Worth Dying For

Huge waves of pain were pulsing out between his eyes, behind his nose, boring straight back into his head, one with every heartbeat, bumping and grinding, lapping out into his skull and bouncing around and then fading and receding just in time to be replaced by the next. Bad pain. But he could fight it. He could fight anything. He had been fighting since he was five years old. If there was nothing to fight, he would fight himself. Not that there had ever been a shortage of targets. He had fought his own battles, and his brother’s. A family responsibility. Not that his brother had been a coward. Far from it. Nor weak. His brother had been big too. But he had been a rational boy. Gentle, even. Always a disadvantage. Someone would start something, and Joe would waste the first precious second thinking,
Why?
Reacher never did that. Never. He used the first precious second landing the first precious blow. Fight, and win. Fight, and win.
    His face hurt like hell. He looked at the pain, and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it.
You against me? Dream on, pal
. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.
    Not beating it.
    It was beating him.
    It was exploding, like bombs on timers, one, two, three. Relentlessly. Everlastingly, with every beat of his heart. It was never going to stop, until his heart stopped. It was insane. In the past he had been wounded with shrapnel and shot in the chest and cut with knives. This was worse. Much worse. This was worse than all of his previous sufferings put together.
    Which made no sense. No sense at all. Something was wrong. He had seen busted noses before. Many times. No fun, but nobody made a gigantic fuss about them. Nobody looked like grenades were going off in his head. Not even Seth Duncan. People got up, maybe spat a little, winced, walked it off.
    He raised his hand to his face. Slowly. He knew it would be like shooting himself in the head. But he had to know. Because something was wrong. He touched his nose. He gasped, loud and sudden, like an explosive curse, pain and fury and disgust.
    The ridge of bone on the front of his nose was broken clean off. It had been driven around under the tight web of skin and cartilage to the side. It was pinned there, like a mountaintop sliced off and reattached to a lower slope.
    It hurt like hell.
    Maybe the Remington’s butt had a metal binding. Brass, or steel. Reinforcement against wear and tear. He hadn’t noticed. He knew he had turned his head at the last split second, as much as he could against the resistance of the sweaty palm clamped on his forehead. He had wanted as much of a side-on impact as he could get. Better than head-on. A head-on impact could drive shards of loose bone into the brain.
    He closed his eyes.
    He opened them again.
    He knew what he had to do.
    He had to reset the break. He knew that. He knew the costs and the benefits. The pain would lessen, and he would end up with a normal-looking nose. Almost. But he would pass out again. No question about that. Touching the injury with agentle fingertip had nearly taken his head off at the neck. Like shooting himself. Fixing it would be like machine-gunning himself.
    He closed his eyes. The pain battered at him. He laid his head gently on the concrete. No point in falling back and cracking his skull as well. He raised his hand. He grasped the knob of bone, finger and thumb. Atom bombs went off in his head. He pushed and pulled.
    No result. The cartilage was clamping too hard. Like a web of miniature elastic straps, holding the damn thing in place. In completely the wrong place. He blinked water out of his eyes and tried again. He pushed and pulled. Thermonuclear devices exploded.
    No result.
    He knew what he had to do. Steady pressure was not working. He had to smack the knob of bone back into place with the heel of his hand. He had to think hard and set it up and be decisive. Like a chiropractor wrestling a spine, jerking suddenly, listening for the sudden click.
    He rehearsed the move. He needed to hit low down on the angle of cheek and nose, with the side of his hand, the lower part, opposite the ball of his thumb, like a karate chop, a semi-glancing blow, upward and sideways and outward. He needed to drive the peak back up the mountainside. It