Читать книгу Her Last Defense - Vickie Taylor - Страница 9

Clint would rather have stuck his arm in a rattlesnake nest than deal with Dr. Attois now. In his years as a Texas State Trooper, and later as a Ranger, he’d seen a lot of victims, with their wide, shocked pupils and pale faces. He’d learned that doling out sympathy wasn’t the way to help them—at least it wasn’t his way. He could call in victims’ advocates and social workers and counselors for that. The best thing he could do for them was give them justice.

But in an accident, there was no justice to be given, no righteous punishment to be meted, and out here, there were no counselors to call. Whatever had to be done was up to him to do.

She sat on the trunk of a fallen cottonwood, her head bowed. The wet trails scrolling down her cheeks made his breath hitch, his throat close. It made him want to reach out and dry her tears, but he couldn’t touch her, not without risking spreading the virus.

Maybe it was for the best. The last thing he needed was to touch her. No, that wasn’t true. The last thing he needed was to know whether her skin felt as warm and soft and smooth as it looked or not.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She rocked back and forth, her arms hugging her middle. “It’s just—I have a hard time with…the dead.”

“Understandable. You said they were your friends.”

She shook her head, still rocking herself. “No, I have a hard time with all dead people.”

Frowning, Clint squatted down next to her. He spoke as gently as he could manage, but wasn’t sure he pulled it off. It had been a long time since he’d tried to be gentle. “Must have made medical school a bitch.”

Her laugh came out as a hiccup. “I never would have made it through Advanced Pathology if it hadn’t been for the pint of Jack Daniels I kept under my bed. It was the only way I could sleep after…after class.”

Full of surprises, the lady doctor was.

She pulled her lips between her teeth then exhaled slowly. “I haven’t been able to drink whiskey since I graduated.” Her smile trembled then fell. “It tastes like death to me.”

Clint felt the meltdown coming a long second before it happened. The sight of tears clumped in her thick lashes twisted through him like a blade. It took all the grit he could muster to keep his own expression impassive.

A moment later, the tide of grief overwhelmed her. Tears tumbled out, rained to the ground. “I killed David,” she cried. “It’s my fault.”

He shoved his hands, gloves and all, into his pockets to keep them from reaching for her. “You didn’t cause the plane to crash.”

“I caused him to be on it. He was supposed to come home on the commercial flight, with me, the day before. But I broke off the engagement. I gave him his ring back. He decided to ride back on the charter so he wouldn’t have to be around me.”

Clint had once served a warrant on a drug house that had turned out to be booby-trapped. The doors were wired with explosives, the windows, the cupboards, even the floorboards were rigged, all in an attempt to kill a few cops. Walking through that house hadn’t been nearly as frightening as stumbling through this conversation. He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t good at making people feel better.

“By definition, accidents are random events,” he said, treading carefully and watching her face for some sign of whether he was helping or making matters worse. “You couldn’t have known the plane would go down. Or it could have just as easily been the commercial jet that crashed, and you could have saved his life.”

“At least then it would have just been a plane crash. We wouldn’t be worrying about an ARFIS epidemic.”

“Maybe. Or maybe the plane would have crashed into a school, killed a kid who would have otherwise been president some day. You can’t tear yourself up wondering ‘what if.’ No one knows what the results of their actions will be ahead of time. No one.”

If they could—if he could—he sure wouldn’t have stepped out of his truck in that parking garage six weeks ago and walked right into two gunmen coming off the elevator. He wouldn’t have taken the .38-caliber round in the shoulder that was soon going to change his life forever.

Maybe he wouldn’t have stepped up to the front of the crowd when the CDC team had shown up at the crash site, gotten a close-up look at the wild mane of hair, the warm complexion.

Maybe.

Dr. Attois angled her head to the side, a frown tipping her full lips downward as she studied him curiously. Her eyes were the color of chicory coffee, dark and rich. And they were looking at him as if she was seeing a different man than she’d seen the moment before.

Or as if she’d seen more of him than before. The shield he wore over his emotions was slipping. He stood before it came crashing down.

She blinked as if his movement had woken her. The color came back to her cheeks. “I have to find him.”

He watched as she stood and pulled on her helmet. “What? Now?”

“I can’t leave him out there.”

“There’s nothing you can do for him.”

“I can bring him home! Give him a decent burial, while there’s still enough to bury. Before the scavengers…” Her face twisted.

“What about the monkey?”

“Most likely he was killed in the crash. My team is searching the wreckage again for his remains.”

“The virus?”

She held out her arms. “I’m protected, remember?”

“That suit’ll be shredded about thirty seconds after you leave this clearing. You ever heard of saw briar? Mesquite thorns? Spear grass? These woods are full of them.”

She dropped her arms to her sides, took a deep rasping breath through her respirator. “Even if the macaque did survive the crash, which I doubt, it was infected nearly twenty-four hours ago. With its smaller body mass, ARFIS would overwhelm its system much more quickly than it would a human. One way or another, the monkey is dead or soon will be. The virus won’t be a threat.”

Biting her lower lip, she checked the seals on her wrists and ankles.

He took in her woman-on-a-mission expression and sighed. “At least wait until tomorrow morning. Once the blood tests are done and we’re sure no one’s sick, we can send the men out in search teams. They may not be big-city doctors, but they know these woods and they’re good people. They’ll want to help.”

“That’s a good idea. If I haven’t found David and the others by then, we’ll do that.”

He could tell from her tone that she was only half listening to him. She turned to walk away.

“Damn it,” he called to her back, “it’s a big forest out there. You can’t just go traipsing around it alone.”

She laughed, but there was nothing joyous in the sound. “I was raised in the bayou. My sisters and I played so far out in the bogs even the gators couldn’t find us. You think I’m afraid of a little walk in the woods?”

As she spoke, she hit the edge of the tree line—and immediately stumbled over a vine that caught her ankle. She caught herself on the trunk of a pine tree just in time to keep from falling on her face, righted herself and disappeared into the foliage.

Cursing his luck and stubborn women under his breath, Clint counted to ten to give his temper a few seconds to cool. Then he counted to ten again.

Finally under control, he yanked the straps on his face mask tight and clomped after her in his rubber booties. The infected monkey might be dead, but the twenty-two men Clint had helped convince to accept the quarantine in the camp behind him weren’t. Not yet. If they got sick, they were going to need her.

He’d be damned if he’d let anything happen to her before he knew they were okay.

Either there was a rogue elephant stampeding through the woods behind her, or the Ranger had caught up to her. An awkward moment passed between them when he reached her side. Macy tried to say something, but her throat closed around a knot in her esophagus and she couldn’t speak. She flicked him a cautious smile instead.

He must have expected her to be angry at his intrusion, because his eyes rounded in surprise for a moment before the steel curtain he hid behind so often slammed down.

The truth was, she was glad for his company. Under the canopy of trees, the forest felt like a morgue. The temperature was several degrees cooler. Leaves muffled their footsteps. The critters that should have been scuttling around were quiet, as if in deference to the dead.

She didn’t want to be alone with the dead again.

The going was rough, as Ranger Hayes had said it would be. At times the underbrush grew in impenetrable walls. The saw-grass vines seemed alive, reaching out to snag her arms and ankles. Three-inch mesquite thorns sharp enough to puncture the sole of a boot and thick enough to impale a girl to the bone made every step over a broken limb an adventure.

They walked wordlessly until, after nearly an hour, she sat on a mossy boulder near a thin stream to catch her breath.

The Ranger loomed over her, swiveled his head. Sunlight angled through the boughs overhead in sharp beams.

“Gonna be dark before long,” he said.

Out of habit she checked the seals between her suit and gloves. “Couple of hours.”

“We should head back.”

“In a while.”

His forehead furrowed over his face mask. “You do know which way is back, don’t you?”

“Approximately six-tenths of a mile on a heading of ninety-four degrees.”

His scowl deepened. “What’re you, a Girl Scout leader wannabe?”

He looked so perplexed that when she smiled this time, it almost felt genuine. She opened her fanny pack, pulled out her Garmin, checked the heading to the waypoint she’d made at base, and pointed. “That way.”

He leaned over her. “GPS?”

“Part of the standard CDC field pack.” She patted the zippered pouch sewn into the waist of her suit. “GPS, satellite phone, two-way text pager. Just because I’m not from the big city doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate modern technology.”

“All right, Techno-Girl. You know where we came from. But do you have any idea where you’re going?”

She stood, walked about fifteen feet to her left where there was a break in the trees and pointed up and to the right. “There?”

He followed her outstretched hand with his gaze. Some distance away, six large, black birds glided above the trees. Her stomach plummeted with each heavy swoop of their wings. “Buzzards? You’re chasing buzzards?”

“They’re feeding,” she said, trying not to picture what lay below them.

“It could be anything. A possum, the remains of a deer some hunter left behind.”

“Or one of the men from the plane.”

He took her arm in his hand. “Look, we have to get back. We’ll call the state. They’ve got dogs that can search these woods in a fraction of the time it will take us, and do a hell of a better job at it.”

“We’re almost there.”

When she pulled away from him, he made a sound somewhere between a growl and groan and stepped in front of her, this time holding her in place more firmly. “You don’t have to do this yourself. Do you hear me? You do not need to be the one to find your friends.”

But his words faded in her mind. Her ears were tuned to another sound. A chirping, trilling chatter. A sound that didn’t belong in the quiet woods.

“Shh,” she said.

“What?”

“Listen,” she whispered, and let her eyes fall partway closed to hone in on the direction of the sound. When she opened them again, she pointed over the Ranger’s shoulder. “There.”

He turned, and the color blanched from his skin. His hand gripped her arm with bruising force.

In a tree twenty feet away, a black-and-white ball of fur scampered out a limb and plucked a nut from a twig, gnawed on it, chattered some more and threw its prize to the ground.

“I’m no doc, doc,” the Ranger said in the most un-emotional tone she’d heard from him yet. “But that monkey doesn’t look dead to me.”

No. Not dead.

Not even close.