Читать книгу From Good Guy To Groom - Tracy Madison - Страница 8

Prologue

Chaos. Panic. Screams of terror.

Huffing short, heavy breaths, Andrea Caputo used her hands as leverage to push herself across the hard, cold floor, trying to get out of the line of fire. How many others had been shot? She didn’t know, could barely see—let alone think—due to the pain exploding throughout her entire right leg. One bullet to the femur, she guessed, and one to the tibia.

Both bones were likely shattered, and, due to the amount of blood, one of those bullets had hit an artery. Which meant she was in even more trouble.

If she made it through this moment of pure hell, her future would include several surgeries, a long recovery and months, if not years, of physical therapy. And Lord, she’d take it all. Happily. If only she survived long enough to get there. Please let me survive.

Okay. Okay. In order to survive, she had to get out of the damn hallway and into the closest trauma room, where she’d call 911. Chances were high that someone had already made the call, but what if everyone else thought the same and help wasn’t on the way?

The madman with the gun would continue to shoot his way through the trauma center until doctors and nurses and patients alike were dead. Unfair, maybe, to characterize an out-of-his-mind bereaved husband who blamed the hospital for his wife’s death and was now hell-bent on retribution as a madman, but with the blood, bedlam and horror engulfing the ER, the title fit.

Another booming shot. Another scream.

Not right. This wasn’t right. Juliana Memorial Hospital was, at its happiest, a place for healing and miracles, and, at its saddest, where people said goodbye to their loved ones. As a trauma nurse, Andi had experienced hectic shifts, slow shifts, heartbreaking moments and peaceful ones. After five years, she’d thought she’d seen it all. But this...this was a battlefield.

Why couldn’t she move faster? Focusing on the trauma room to her right, Andi fought against the dizziness and the fear that consumed her, and pulled together every ounce of strength she could to breach the few feet that lay between her and what she hoped would prove to be safe ground.

Please, please let this stop.

Now in the otherwise empty room, Andi reached for the bottom of the privacy curtain and yanked hard, sliding it about halfway across the bar before her strength evaporated. Good enough. It would have to be good enough. She didn’t have much left in her.

She fumbled for her phone, hit 911 and Send, and tried not to think of all the people around her who were hurt—possibly worse than she was—or dead. Tried not to remember the look on the attending physician’s face in the seconds before a bullet tore into his stomach.

Andi had not been able to help.

She’d tried. Her training and instinct had overtaken her shock and her fear, and she’d rushed toward the fallen doctor—her friend—but she’d gone down just as fast as he had, when the gunman turned on her and fired twice in quick succession. Andi didn’t know if he’d been aiming for her leg or if she’d simply been moving too fast for a direct hit to her chest or, like Hugh, her stomach. Didn’t matter. What did was that she hadn’t been able to get to Hugh, hadn’t even had the slimmest opportunity to try to save him.

In that group of minutes following her collapse, she didn’t remember anything except the seemingly endless screaming, the blast of gunfire, the excruciating pain that enveloped her leg and, within seconds, had magnified and was pulsating throughout her entire body. Pain like she’d never experienced before. Dizziness, blurred vision and then, for a blessed minute, numbness took over. Believe it or not, that was what got her moving again.

Numb was bad. Numb meant she was losing too much blood.

She’d looked at Hugh, whose prone body was several feet from where she’d been shot, and had made a decision. But what if she’d been wrong in her assessment? What if...? No. Surely, she’d been correct, that his pallor, unmoving chest and closed eyes meant that Hugh had bled out. Fast. Surely, he was already gone. She hadn’t left a dying man alone, had she?

No. She couldn’t think about that possibility now. Couldn’t.

Unreal. No. Surreal. Impossible that Hugh was dead. Impossible that such violence was happening in her hospital. Impossible that she’d been shot, and that others were hurt and dying around her. Impossible that she couldn’t do her job, what she was born to do, and try to help the injured. The most impossible of all, though, were the loud cracks of gunfire that continued to blast through Juliana Memorial Hospital’s trauma center. When would he stop?

When would someone stop him?

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” The voice, solid and sure and offering hope, slipped into the dense fog of Andi’s fear, her panic and disbelief.

“My name is Andrea Caputo and I’m a nurse at Juliana Memorial Hospital,” she said in as crisp and clear a manner as possible. “There is a gunman in the emergency room. He’s—” she cringed and gasped when the sound of another shot pierced her eardrums “—the widower of a patient we lost yesterday, and...and...people are hurt. People are dying. Send help.”

“Help is already there,” the female voice said. “Are you hurt?”

“I am. I think an artery was hit by...by the bullet, but if I can stanch the bleeding, I should be... I...I need to...to—” Words, thoughts...everything trailed off as black edged into Andi’s vision. She blinked, tried to force her brain to function, tried to stay conscious against the promise of painless oblivion. But the pull was just too appealing, and she started to sink.

“Andrea! Talk to me,” the operator said. “What do you need to do to stanch the bleeding? You’re a nurse, right? Walk me through the steps.”

The sharp command served to momentarily bring her to her senses. “I need to... A tourniquet would do it,” she mumbled. “There are supplies here. I just need to...find the strength to get to them. So tired. Just want to close my eyes for a second.”

“I have good news,” the operator said, her voice calm and collected. “The police have everything under control. You’re safe. Where are you in the emergency room, Andrea?”

“Trauma room four. I’m in number four, behind the...um—” what was the word? “—curtain. I’m behind the curtain, on the...um...floor.”

“Stay awake just a little longer, Andrea. Can you do that for me?”

She tried. She really did. But the force of keeping her eyes open and her mind alert proved impossible against the weight of her exhaustion. Soothing warmth surrounded her—a pool of tranquility promising relief—and Andi sighed in surrender and closed her eyes.