Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free Page A

punishment, but since one of them was pregnant, the elders decided that their husbands should be tied to the tree instead.’
    ‘Sounds quite civilised to me,’ Shepherd said.
    ‘Better not tell your missus, Jimbo,’ Geordie said. ‘She’ll have you tied to a lamp-post before you can say “knife fight”.’
    ‘It’ll make a change from tying me to the bedposts, anyway.’
    ‘More information than we needed,’ laughed Shepherd.
    Pilgrim pointed to a coffee tree and a tall breadfruit in the heart of the village, casting a deep pool of shade. ‘I need to check in with the alcalde,’ he said. ‘So why don’t you take five?’ He walked over to the alcalde’s office - a hut knocked together from used boxes and planks, with a solitary sheet of rusting corrugated iron nestling amongst its thatch - and almost had to bend double to get through the low door.
    Shepherd and the others took off their bergens and squatted in the shade. The village children surrounded them, a circle of silent faces. Their mothers also stared impassively as they sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands never still, grinding the corn for the day’s tortillas. Pigs and dogs chased each other between the houses, a few chickens pecked listlessly in the dust, and Shepherd saw one chase and eat a dark green scorpion unwise enough to have strayed from the safety of the forest.
    Pilgrim emerged from the hut a few minutes later, accompanied by the alcalde. Like most Mayan men, he was little more than five feet tall and all the SAS men towered above him as Pilgrim introduced them in turn. Just then there were shouts and the children began pointing up the track on the far side of the village.  A Mayan man was approaching, leading a donkey. The lower half of his face was a mask of blood and there were two blood-soaked men draped across the donkey. ‘Jesus,’ Liam said. ‘It looks like a fucking spaghetti western.’
    Geordie had already sprung into action, grabbing his medical kit and using a spray to sterilise his hands. He’d been a patrol medic with the Paras and had joined the SAS partly because he wanted to improve his skills in dealing with battlefield trauma. The two wounded men were lifted from the donkey and laid on split-log benches on the open ground in front of the huts. Geordie spared the man with the bloody face no more than a cursory glance and then began examining the other two, swiftly assessing their wounds.
    Liam and Shepherd ran to help him. Both bodies were riddled with deep cuts and puncture wounds. Geordie began tying off the bleeders, then sutured the muscles and packed the wounds. Shepherd watched him in awe, marvelling at the speed and precision of his work. ‘If I had saline and blood, I could save them,’ Geordie said, still working frantically, ‘but without it, they’ll be lucky to survive; they’ve both lost a lot of blood.’
    ‘Can we not casevac them?’ Shepherd asked Pilgrim.
    Pilgrim shook his head. ‘Can’t be done. For political reasons, civilians can’t be flown in military helicopters, because if they die, there might be accusations and compensation claims. If we had a Landrover we could send him back in that, because there’s no rule against taking them in military vehicles. Apparently it’s all right for them to die in a Landrover but not in a chopper.’
    ‘So we just let them die?’
    ‘No, we do our best to save them, within the constraints under which we operate. It’s just a pity that those constraints are decided by pen-pushers, arse-coverers and staff officers rather than the men on the ground.’
    Geordie had moved on to the second man, whose wounds included an ugly gash on his head, exposing part of the skull. Blood was still pouring from the wound. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ Geordie said. ‘There’s a rich blood supply to the scalp so there’s always plenty of claret from a head wound.’ He mopped up the blood and then tapped the exposed skull gently with a pair of