Blood. There was blood every-motherfucking-where. In fact, I was going to go out on a limb and say I’d never seen so much blood in one place, in my entire life. That was saying something, as, growing up the way I had, I’d seen some shit. However, I’d never been in open surgery, or watched someone bleed out, nor had I been inside an abattoir on slaughter day. Those were really the only places I figured I’d see more blood.
As it was, one of my best friends in the world had collapsed mid-presentation, and was bleeding from every orifice. It was, without a doubt, the most horrific thing I’d ever seen. Not that shooting and stabbings were fun, nor was getting pulverized in the ring, but in all of those situations, it was at least pretty easy to see what to do to stem the tide—where to apply pressure to make a difference.
When someone was bleeding profusely from their mouth and nose—maybe even their eyes, for God’s sake—it was impossible to know what to do, except for what we were doing, Beck, Dillon, and me, Raine’s best friends, and that was stay with him and do our best to comfort him while we waited for the first responders.
We were crouched on the ground, not giving even the slightest fuck that our slick designer suits—tens of thousands of dollars-worth between the three of us—were being ruined. Not giving a fuck that we were in a very public, very professional situation. Not giving a fuck about anyone, or anything, other than our friend. Everything else was less than irrelevant.
Someone had gotten him into the recovery position. He was breathing—but with great difficulty, as he choked on the gallons of his own blood that were pouring out of him—and conscious, but again, it was hard to tell for how long, if the fucking EMTs didn’t hurry the fuck up and get there.
Beck and Dillon each had one of his hands in theirs—Dillon from behind him, Beck from in front—while I focused on speaking to him, saying whatever I could think of to reassure him, although I didn’t believe much of it myself. How could I? It was hard to imagine that for someone in his condition, the situation was going to end well. I pushed the thought to the very back of my mind.
“Well dayuuuuum, dude!” I exaggerated the words, comedy-style. “I’ve heard of falling on our sword for the creative work, when we really believe in it, but this stunt right here is next level. You’ve really gone above and beyond the call of duty this time.”
I was the last person on the planet who went in for anything even remotely New-Aged—if I couldn’t see it, smell it, feel it, or taste it, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t exist. But, crazy though it was, even to my own mind, something about the gravity of this situation had me believing in the need to think positively, and in the ability of those thoughts to impact the outcome. Like somehow, purely by the power of my mind, I could in some way influence whether Raine made it out of this literal bloodbath okay or not.
“Seriously, you’ve really outdone yourself. But why am I not surprised? I mean, it’s so like you to do something extra like this, just trying to enhance your ‘living legend’ status in the industry, and ensure that no other creative director could possibly live up to your level of dedication to the job. Asshole.”
Dillon and Beck joined in the laughter, but, like mine, their hearts weren’t in it. I guessed we were all too terrified to indulge in the usual banter that was standard between the four of us under normal circumstances. Then again, those were certainly not normal circumstances.
Maybe what was really at play was guilt, and trailer loads of it. We’d known for months that something was going on with Raine. Fucking months, though we hadn’t been one hundred percent certain what.
We’d been aware that he’d been drinking heavily, and hitting the nose candy excessively, even by his extremely lax standards. And then there was the hot mess of a situation with the girl he seemed to be into, which wasn’t helping matters.
We’d been close to staging an intervention a few times, before we’d finally stepped in and said something today, but every time something would get in the way—client meetings, production work on the biggest campaign of any of our careers,