LUCAS ISN’T BREATHING RIGHT. And not in the way that guys sometimes do when they’re passed out asleep and snoring like a bear or, like, an eighteen-wheeler.
That’s annoying, but it’s not, you know, concerning.
Dawn wakes up because she realizes that Lucas isn’t moving. And she listens and she can’t hear him breathing over the sound of the wind, and then she panics and starts to believe he might be dead, and she reaches for him in the dark and finds his face and his neck and feels around for a pulse.
And his pulse is there, but it’s weak.
And when she turns on her flashlight and shines the light at him she can see he’s breathing, but it’s super shallow. And then every now and then he’ll, like, gasp really loud and suck in a mouthful of air like he’s dying, and his face will contort and she can see he’s in pain.
And she can see all the blood that’s leaked out through the hole in his jacket.
Dawn points the flashlight beam at the rock wall. Props it up there so it will stay and she’ll have both her hands free.
Lucas is curled up on his side with his legs bent. Gingerly, Dawn tries to roll him a little bit. She reaches for the zipper on his jacket.
Lucas stirs, but he doesn’t wake up. It’s so cold in the little crevice but his skin is hot to her touch, too hot. He whimpers a little bit as she unzips his jacket. But he doesn’t wake up, and Dawn doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
There’s so much blood underneath.
He was wearing a T-shirt to sleep in, and that’s all he has on underneath his jacket. He’s a Black Bear, so the T-shirt is red, but it’s a bright cherry red. It’s nothing like the deep crimson staining his midsection.
The fabric is slashed open, just above Lucas’s belly button. His whole stomach is sticky with blood, some of it dried and some of it fresh. Some of it has soaked through the shirt, gluing the fabric to his skin. Dawn stares at the stab wound and feels sick to her stomach.
Lucas whimpers again. It’s the noise a child would make, or maybe a sick animal. It’s pain and fear and exhaustion.
Dawn zips his jacket back up, to the top. Then she turns off the flashlight and sits there in the dark, her back to the storm, straining her ears to listen to Lucas breathing.
Time passes. Dawn can’t say how long, only that she lies there and listens to the wind and feels Lucas breathing softly, and every now and then he’ll wake up and gasp a lungful of air again, and he’ll cry out from the pain of moving and his breathing afterward will be hot and fast and feverish.
He’s in bad shape; that much is obvious.
And sooner or later, Dawn realizes that she can’t ask him to go any farther.
“Lucas,” she says. She turns on the flashlight. “Lucas, wake up.” She shines the light on him. He doesn’t open his eyes. He’s shivering now, from the cold or from something else entirely.
“Lucas,” Dawn says. She shakes him, gently, and watches his forehead furrow. He stirs a little bit, but doesn’t open his eyes.
“Hmm?” he says, finally.
“Lucas, I think you’re hurt,” Dawn tells him. “Like, really bad.”
Lucas doesn’t answer immediately. He exhales, and it sounds ragged. “Yeah,” he says. His voice is weak. “Warden got me.”
He shifts a little bit, and Dawn sees how every muscle in his face goes tense with the effort and the pain of moving. And she can see the blood staining the front of his red Black Bear jacket and she wonders how he even made it this far, how he didn’t just drop dead hours before.
“I don’t think…I can do this,” Lucas says, and that scares her. It scares her because she knows how bad Lucas wants to play the hero, how he wants to be the one who saves the day.
Solid and dependable.
“I think,” Lucas says, “I think I just need to lie here for a while.
“Dawn,” Lucas says. “Are you as scared as I am?”