Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 10:30 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 64 Hours, 11 Minutes Remaining
Chapter 104: The Bleeding Point
The heavy glass door clicked shut.
It was a tiny, pathetic sound, but it meant Aaron and Daniel were out there in the burning streets, and the rest of them were buried alive in here.
The pharmacy wasn't quiet. It was just the absence of screaming. It was the breathless, suffocating silence of prey hoping the predator just walks past the bushes.
Kenzie pressed her spine hard against the base of a greeting card display. Her legs were completely numb. The spilled cherry cough syrup on the floor was drying, sticking to her jeans like glue. She clutched Barbie's nylon carrier to her chest, her fingers tangled in the mesh. The dog was vibrating with a continuous terror that matched the frantic, heavy hammering of Kenzie's own heart.
Across the dark aisle, Alyssa Gomez Carrillo was falling apart.
She was kneeling in the dirt, her hands looking like she had just plunged them into a bucket of red paint. She had dumped a looted plastic first aid kit onto the grimy linoleum next to Caleb's head. The contents were a fucking joke. Flimsy paper-wrapped gauze, a useless roll of paper tape, and tiny, square band-aids.
"Okay," Alyssa whispered, the words tumbling out of her in a frantic, spit-flecked rush. She was hyperventilating, ripping at a gauze wrapper with her teeth because her bloody fingers couldn't grip it. "Okay, Caleb. I'm going to pack it. Just gonna pack it tight. Hold on."
She wasn't going to pack shit.
Caleb's arm looked like a butcher's mistake. Alyssa didn't even know this guy. She had literally met him a few hours ago on the street. But she knew that when they were cornered in the office across the street, Caleb had thrown his entire body weight forward to tackle a man into a shattered glass partition so the rest of them could run.
He had taken the glass for them. A massive wedge of plate glass had guillotined his right forearm, slicing cleanly through his jacket, parting the muscle like warm butter, and stopping only when it hit the bone.
Now, Caleb was fading. The catastrophic blood loss was turning his deep brown skin a powdery, terrifying shade of ash. Below the bloody shoelace Alyssa had cranked down above his elbow, his fingers were stiff and tinged a bruised, lifeless blue. The tissue was dying right in front of her.
"I can't leave it on," Alyssa choked out, her voice barely a squeak. She dropped a bloody square of gauze into the dirt and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, smearing blood into her own hairline. "If I leave it, the arm dies. He loses it from the elbow down. But if I loosen it... he bleeds out. The glass cut the radial artery."
She rocked back on her heels, gasping for air that wouldn't fill her lungs.
"Aaron should be here," Alyssa wept, the tears cutting tracks through the grime on her face. "He should be here. He knows what to do."
But Aaron wasn't here.
And that was the part that was actively tearing Alyssa's mind into jagged little pieces. Aaron had looked at Caleb—a man who had just bled to save their lives—and Aaron had done the math. Aaron didn't do empathy. He did algorithms. Severe trauma. No surgical gear. Dead weight. Aaron had made the cold, calculated decision that Caleb wasn't worth the calories it would take to keep him alive. He would have left him on the floor to rot if Daniel hadn't pushed the issue.
Alyssa hated Aaron for it. She hated him with a raw, ugly intensity that made her sick to her stomach. Aaron got to just walk away. He got to make the call to let someone die, flip a switch in his brain, and leave.
She couldn't.
She stared down at the bloody shoelace digging into Caleb's bicep. She had known exactly where to place it. She had known exactly how high up the arm to tie it to stop an arterial bleed.
She hadn't learned that in a nursing textbook.
The smell of the raw copper pooling on the linoleum suddenly spiked in her nostrils, thick and suffocating, tasting like hot pennies and salt.
The dark walls of the Savannah pharmacy violently ripped away.
Southcentral Los Angeles. Eight years ago.
Alyssa was fourteen. She was pushing open the heavy, peeling door of the second-floor girls' bathroom at her high school.
She had been looking for Marisol.
Marisol was the kind of beautiful that made people shut up when she walked into a room. She had thick, heavy, obsidian hair, huge brown eyes, and a loud, bright laugh that used to fill Alyssa's living room.
But high school girls are vicious. They couldn't stand that the boys couldn't stop looking at Marisol. So they destroyed her. They picked and clawed and relentlessly bullied her for six straight months until that vibrant girl was completely hollowed out. She stopped eating. She stopped laughing.
Alyssa found her in the third stall.
The metallic smell was the first thing that hit her. Marisol was slumped against the porcelain toilet. Her beautiful face was terrifyingly pale, her head lolling to the side. Her white school uniform blouse was soaked in an expanding pool of dark red. A rusted box cutter lay discarded on the wet tile.
Alyssa had screamed—a raw, ugly sound that tore her throat to shreds. Panic completely overrode her adolescent brain. She was just a kid. She dropped to her knees in the slick blood, frantically stripping off her own knee-high uniform socks. She had watched movies. She had seen people wrap wounds on TV.
Weeping hysterically, fourteen-year-old Alyssa wrapped her cotton socks directly over the deep, horizontal slits on Marisol's wrists, tying them as tight as her shaking hands could manage.
"Stay here!" Alyssa screamed at her best friend's fading, glassy eyes. "I'm getting help! Marisol, please stay here!"
Alyssa ran. She sprinted down the hallway, slipping in her own bloody footprints, screaming for a teacher, a nurse, anyone.
It took three minutes for the school resource officer to radio for paramedics.
Three minutes too late. Marisol was put into a black bag before third period.
Nobody sat Alyssa down and told her she killed her best friend. What kind of monster would tell a fourteen-year-old girl that? No, she found out two hours later, completely by accident.
Alyssa was sitting in the sterile hallway outside the principal's office, a foil shock blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She was staring blankly at Marisol's blood drying under her fingernails. Two EMTs were standing by the water fountain a few yards away. They didn't know the girl in the foil blanket was the one who found the body. They were just exhausted guys coming off a brutal call, keeping their voices low.
But not low enough.
"Shame. Poor kid tried," one of the medics muttered, rubbing his face and tossing a bloody pair of latex gloves into the trash can. "Wrapped the cuts directly on the wrists. Always happens. Kids don't know the arteries retract up the arm like rubber bands when they're severed."
"Yeah," the second medic sighed, leaning over the fountain. "If whoever found her had just tied those socks off an inch or two higher, above the elbow... might've stopped the flow. We would've had a pulse."
Alyssa stopped breathing.
She hadn't made a sound. She just sat there, suffocating under the weight of it. She went home that night, locked herself in her bedroom, and opened her laptop with shaking fingers. She typed it in. She read the biology. She looked at the diagrams. She confirmed it herself.
She had killed Marisol. Not with malice, but with pure, cinematic ignorance. She used movie logic when her best friend desperately needed medical science.
It took five years of intensive grief counseling just to get Alyssa to stop throwing up every time she saw the color red. Her parents uprooted their entire lives and relocated from the gang-riddled streets of Southcentral LA to the quiet seaport of Savannah, Georgia, just to give their broken daughter a fresh start.
Alyssa didn't make some poetic vow to save the world. She just developed a complex. She punished herself with academics. She threw herself into a brutal, accelerated nursing program, memorizing veins and arteries until she saw them in her sleep, absolutely terrified of ever being that stupid, useless fourteen-year-old girl again.
Present Day.
"Alyssa!"
The sharp hiss snapped her back to the gutted pharmacy. The ghosts of Southcentral LA vanished, replaced by the grim, shadowed face of Lila.
Lila had crawled through the sticky syrup, ignoring the shards of glass biting into her jeans, and was kneeling directly across from her.
"I can't do it, Lila," Alyssa cried, the flashback leaving her completely unmoored. Her chest heaved. She pointed a shaking, bloody finger at Caleb's arm. "I need an ER! I need a clamp! I have a dirty floor and cough syrup. He's going to die, and it's my fault."
Lila didn't hug her. She didn't offer some bullshit comfort about how it was all going to be okay.
Instead, Lila reached out, grabbed Alyssa's bloody wrists, and physically yanked her hands down from her face, forcing her to look up.
"Stop it," Lila demanded, her grip hard enough to bruise.
Alyssa's wild, red-rimmed eyes locked onto Lila's.
"Stop waiting for Aaron to walk back through that door," Lila said, her voice a low, sharp blade cutting through the hysteria. "Aaron isn't going to save him. You are."
"I don't have a sterile field!" Alyssa shrieked quietly, trying to yank her hands away. "If I mess up the knot, he bleeds out in my lap!"
"You don't get a sterile field," Lila shot back, refusing to let go. "You get a dirty floor. That's what you get. I didn't watch you stay awake for three days straight, crying over anatomy textbooks, just for you to bitch out now. You know how to do this."
"He's going to bleed to death!" Alyssa gasped, shaking her head frantically. The image of Marisol's pale, lifeless face flashed behind her eyes. "I'm just a student, Lila! I'm not ready for this! I can't watch it happen again!"
Lila's expression shifted. The tough-love act dropped. They had lived together for two years. Lila had held Alyssa's hair back when she drank too much. Lila had listened to her nightmares. Lila knew exactly what was happening right now.
Lila leaned forward, her face inches from Alyssa's.
"Alyssa, listen to me," Lila whispered fiercely. "Caleb isn't Marisol."
The name hit Alyssa like a physical shockwave.
She froze. The frantic, hyperventilating struggle completely stopped. The air rushed out of her lungs in a sharp, stunned exhale.
"He's not her," Lila repeated, her voice softening just a fraction, but maintaining the iron grip on Alyssa's wrists. "You are not fourteen years old anymore. You aren't in a high school bathroom. You are weeks away from a nursing degree, and you know exactly how to stop this. You put the tourniquet in the right place this time. You tied it above the elbow. You saved him on the street. Now finish it."
Alyssa stared at Lila.
She looked down at Caleb. He was a stranger. But he had thrown himself into a wall of glass so that she wouldn't get eaten alive. He had fought for her.
Alyssa swallowed the bile burning the back of her throat. The terror didn't magically vanish—it was still there, a cold, heavy block of ice sitting at the bottom of her gut—but the paralyzing, suffocating panic finally broke. She forced the terrified fourteen-year-old girl back into the dark and let the nursing student take the wheel.
"Okay," Alyssa breathed. She pulled her wrists free from Lila's hands. She wiped her nose with the back of her forearm, smearing Caleb's blood across her cheek. "Okay."
"Talk to me," Lila said, instantly shifting back to the steady, reliable roommate who used to quiz her on flashcards late at night. "What do you need?"
Alyssa leaned over Caleb's arm. She hated the sheer, horrific violence of the wound. The edges of the laceration were jagged and raw, the muscle tissue completely saturated in the dark blood pooled against the shoelace.
"It's a deep trauma," Alyssa said, her voice shaking slightly before the medical jargon took over. "I have to go deep into the wound cavity, find the severed ends of the radial artery, and tie them off manually."
"Blind ligation," Lila stated.
"Yeah," Alyssa whispered, her stomach turning sour at the thought. "With zero anesthesia. If he wakes up while I'm digging my fingers into his open muscle... the pain is going to be astronomical. The shock could stop his heart."
"So we manage the pain," Lila said logically. "What else?"
"I have to flush the wound bed first," Alyssa said, her brain finally building a surgical plan out of absolute garbage. "If I tie off the artery but trap the floor bacteria inside the tissue, the sepsis will kill him by Friday anyway. I need to flush it. And I need something to sew with."
She looked up at Lila. The terror in Alyssa's eyes had hardened into something grim and resolute.
"I need a needle," Alyssa said, her voice tight. "A curved surgical one is best, but a regular sewing needle will work if the eye is big enough. Heavy thread. Cotton, nylon, dental floss. I don't care. I need hydrogen peroxide to foam the dirt out, and rubbing alcohol to sterilize the needle. No scents, no dyes. Just pure alcohol."
Lila nodded.
"And painkillers," Alyssa finished, looking down at Caleb's ashen face. "Tylenol or ibuprofen. We need the highest milligram count you can find in this dump. If I can shove four or five hundred milligrams down his throat before I loosen this shoelace, it might keep him from coding when the pain hits."
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 10:41 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 64 Hours, 00 Minutes Remaining