Gosling was laying there, under a waterproof tarp. With shaking hands George was bandaging him as best as he could. Gosling was unconscious, moaning in his stupor.
“It’s gone,” Chesbro said. “It’s gone now, it’s really gone.”
“It’ll be back,” Pollard said.
Chesbro clutched his head in his hands, saying: “‘Behold now behemoth… he maketh the deep to boil like a pot…’”
George stopped what he was doing and turned to Chesbro. “You fucking idiot,” he said, feeling it all coming out of him now. “You fucking stupid piece of shit.”
Chesbro looked up at him just in time to see George’s clenched fist coming at him like a piston, something propelled and deadly like a torpedo. It caught him square in the mouth, snapping his head back and mashing his lips against his teeth. Had George any more room to swing, any more space with which to build momentum, he would have probably busted out a few teeth. But as it was, he split Chesbro’s lower lip wide open and slammed his head against the cockpit door with a hollow clang. Then George’s other fist was coming, but it was wild and just managed to clip the top of Chesbro’s head as he curled up like a hedgehog in a defensive position.
By then Cushing was on George, pushing him back. “Enough,” he said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough, George.”
But maybe from where George was sitting, it wasn’t. His teeth were clenched and his mind had gone stupid with hatred. The color drained from his face and he took a deep breath, his body going limp. “That fucking idiot… spouting that shit, spouting that shit at a time like this.”
Pollard just stared at it all dumbfounded.
Chesbro was whimpering now, something in him just shearing open at this latest indignity. He was hugging himself, rocking back and forth on his ass while his mouth filled with blood and it trickled down his chin.
“Just take it easy now, everyone,” Cushing said. He pulled a bandage out of one of the green nylon medical bags and made Chesbro press it to his mouth until the bleeding stopped.
Then he took a good look at Gosling. A real good look.
The bandages George had wrapped around his ankle were already turning red, same for the ones at his chest. Cushing was hardly a medic, but he’d been through a couple Red Cross first aid classes when he’d worked at a foundry years back. He searched through the Army medical bag. It had just about everything you could imagine, most of it centered around treating battlefield wounds. He saw the suture sets and given the enormity of Gosling’s wounds, he knew a good medic would be thinking of stitching him up. But Cushing didn’t know the first thing about suturing and now wasn’t a good time to learn, he figured.
He removed the bandages at Gosling’s chest and poured some QuikClot, clotting powder, into the deeper ones. Then he took out a pre-loaded syringe of what the label told him was triple antibiotic and injected it right into one of the gashes from the squid’s claws, hoping he was doing this right. Then he placed self-adhesive fast-clotting bandages over the wounds and repeated it all at Gosling’s ankle. But he wasn’t too hopeful with the latter. The tissue damage was so severe, he doubted anything less than a modern medical team would be able to fix it.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” George asked him.
Rubbing his trembling fingers against his legs, Cushing said, “Some of it from first aid courses, the rest I winged.”
If nothing else, the clotting agents and bandages stopped the bleeding or slowed it to an acceptable rate.
“Let me take a look at your mouth, Chesbro,” Cushing said.
But he just shook his head.
Cushing told Pollard to keep an eye on Gosling and George and he slipped up behind the remaining Hummer. From the light thrown by the lantern, they could see that the nylon line they’d tied off the lifeboat and raft with had been snapped.
“Oh, shit,” George said. “If that raft is gone…”
And Cushing understood the implications of that just fine: marooned. Without the raft or lifeboat, they were marooned. Trapped in the steel coffin of the C-130 and like candy in a dish, the monster-squid would keep coming back until said dish was empty.
“I wish this goddamn night would end,” George said.
“We just have to hang on.”
George said, “If I can get at those satchel charges, we can take care of that ugly bastard.”
“No,” Cushing said. “You go back there… no, you’d be exposing your ass to that thing.”
Pollard came walking up. “I think… I think the First is coming around.” He looked out into the mist. “That thing… it can’t get us way in the back, can it?”
“No,” George told him.
