from a steady gush to a trickle.
    “Won’t that cause him to lose his whole leg?” the woman asked, her voice high with barely suppressed panic.
    “No,” Jase said, taking the boy’s blood pressure again. It was dangerously low. He reached into his bag and brought out a saline IV kit, swiftly inserting the needle into the back of the boy’s hand and taping it down. He handed the bag over to the woman. “Squeeze that, get that fluid into him.”
    “But what about his leg?”
    “If I don’t stop the bleeding, he’ll bleed to death in only a few more minutes,” Jase said tersely. “I don’t have any other choice. And as long as he’s treated by a trauma unit within the next couple of hours, the tissue in his leg won’t die.”
    Jase forced himself to look at the boy’s lower leg, knowing it was beyond saving, the bones and tendons splintered and mangled beyond recognition.
     
    The insurgent car drifted almost to a stop. “Get away!” Jase screamed, and before his shout had even died away, the car exploded into flames and shrapnel, cutting down the men closest to it. Carey was in the back of the group, and Jase watched helplessly as his friend was thrown into the air and tossed to the ground like a rag doll to lie crumpled, unmoving.
     
    Jase continued to monitor the boy’s vitals, and the fluid being pushed into him caused him to rouse briefly, his eyes fluttering open, his gaze unfocused.
    “Easy, buddy,” Jase murmured. “You’ll be okay.”
     
    Jase grabbed his medical kit and raced to the scene of the carnage, a horrific scene of body parts and burned