Akira goes over the ABCs of first aid
Akira and Hinami were stuck.
They'd spent the last hour avoiding crowds of evacuees—neither wanted to find out what would happen if anyone recognized Akira's face from the news. There was also the chance someone would notice Hinami doing surprisingly well considering her recent amputation, and realize she was a ghoul.
After the crowds died down, they slowly wandered through the empty margin between the evacuating humans and the Dragon they fled.
Eventually they took another rest on a small side street. Akira was waiting for some new piece of information to help figure out a plan beyond "run and survive." It didn't appear to be forthcoming, and soon they would need to make a decision or have it made for them.
Hinami halted suddenly and pointed towards where the Dragon passed nearest to them. "I hear a…tank, I think. It's big and heavy."
"Should we leave?" Akira helped her up and handed her the bit of scrap metal that was currently serving as a walking aid. Looks like events are making decisions for us.
The girl nodded and started heading away from the battle taking shape. "Yeah. It's rolling in really fast. I think they might—"
It was too late—there was another rumble nearby, some screams, and a crashing noise so intense that Akira could feel it vibrating the air in her lungs.
They still hunkered down to wait out the nearby destruction, which seemed to become a series of explosions and another building or two collapsing.
It took a good ten minutes before the air quieted down again. Akira and Hinami turned in the direction opposite the war zone only to exit onto the main thoroughfare, look around, and realize that the way they wanted to go was now blocked by debris.
"Hold on a minute." Jogging around the little section of street they were on, Akira came to the disturbing realization that they were now almost entirely cut off. There was an insurmountable wall of detritus at nearly every exit. Hinami certainly wouldn't be able to get through without a struggle, and it was debatable that Akira could with two good legs.
Finally, out of desperation, she backtracked to where the bombastic skirmish had occurred.
The street was blocked, but only partially. It looked like it had been clogged with rubble, then cleared by another explosion. The twisted, smoking metal remains of an upended tank was lying across the sidewalk. Peeking over the wall of destroyed rubble, she spotted a coil of the Dragon.
Her heart took off again. She reminded herself that unlike a fully loaded tank, she was as insignificant as an ant to it. They'd have to pass very close by the city-destroying leviathan, but they should be able to make it.
The only problem was a strange humanoid monster crouched in their path. Even from a distance Akira could hear it noisily chewing on bodies dressed in army fatigues.
She backed away slowly behind the nearest building, right into Hinami. The girl had quietly hobbled up behind her.
Akira gestured for her to look around the corner at what they were up against before they retreated to a safer distance.
"We have a way out, but there's a little bit of an obstacle in the way. Do you think you can fight at all?"
"I don't think I can use my kagune right now." Hinami looked down at her skirt, where still only one leg was holding her up. "I did all that fighting after I was wounded, and then the cave-in happened…"
Akira held back her groan of frustration. She opened her little bag of supplies. "Okay, then. No kagune. We still have a couple of small knives and some medical supplies." She stopped, running through what she could do with what little they had, and trying to put it together into a plan.
She unscrewed one small vial of RC suppressant and poured it on the knife's blade. Unfortunately, Juzo took good care of his weapons and liquid rolled off the well-oiled blade as if repelled.
"Shit. On to the next plan. Hinami…can you at least hit him with a good sucker punch?"
She nodded after thinking about it for a moment. "I'm not great with hand-to-hand fighting, but I can do that. It won't be enough to kill him, though."
Akira was busy unwrapping and uncapping an insulin syringe, then using it to draw up RC suppressant from one of their aliquots. "I know. I'm thinking there might be a way to weaken him first. If this thing is somehow ghoul in origin, RC suppressant should have some effect, don't you think?"
Hinami eyed the needle suspiciously. "That won't make it through the creature's skin."
"I know. I'm thinking there's another way to get this stuff into its bloodstream. This is the industrial-strength formula from the CCG labs, so even a tiny bit should have a big effect."
The girl nodded cautiously.
"Okay, you hide here. I'll distract it, try to give it the RC suppressant, and then you attack when I give the signal. Just like last time. Can you do that?"
She nodded. "I can."
Akira uncapped the syringe and thought for a moment, before picking a spot on her nondominant arm to jab herself. The needle piercing her skin barely hurt, but as she hit the plunger, she gritted her teeth at the brutal stinging of the suppressant being injected. At least it's strong. It's never hurt like that before.
"What are you doing?!"
Akira threw the needle aside. She tossed one knife in her good hand, getting used to the heft of it. Sticking the other knife in her belt for easy access, she asked, "One more thing. Do you know any basic first aid?"
Hinami shook her head.
"Ok. First thing is always check the airway, make sure it's clear for breathing, then apply pressure or wrap up any bleeding."
"First aid for who," the young ghoul breathed.
"Me," said Akira as she stood and walked around the corner.
She gritted her teeth. Just go, just get it over with, she told herself. I just need some radical acceptance that this is going to suck. While the monster's back was turned, digging into the corpse on the ground, Akira exhaled and sprinted up behind him.
Its bone-cracking chewing must have been too loud to hear her approach. The creature didn't notice her until she was on top of it.
In one motion, she jumped on its back and hooked an arm around its neck, wrapped her legs around its waist. It stood up and screeched, trying to reach back and grab at her. Its arms and shoulders were too large, too inflexible, to reach anything vital. One of its claw-hands instead dug into her forearm and tried to peel her off.
No, I need to be right against the skin for this to work!
She brought up the knife in her other hand, and with more force than she thought she'd need, she stabbed herself in the arm right over where she'd just injected RC suppressant. After so long fighting ghouls, her own skin seemed paper thin.
The blade crunched through her skin with a sharp flash of pain, but it was not nearly as debilitating as she feared it'd be.
There. Now she was pinned to the creature—the knife going through her and getting lodged in its neck, taking Akira's contaminated blood with it.
It screeched and slowly pried the mangled arm off, forcing the knife out, and shook Akira off at last. She landed hard on the ground and scrambled backwards.
The monster turned and took a step towards her but faltered, just barely. Good, it worked fast.
He was nearby and a large target, so Akira wasn't too worried about missing when she grabbed the second knife with her good hand. It flew through the air and hit handle-first, bouncing off of the monster's chest. It must have been only a pinprick of annoyance, but it served as enough of a distraction.
Akira shouted, "Now!"
Hinami popped up from her hiding place and leapt by, taking the dragon monster's head off its shoulders with a single swipe of her hand. The girl's one leg gave her enough power to jump but it wasn't enough to land safely—she tumbled across the ground for a few revolutions before she was able to right herself.
Akira got to her knees and cradled her torn-up arm—more damaged from being clawed at than the knife that was still lodged between her ulna and radius. She was okay, in a lot of pain, shaking as she came down from the adrenaline, but okay. They did it.
So it was a surprise when Hinami screamed and crawled over to her. "Airway! Clear the airway!"
The blonde leaned back, keeping the frantic girl away from her injured arm. "Hinami! I'm fine, Hinami. I'm talking to you, my airway is fine."
"Oh." Hinami paused and snapped out of it. "I'm sorry…I didn't mean to…It's just that, seeing you kneeling there, bleeding, it reminded of…my mom, before Kaneki covered my eyes so I wouldn't see…"
Akira was quiet for a moment. "I see. I do still need help with the second part. We've got to wrap up my arm before I bleed any more."
Hinami nodded. Akira handed her some gauze and wraps she still had in her bag. "Here, I can't do this one-handed."
"Should I take the knife out?"
"No, it'll bleed like a sieve if we take it out. Just wrap around it for now, securely but not tight enough to cut off circulation to my hand," Akira said with a grimace. "We might have to remove it ourselves if we don't find help soon, though."
Hinami worked in silence, trying to be gentle, but she bumped the knife a few times and it took everything Akira had not to scream and lash out at the girl.
Instead, she tried to breathe through the pain and started saying something that had been on her mind. "I should apologize to you," Akira said. "I think I left one of your parents behind on Rushima, and the other is buried somewhere in the 24th ward…I should have been more careful. More respectful. It's not right…" She halted.
She didn't have a good way to sum up everything that wasn't right about Hinami's parents.
Hinami didn't say anything. She just gave the barest nod of acknowledgement, finished up her task, and sat back. "There."
Akira poked at her bad hand's fingertips. Still pink, still able to feel—getting plenty of bloodflow. "That'll do for now. You did a good job."
"Thanks," Hinami said before looking around. "What do we do next?"
"The sun will go down in two hours, but it'll get dark before that because we're surrounded by buildings. We've got to either find shelter, or pick a destination. How far out can you hear? Can you tell me if there's any more of those monsters nearby?"
Hinami closed her eyes and focused. Before long, she made a face. "Uh…there is someone heading our way. I don't know if it's good news or bad news."
"Do we need to run?"
"Probably not," the girl sighed.
"Hey, losers."
Hinami wasn't startled, but Akira's head snapped around to spot Takizawa, sitting on the rail of a half-destroyed pedestrian overpass, legs kicking back and forth like a bored child. "Oh," she said.
He glanced at Hinami, again balancing one-legged with her makeshift crutch, then over at Akira and the predicament she was in. "Aw, it looks like you guys were having fun without me."
"What do you want," said Hinami.
"Nothing, I was just on my way to see what the hell all that ruckus is, when I caught a familiar scent. Your blood, Mado."
Oh, this fool. Akira shook her head. Though…if he was here and he wasn't immediately trying to kill them, it seemed their hopes for survival were looking a bit better.
He reached for the ground behind him and tossed a dismembered arm at Hinami's feet—or, foot. Akira winced when it landed with a meaty thunk.
"Eat up. You're looking more pathetic than usual. It's bumming me out."
Hinami glared back at him, looking more like a surly teen girl than she'd ever appeared before.
He jumped to the ground in front of Akira. Without saying much else, he grabbed her wounded arm and took a closer look at it. "Oh, that looks nasty."
Trying to give Hinami some privacy, Akira instead focused on Takizawa. "What about, 'nice to see you Akira? Sorry I didn't come sooner but I'm here to help, Akira?'"
He dropped her arm and looked at her. "Will we be even for Rushima, then?"
"We'll never be even," Akira said.
His face fell into despair for a split second before hardening into the sullen expression he seemed to favor nowadays.
"I know you want to tie things up between us," she continued, "so there's no loose ends and you can just disappear forever. So no, we'll never be even."
"I don't know why you even care," he grumbled.
Digging deep to muster up her last reserves of energy for their next trek, Akira stood. As she one-handedly removed her belt and tried to fix it into a sling, she spoke.
"Because, Seido, I'm aware that I'm glacially slow at warming up to people. You're one of about seven people on Earth that I'll tolerate, so if you disappear my list of friends goes down by fourteen percent."
Frustrated at her lack of dexterity, she finally looked over at Takizawa's shocked face. "Could you maybe help me with this instead of watching me fumble around like a jackass?"
They'd taken another rest to allow for Hinami's leg to grow back. With her on the mend and quickly regaining strength, and Takizawa ripping through the occasional monster in their way with ease, the going was suddenly much quicker.
Akira was now, of course, the slowest member of the group. Several times, Takizawa got impatient with her stumbling and just picked her up to haul her over a rough patch of road.
At first, they just tried to trek away from the epicenter of destruction for their own safety.
They watched from a distance as a fighter jet buzzed overhead and attempted to strafe the enormous Dragon, curling around a skyscraper like a climbing vine. The monster retaliated and the plane was suddenly swatted out of the sky into the side of a nearby building.
It made Takizawa laugh. "I say we burn the whole city down and just get a new one."
"No. Bad." Leaning into the gallows humor that often took over in such bleak times, Akira smacked him upside the head. "Now shut up and let Hinami work."
It had suddenly grown so dark Akira could barely see—most of the lights in the city were out and it was just the gibbous moon that lit her way—but the ghouls she was with didn't have any problems.
The girl was currently on top of a pile of concrete and drywall that had once been a nice furniture store, trying to locate any more of their friends.
Her eyes were closed and she was standing perfectly still, clearly searching on the limits of her perception. Suddenly, she pointed to the northeast and opened her eyes. "I have something. It's faint, but when a breeze comes in from that direction…they must be far away."
Akira nodded. "Let's go. The sooner we start, the sooner we get there."
Holy guacamole, fifty chapters! I don't have the home stretch super set in stone yet, but I'd say there's about ten to fifteen more to go…
Next week: Akira gathers 'round the campfire with some old friends