CHAPTER 19

"Ummmmph." The low moan clenched the muscles in Joe's stomach tight, teeth clamped together until the grunt of pain passed. Four days. Four days and nothing but fevered, incoherent murmurs of distress had escaped from Frank. Joe could have tolerated the sounds so much better if they had been his own. As it was they left him barely able to breathe.

"You made the right decision, Joe." Biff spoke from the darkened corner of the windowless hut. He sat on the earth floor, forearms draped over drawn up knees.

"How can you know that?" Joe scratched his fingers through sweat dampened hair, a loud sigh punctuating his question. "He's not waking up."

"He's alive."

"Yeah, for how long, though? Answer me that!" A crack of anger underlined the words.

Biff wisely didn't answer, recognizing Joe's frustration as just that. Joe wasn't angry at him. At everyone who had done this to his brother certainly, and unfortunately at himself.

"Sorry. Guess I'm tired."

"It's okay." Biff paused, his tone adding some weight to his answer. "Frank will be okay."

Joe thought of the mere dribbles of water he'd forced down Frank's throat since they'd arrived in the remote village. "I hope so. I thought by now he'd… I thought… he can't …" Joe sucked in a shaky breath, hand resting absently against Frank's side, the nearly inaudible words trailing out of him no longer meant for Biff as the scenes of four days ago replayed in his head. "I hope so. You can't go, Frank. Don't know if you hear me, but I'm telling you, you can't go…"

"Joe? What do you want to do? I need to know. Now." Reza searched his eyes, understanding the difficulty of the question, but not having the time to ease into it. Or more accurately, Frank didn't have the time.

Joe turned away from her and her father, staring at his battered brother. He had to ask one more time. "There's no way to just splint the break?"

"No. I can try the fasciotomy, which is what I think we should do, we can treat his other injuries and hope for the best, which won't happen, or we can play it completely safe and take the arm off."

"Off?!"

"Whether it's infection or compartment syndrome, there are things happening in that arm that will affect the rest of him. If we take the arm off, that isn't going to happen."

"And he'll definitely survive if we do that?" All the things Frank would never do again invaded his head and churned his stomach. Would his brother forgive him for even considering it?

"No." Reza wished she could answer another way. "His chances would be higher, but a field amputation is a risk by itself, not a guarantee. Besides, compartment syndrome doesn't make you unconscious."

"So it's not the only thing threatening him." Joe knew that, a simple look at the bruises marbling the rest of Frank amply demonstrated the fact. "Tell me about the fasciotomy. You said you hadn't done one."

She shook her head, not eager to elaborate on how nervous she was at the mere idea of attempting the procedure. "I haven't. You're supposed to measure the pressure in the muscle compartments, be sure that's the problem before you try it. And a surgeon should be the one doing it."

Joe nodded, swallowing down everything he wanted to scream about how he came to be here in the middle of the dank land before time instead of having this conversation with an actual surgeon. "You're sure you can do this?"

"No." Reza offered a wan smile. "I can try."

He might have appreciated a little less honesty. A heavy sigh left him, as he hesitantly weighed the options a final time. "Do it."

Ten minutes later she was kneeling at Frank's side, boiled blade in her hand. Biff knelt astride Frank's ankles, a hand planted on each shin, while Reza's father sat behind his head, a knee clamped against each ear.

"You're going to stay?" Reza wasn't at all sure Joe should be here.

"I'm not leaving him." Nothing in Joe's voice suggested there was room for debate. "Where do you need me?"

"Stay by his other arm. I'm not sure he'll move, but if he wakes up, it'll help if you're the first thing he sees."

In the end, Frank jerked away from the hands on him a few times, but never awoke as Reza carved four long slices into his limb, pulling the skin apart to slit the fibrous sheath confining the damaged muscle beneath. Frank's already pale skin blanched further as she worked, with Joe's and Biff's acquiring a similar hue.

"There." She sat back, wiping the knife on the hem of her ruined tunic.

"Done?" Joe relaxed his hold on Frank's other hand, half sickened that he'd helped her do this. "Don't you have to stitch those up?"

"Defeats the purpose if I do. Let me clean up a bit and I'll dress it."

She returned a few minutes later in fresh clothes, a metal bucket in her hands. Pulling thin strips of drenched linen out of the container, she wrapped the arm, shoulder to fingertips, loosely covering the wounds there.

Joe noted the slightly odd smell. "What's in that?"

"Salt water, mostly. We boil the bucket first to clean it, then boil additional water in another container and pour it in this one along with salt and bark camphor. Once the linen is dropped in there, we boil the whole thing again for about ten minutes. His arm needs rewrapped twice a day with the strips, and it can't be tight."

She described everything else as she went, sensing the information was calming to Joe, giving him something concrete to compete with the anxieties swirling in his head. With the arm cared for as much as the situation allowed, she turned to cleaning out the welts that extended over his chest, back, and thighs. A thick paste of beeswax, honey, and ginger coated those, with a dried version of the linen remnants topping them off.

"Joe?" Reza slipped into the room, pulling his thoughts back to the present. She hadn't found him out of arm's reach of his brother in the days they'd been here.

Joe glanced up, startled when he realized Biff was gone. The villagers had stopped locking them in two days ago, deciding neither boy was going anywhere as long as Frank couldn't be moved. Both of them had agreed to let someone know if they left the hut and not to go beyond the perimeter of the village, but in Joe's case it hardly mattered. He wouldn't budge from Frank's side.

Reza followed his gaze as it swept the room. "Looking for Biff? He went to see the village elders and then to fetch your lunch. Let me see your foot."

"Frank first." The shake of his head dropped his hair into his eyes, wayward strands sticking to his forehead.

"Order doesn't make any difference, Joe." She smiled as she shifted her attention to Frank, dousing his arm in salt water before she peeled the cloth away. "You could still see if you backed up an inch."

"Sorry." Joe felt vaguely sheepish as he relaxed his posture a hair, sliding half a foot away from where he'd been hovering over her shoulder. She was right; he could still see every horrid detail.

The entire process of cleaning and redressing everything took over an hour, Joe flinching for Frank with every touch he didn't feel. She grimaced at the rattling breaths and raging fever, shaking her head at the pneumonia she could do little about.

"Now can I see your foot?"

Joe reluctantly moved to his own pallet, leaning his back against the bound sticks and dried clay that formed the walls of the structure. Reza sat cross legged in front of him, smoothing her full tan skirt and tucking the braid of her hair over a shoulder as she waited for him to settle his foot in her lap.

She dumped a fresh pitcher of water over it; her skirt too drenched from the weather outside to worry about the addition, and allowed the cloth a minute to soften before pulling it loose. She heard the squelched hiss but ignored it, poking about in the quarter sized hole in the arch of his foot, satisfied that it was draining less than yesterday. A few snips at the dark edges of the tissue and she nodded to herself, repacking the area with dried blumei fern. "It looks a little better. You know, if you had told me about this before yesterday, it wouldn't have gotten this bad."

Joe offered a tired shrug. "I wasn't being stoic or anything. I honestly hadn't noticed."

"It doesn't hurt?" She knew better than that.

"No more than anything else. Maybe it would if I was walking on it."

She accepted that at face value, knowing his focus was squarely on Frank. "Fair enough. Eat though, okay? It doesn't help him for you to be hungry and sleep deprived."

"I don't need you to hound me about sleeping, too. I've got Biff for that."

"Well then, start listening to him." Reza sat a clay bowl full of viscous fluid beside him. "Get as much of this in him as you can."

Joe nodded, the routine familiar by now. "What's in this one?"

"Water, honey, nutmeg, jeleme wood powder, and betel nut extract."

"Of course, I should have guessed." Joe offered a half smile, the most he could muster at the present.

"I'll be back tonight."

Joe returned to Frank's side, propping his brother's head up slightly before giving the bowl a stir. "Hey, Frank. You gonna wake up and talk to me? No? I've got some first rate sludge here for ya. Smells even worse than yesterday's, and that's saying something." An image of the seafood rolls the first night on Ranei flashed through his mind. "Then again, you might actually like it."

Joe spooned a few drops of the mess into the inside of Frank's cheek, careful not to overload what he would swallow. Reza had taught him the first night how to rub the front of the throat and trigger the swallow reflex, but it was still a painstaking process to avoid choking him. Half way through the tiny dish, Biff made his way inside, dripping from the latest deluge of the never ending storms.

"What did you find out?" Joe didn't look up, recognizing the heavier footfalls.

"Topan and a few of the others made it back in from the capitol area this morning. The rebel militia is pretty much done for. Most of the troops were killed or captured and the city is back in the hands of the original government."

A spark lit in Joe's eyes for the first time in a week. "Then we can get Frank out of here." He reached for the rice rolls Biff had piled beside him, suddenly famished.

Biff hated to dash those hopes. "May not be that easy, Joe. The city's destroyed and from what Topan could learn the hospitals are too. They're triaging wounded at other public buildings, but it sounds like everything is pretty overwhelmed. A few militia holdouts are loose in the mountains still, too."

"How destroyed?" Joe wasn't ready to let go of the idea just yet.

"Buildings burned out and dead people in the street sort of destroyed."

Joe nodded, accepting that once again everything here was going to go wrong. "So now what?"

"Topan thought he could get us to the city; it sounds like the few non-residents still in Ranei are gathering there and the regular army is protecting those sites. We'd have to walk out though. It took Topan almost two days each way and that was at a good clip."

"I'm not leaving Frank here and he'd never make the trip."

"I already told the elders that." Biff hadn't thought Joe would consider the idea.

"You should go, though."

"What?" Biff was genuinely surprised. "I'll stick it out with you."

"It's not that." Joe resumed trickling the pseudo-broth into Frank. "I need you to get to wherever they're rounding up internationals and send Frank some help. Find my parents if you can, but if not get in touch with someone back home. Even if the police have to break into our house to get Dad's contact numbers, there's got to be something that can be done. No one in the capitol is going to make Frank their priority. I need you to go change that."

Biff nodded, not liking the idea of leaving Joe, but seeing the logic in his plan. "I'll go, but…"

"But what?"

"But five days ago these people nearly shot Frank and marched us through the jungle like a pair of mules. How sure are you that it's safe to stay here alone?"

Joe raised an eyebrow, squaring his gaze with Biff's. "How sure are you that it's safe to go back into the rainforest with Topan?"

"Point taken. I'll find someone. Promise."

An hour later and Biff was gone with Topan and another villager, leaving Joe to hope he'd made the right decision. Again.

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"Uhhh… ummmph."

The groan yanked Joe away from the precipice of the nap he'd been flirting with. It was morning again, but he hadn't truly slept. Maybe not since the day in the hotel when the soldiers had taken Frank away.

"Ughhhh…"

"Frank?" Joe scrambled to the side of the thin mattress, afraid to hope.

"Uhhh." The darting behind the eyelids picked up pace, almost matching the darting breaths.

"Frank, come on. Frank?"

The eyes fluttered, finally opening into an unfocused glaze, traveling aimlessly. The breathing increased into a frantic pant.

"Frank! Stop. You're okay. You're okay. Breathe." In spite of the plea, Joe felt his own breathing nearly cease. "That's it. Slow down. In… out… You're okay. In…" Joe matched action to words, calming both of them.

Slowly the roaming gaze found the source of the voice, every bit as familiar as his own. "Uhhhjjj….ujjjjjjj….J-Joe?"

"Yeah. I'm here. You're okay." Joe couldn't have said which of them he was trying to convince.

"J-Joe." The word was more seen than heard, the tail of it lost in a violent fit of coughing.

"I'm right here, Frank. Breathe." As the cough subsided, Joe reached for his water cup, fingers skimming over the bowl's concoction before deciding against that. "Just a sip, okay?" He slipped an arm behind Frank's neck, holding the cup to his lips.

"H-hanged. Going to h-hang-g." The confusion swum on his face, clearly unsure if Joe was now in the same danger.

"Shhh, Frank, I know about that. It's over. I'm not sure how exactly, but you got away from them. It's not going to happen; we're safe here." Or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

"Hurts." Frank attempted to lift his better arm off the bed, only to have Joe rapidly pin him down.

"Can't let you do that, bro. I'm sorry. You need to keep still. Sorry it hurts." How am I supposed to tell him that there's not a blamed thing I can do about it? It hurts, it's gonna hurt, and there's nothing to give you for it. All because I got us caught by a bunch of natives I should have heard coming instead of getting you to a hospital.

Frank fought down another round of coughing, gasping for air before it was over. "W-what's…. wrong… with…. m-me?"

Joe knew Frank would spot a lie even in his current state, but maybe he could get by with toning it down a bit. "You have pneumonia and you broke your arm."

"Huh." Frank paused for a long while, exhausted with the effort of forcing air in and out of his chest. "What's… wrong… with… you?"

"Me? Nothing. I'm fine, Frank."

"F-face."

Joe thought a minute, picturing how he probably looked. His nose was still swollen from breaking it at the hotel, and while he hadn't had access to a mirror, it was a safe bet that both of his eyes were black as a result. Any number of vines and weeds had slapped across his face on the hike here. Throw in not shaving or showering for a week and, well, Frank's question was making a lot more sense.

"Y-you… were sup…posed…. to… go… home…"

"What, without you? No way are you getting all the vacation days to yourself."

Frank tried to smile, flinching backwards into the straw-stuffed pillow when it actually hurt his jaw. "Y-you… look… aw-ful."

"Trust me here, I'm the handsome one."

"Huh."

"You're the sparkling conversationalist, though." Joe shifted the pillows when Frank's breathing worsened again. "Easy. Just breathe easy. Slow down. Slower. That's it. Slower."

Frank struggled long minutes, eventually settling into a pattern that lanced less fire through his ribs. Every inch of him ached or stung. Except his right arm maybe. There was no word in any language Frank knew that came close to describing how it felt. Agony wouldn't have even made the top ten list.

"J-Joe? P-please…" Frank teetered on the edge of begging Joe to do something for how he felt. Anything. Knock him over the head with a shovel kind of anything. And then he saw it. No matter how many times Joe had said 'you're okay,' he was scared. Scared for his brother. And that was something Frank would never add to, no matter how much he hurt.

"J-Joe?"

"Still right here."

"S-stay?"

Joe jerked his eyes to Frank's, an acknowledgement of everything that happened passing between them silently in a single heartbeat. "Always."

Frank saw the desperation in those blue depths, but also the fierce belief that they were getting through this. Even knowing this time he couldn't be the big brother, couldn't lift his own head, an assurance settled through him. The last memory he had, he was standing on a gallows, a hair's breadth from dying. Now he was here, and Joe was taking care of him. Whatever else may have happened, Joe had orchestrated that, and Joe was going to get him home. He let his eyes drift closed.

"Frank!?"

"Still… h-here too." Frank worked enough air in for another sentence. "Enjoying… your… v-vaca.. vacat-tion?"

Joe snorted, the stuttered sentence conveying far more than a seemingly random question. "Nah, too rainy."

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to be continued...