Rescue

a generation ago in a Saigon bar.
    The impact hurt, enough to distract me from the pain and the smell from my hands. Through it I heard Severn grunt, then crumple and bang elbows and skull off my knees. Leaning forward, straining, I got the hood to the fingertips of my right hand and tugged it off.
    There wasn’t much light, but it still blinded me coming as it did from the fire in the black woodstove, its door open. Severn lay on his left side in front of me, kind of fetal position. The room was about twenty by fifteen, with a couple of cots and a card table and not much else that registered until I found the knife.
    On the floor, between my taped legs.
    If I rocked forward, I could fall forward and get the knife into one hand. Only problem was, I wouldn’t be able to reach the other hand’s tape with it. I started to strain upward with my wrists at the tape, trying to pull the arms of the chair from the seat. But whoever built it did a good job with bolts and glue, because nothing would come.
    Severn groaned but didn’t move.
    Despite the tape at my ankles, I could stand up, maybe, and—
    Severn groaned again, rolling over onto his back.
    I rocked forward and up, crablike, and hopped back toward the wall as fast as I could, crashing into it. The chair’s back splintered behind me, driving one spoke into me, just below the shoulder blade, leaving my wrists taped to the arms but now free of the seat, shards of chair dangling from them like bizarre charms on a bracelet.
    Severn opened his eyes and shook his head, as though to clear it.
    I moved forward, then back again faster, crashing the wall harder and feeling the spoke below my shoulder blade lever out. This time the rest of the chair went, my ankles carrying away parts of the wooden legs, the seat of the chair clattering to the floor behind me.
    That’s when Severn reached toward a rear pocket for what I expected to be a gun.
    I charged him as he came up with it, a black semiautomatic. Swinging my left arm at the muzzle, I knocked a piece of chair against the barrel and away from me as a round went off, the metallic “krang“ deafening in that small enclosure.
    Severn punched me in the groin with his free hand, but he’d already gotten me used to pain, to moving through it. I brought my left knee up to drive into his stomach, but he saw it coming and caught just a glancing blow as he stepped back, trying to get enough away from me to use the gun effectively.
    That’s when I felt one of the dangling shards of chair fill my right hand like a rounded knife, and I lunged with it up and in, under the jaw.
    Severn dropped the gun and went to his knees, the shard buried almost to his spine.
    In the movies, that’s when the bad guy obligingly keels over, dead. Or the camera pans off to another part of the fight scene. But that doesn’t often happen when you actually stab somebody. In real life, it can take some time to die.
    Severn used both hands to yank at the shard. I helped him pull it out, the blood flooding down onto his shirt and frothing as he tried to breathe through it. And blubber through it.
    “You killed me!... Oh, Jesus is my Savior.... Jesus is my Lord!“
    “Severn—“
    “Oh, my... Almighty God... you killed me!... You gone... and killed... me!“
    “Severn, where’s Eddie Haldon?“
    He clasped his hands and raised them. “My Jesus... please... save... me!“
    “Where did you take him?“
    “Jesus... my…“
    Severn began coughing up blood, cups and then pints of it. He seemed to hiccup twice, a strange sound given everything that preceded it, and looked up at me as he collapsed forward onto the floor.
    I began trembling, then shuddering so badly I sat down before I fell down, too.

    There was a lot of time to do little things and think.
    First I used Severn’s knife to cut the tape off my wrists and ankles. Then I found a shaving mirror on a milk crate one of the cots used as a night table. Contorting with it, I could just see the gouge from the chair spoke under my shoulder blade. Painful, but pretty superficial.
    I was almost embarrassed to see the wounds on my hands. The right, the first one Severn did, was red and blistering, but only in a one-inch-square patch. The left one hurt deep, but showed only an inch-long stripe of blackened skin, like a charcoal slash. Effective torture without much visible damage, and I wondered where he’d learned it.
    There was some antiseptic salve in a first-aid kit on a pantry shelf, and I