Hellfire. Ed Macy

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СКАЧАТЬ spinal and internal injuries…’

      I couldn’t open my eyes but at least the pain was telling me I wasn’t dead.

      I wanted to go to sleep again, but a voice in the back of my head told me I needed to stay awake.

      And someone seemed to be shoving the end of a broom shank deep into me, just below my rib cage, next to my spine. Every time the ambulance hit the tiniest bump it felt like it was going to burst through my chest. I was John Hurt in my own nightmare version of Alien.

      We hit a pothole and I suddenly found my voice. I screamed-full throat, full belly. It filled the ambulance and blotted out the sound of the siren.

      ‘Fuck me!’ the paramedic said.

      I passed out again.

      ‘Corporal Macy, can you hear me?’

       Of course I can hear you; just give me some bloody morphine…

      Then: closed abdominal injury, mate, the voice at the back of my head said. Fat chance of the love-drug.

      The pain had got worse.

       If I couldn’t put up with this, how would I ever be able to pass Selection? Fuck Selection, I’m tired…

      ‘Corporal Macy, can you hear me?’

      I opened my eyes a crack and found myself blinking against bright, brilliant white. No wonder people said they saw angels in places like this. They were delusional; just like I was now.

      A guy in a green smock leaned over and shone something into my eyes. ‘You’ve been in an accident, mate.’

      Now there’s a surprise.

      My head and back were on fire. I tried to move my feet and legs, but couldn’t. With a supreme effort, I managed to raise my head and shoot a glance down my body.

      I was on a bed wearing a green gown, in an operating theatre with a lamp suspended over me. It was pushed up and switched off. Maybe they’d already given up on me…

      A six-inch square rubber block was strapped tightly to my belly. The strap had some kind of winch attached to it. It was fucking killing me.

      At least I now knew why I was paralysed. My wrists and ankles were cuffed to the bed with more straps.

      ‘Can you tell me where the pain is?’ the guy in green asked.

      ‘Everywhere,’ I said. ‘Please, morphine…’

      Someone else approached the bed, a stethoscope around his neck. They looked at each other, then at me. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us where it hurts most?’

      He injected my right arm with a clear liquid from a big syringe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pain relief.

      I screamed.

      ‘My back is killing me.’

      ‘Where specifically?’

      ‘The small of my back. Please. You’ve got to give me something for the pain. I’m begging you—’

      He cranked the handle several notches. The clicks were like machine-gun fire. I screamed again.

      ‘I’m sorry, Corporal Macy, really I am.’

      Like fuck, I thought, as another wave of pain crashed through me.

      The lights went out again.

      My torso sprang upwards as soon as they took the tension off the strap. They lifted me onto another bed and finally relieved some of the pain.

      They’d had to pump X-ray dye into my arm to identify the source of my internal bleeding. Then they’d squeezed the blood out of my kidneys. When they released the pressure, the blood had seeped back into them, the rupture clotted and my life had been saved.

      ‘Think of your internal organs as being connected together by pipes.’ The junior doctor’s bloodshot blue eyes were set in a broad, unsmiling face. ‘When you get hit as hard as you did, all your organs get thrown around and the pipes connecting them detach. Then you bleed internally and the bleeding can’t be stemmed. You die from a loss of circulating body fluid. We think you were hit at about 50 mph, a lot faster than is considered survivable. Fortunately, your stomach muscles are so strong and your body so fit that the impact did not rearrange your internal organs as it would have for most people, so all your pipes remained miraculously connected. The force of the collision did, however, rupture your kidneys and damage a number of other organs. Your heart arrested as it fought to keep you alive. You arrested twice, in fact.’

      He smiled. ‘You’re a very lucky man. The surgeon couldn’t operate and didn’t give you more than a 20 per cent chance of pulling through. Thank God you’ve been keeping yourself fit, Corporal Macy. By rights you should be dead.’

      Funny what you dream about when you’re on the point of checking out. Being pursued by a drone across a military firing range must have been on my mind because we’d recently done antiaircraft drills at Larkhill.

      ‘What hit me?’

      ‘You don’t remember?’

      I’d have shaken my head if I wasn’t in so much pain.

      He told me that a number of witnesses had come forward. I’d been cycling along Queen’s Avenue, close to the barracks. It was dark and it had been raining.

      Slowly, it came back to me. I remembered the orange glow of the street lamps and their reflection in the puddles as I’d held my bike’s front wheel between the yellow lines at the edge of the road. I’d followed the same routine for several weeks: two hours in low gear at full pelt with a bin-bag under my clothes to raise my temperature and make me sweat. After that, I’d get off the bike and go for a long run.

      I’d been getting myself fit for SAS Selection.

      Something had hit my right handlebar; I remembered the bang. I’d looked up and seen a Volvo. It had overtaken too close and clipped me with its wing mirror. I’d struggled for balance and my wheel had clipped the kerb and I’d careered into the oncoming lane.

      I remembered headlights very bright in my face, the world turning upside down and then something colliding with me…

      The rest was filled in by the policeman who came to take my RTA victim’s statement.

      When the front wheel of my bike locked at ninety degrees I’d gone over the handlebars and been hit by a car going too fast in the opposite direction. I was totally inverted when it ploughed into me, its radiator grille striking me in the small of the back. My head went under the bumper and my feet went through the windscreen. The driver had slammed on the brakes but not quickly enough to prevent him ploughing over my shoulder. No wonder I was a complete fucking mess.

      I finally summoned the courage to ask the doctors the only question that mattered. SAS Selection. What were my chances?

      A big fat zero, as it turned out. They told me I’d been lucky not to be invalided СКАЧАТЬ