“Still V-Fib!” David yelled. “Charge to 300!”
Harper wasn’t looking at the monitor. She was looking at Knox’s chest. The right side wasn’t rising. The veins in his neck were bulging like garden hoses.
Tension pneumothorax. The diagnosis hit her brain like a lightning strike. The gunshot wound had punctured his lung. Air was leaking into the chest cavity with every breath, inflating like a balloon, crushing his heart.
“Doctor,” Harper said.
She didn’t whisper. The voice that came out of her wasn’t the timid, flat tone of the last three months. It was a command voice, forged in the deserts of the Middle East.
“Breath sounds are absent on the right. Trachea is deviated. It’s a tension pneumo. Shocking him won’t work. You’re stopping his heart.”
The ER went dead silent for a fraction of a second. David froze. Kinsley covered her mouth.
Preston lowered the paddles. His face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated rage. He looked at Harper as if she were a roach that had just spoken English.
“Excuse me?” Preston hissed, his voice trembling. “Are you a doctor, Bennett? Did you go to med school, or did you get your degree from the back of a cereal box?”
“Look at the jugular distension,” Harper stepped forward, pointing at Knox’s neck. “His heart is being choked. If you don’t decompress the chest, he dies in thirty seconds.”
“Shut up!” Preston roared, spittle flying from his lips. “I am the attending surgeon! You are a nurse! You change bedpans and you shut your mouth! Charge to 360! Clear!”
He slammed the paddles down. Knox’s body jolted violently.
The monitor gave a long, high-pitched scream.
Flatline.
“Damn it,” Preston spat, tossing the paddles onto Knox’s chest as if the man were a broken toy. “He’s gone. Time of death, 14:02. Call it, David.”
No.
Harper didn’t calculate. She didn’t think about her cover, her reintegration, or the consequences. Thomas Knox had saved her life in Ramadi. She was not going to watch him die because a trust-fund surgeon was too proud to look at a patient’s neck.
