H10N1 (29 page)

“Just stay put,” Rick told him. Then he crawled toward the windows. He stopped at Sanchez. “How bad are you hurt?”

“I bit my tongue.”

“Can you handle a gun?”

She nodded before laying Mai’s head gently on the floor.

The two of them crawled over near Judith.

“We need to get those lasers turned back on,” Judith said. “So you can either hold down the fort, or make a run upstairs to the conference room.”

That was a no-brainer. Rick wanted Sanchez out of harm’s way as much as possible. The whole trick here seemed to be shooting wildly out the windows so no one would charge the building. “How about we stay here?”

Without a word, Judith dropped to her knees, handed her gun to Sanchez and crawled for the door. She paused to snatch Mai’s PDA from her belt, then moved on.

Devin crouched down next to Rick. “We’ll try and head off the two bitches upstairs. Get Kat, if she’s still alive.”

Rick nodded.

“Once you hear the lasers humming, post yourselves at the doorway.” He paused to make sure he had Rick’s attention. “No one leaves this room.”

“You got that right,” Rick said. He eased up beside the window and shot a couple aimless bullets, just to demonstrate his knowledge of the task. Some douche bag outside fired back.

Sanchez took Judith’s spot, wiping blood from her chin.

“You sure you’re okay?” Rick asked.

She gave him a firm nod, then fired a quick burst from her window.

Counting out seconds, Rick timed how long it might take Devin and Judith to sneak upstairs, get into the conference room and turn on the lasers.

He hadn’t even gotten to sixty when he heard the whine of the laser coming to life. Outside, someone screamed.

“Yeah!” Rick yelled out the window. “Got a little too close, didn’t you?”

With the numbers evened out now, Rick felt a surge of confidence. They’d have these assholes out of there by lunchtime. Seven down, four to go.

Rick imagined Devin and Judith were already making their way down to apartment six. He heard the door bang open. No gunfire. Maybe the Manson twins had nabbed Kat and slipped through the bathroom to the next apartment. Hopefully, either Judith or Devin was standing guard in the hall so the Twisted Sisters didn’t sneak by.

He heard the second door bang. Rick hoped the women didn’t decide to drag Kat out as a hostage. That scenario was a no-brainer for people like Judith and Devin. Kat was a good kid, but negotiation was not in Dev’s vocabulary.

Snapping his fingers, Rick signaled for John to get under the pool table. He held a finger to his lips. If those women got past Devin and Judith, he didn’t want them to know there were still live bodies in the game room.

Then he took a position on the left side of the entryway, where he had a view to the right hallway and the double doors leading out to the garden. Sanchez parked herself on the right and guarded the hallway to the left.

Now it was just a waiting game.

He heard two shots upstairs, then heard Kat’s piercing scream. Footsteps pounded from above. It sounded like someone was heading for the main staircase. Rick stepped out just far enough to get a glimpse. He’d hate to shoot Devin.

It was one of the Manson girls. And she was looking back over her shoulder. More footsteps, thundering in the hallway. Sounded heavy enough to be Devin. Rick raised his gun, waiting for a clear shot on the bitch, when he heard a shot.

But the girl didn’t fall. What the hell? Was Devin slipping? Then Rick felt a pinch in his gut, and his knees just folded. As he went down, he saw the other girl standing at the animal bay door down to his right.

Sanchez swung out from the game room, her semi-automatic spraying bullets. The girl staggered backwards. Rick watched her slam into the goat pen before the door swung shut. Above him, the first girl somersaulted down the stairs and landed in a pile next to him. Her blank eyes stared into his.

It finally dawned on him when Sanchez started ripping at his shirt. He’d been shot. Then he saw Devin clambering down the stairs, two at a time. He was already bitching.

“Didn’t I say, no one leaves the room?”

Judith was right behind Devin, hauling Kat down the stairs. When the kid saw Rick, she started screaming like the teenage girls always do in slasher movies. Judith slapped her face.

John and Devin carted Rick up to sickbay. He kept insisting he could walk, but by the time they laid him out on Sanchez’ examining table, he wasn’t so sure.

Everybody hovered over him, with scrunched up faces.

“Geez.” He waved them away with his hand. “You guys are creeping me out.”

Devin smiled. “He’ll be fine.”

“You need any help?” Judith asked Sanchez.

Sanchez still looked freaked out, which Rick found just a tad alarming. But she said she had things under control. He hoped she did.

“Then we’re heading for the basement,” Devin said. “We’ve gotta get those last two.”

After they left, the adrenaline began to fade, replaced by a searing pain in Rick’s gut. He groped for Sanchez’ hand.

“I don’t feel so good,” he whispered.

He coughed, and saw blood spray on the front of her shirt. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He blinked hard, but they wouldn’t clear. Sanchez was talking to him, but his ears were ringing again, and with that surgical mask over her mouth, he had no chance of reading her lips.

Turning his head to the side, he saw John sitting on the edge of Taeya’s desk. His hands were clasped together and his head was bowed. Was the guy praying? Come on, it wasn’t that bad. The Doc was there. She’d fix him up.

Kat was slumped in the corner, bawling her eyes out.

Rick coughed again. This time warm liquid rushed up his throat. He swallowed it back. It tasted like iron. His eyes rolled in his head like marbles.

He gasped for a breath, but nothing happened. Sanchez’ face was just a blur. Damn it all to hell. He’d finally gotten his shit together, found the perfect woman, and now this?

Reaching for her hand, he squeezed as tight as he could.

“Taeya,” he gasped. “Don’t let me die.”

She spoke again, but all he heard was ‘wah-wah-wah’ like a record on the wrong speed. Then the next thing he knew, she was coming at him with that damn conch shell. Was she going to see if he heard the angels right before he kicked?

Oh, God, it was worse. She was trying to cover his face with it. His mouth. He batted his hands, to knock it away. But he couldn’t. John was holding him down.

Would the angels in the shell suck the life right out of him? He had to get Taeya’s attention. One more thing he had to tell her. He’d been meaning to say it for days now, but the time never felt right. Why had he put it off? She needed to know how much he…

His words got sucked into shell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Taeya flashed a light in Rick’s eyes. He was in shock. His blood pressure dropped so low, he’d become combative, fighting against the anesthesia mask. With John’s help, Taeya had gotten Rick sedated, but the Diprivan she found was expired. How affective would it be?

She inventoried the instruments on the surgical tray again. Why had she thought this sickbay was state-of-the-art? She didn’t have enough clamps or sponges. The blood pressure monitor was a dinky Boltman 216. She located two malleable retractors, but she had no good means of high-volume irrigation and suction. This was going to be like doing triage in the field.

When was the last time she’d actually done a peritoneal lavage? Allapalli in India?

Randall’s team was tracking an E-coli outbreak. One of their colleagues stumbled and fell on a protruding stick. But once Taeya located the puncture and clamped it off, the man was transported to Nagpur where real surgeons performed the closure.

Technically speaking, half of her surgical experience was autopsy.

Taeya’s hand shook. Until she got inside Rick’s abdomen, she had no idea what she might find. A gunshot wound to the belly was one of the worst. Lacerations of the bowel were dangerous, lots of bacteria in fecal matter. From the trajectory of the entrance and exit wounds, she felt sure Rick’s spinal cord was unaffected. But what about his kidneys?

The shock indicated blood loss, so the bullet must have hit at least one vessel. Her first priority was to locate the source of bleeding and clamp it off. She had only two units of ABO universal plasma, and no time to consider possible donors.

“Okay, John.” She took a calming breath and waited for her hands to stop trembling. “Your job is to watch the monitor. Once I get inside, that top number should start going up. If it drops, we’re in big trouble. Keep me apprised of the other numbers as well.”

When John didn’t answer, she looked up. “Can you do this?”

John was in his own state of shock. He’d never expected this kind of gruesome attack. Had he ever seen a gunshot wound up close? The victims in the game room with close-range wounds were particularly disturbing because of the skull fragments and brain tissue. She’d seen John huddled against the wall, his eyes locked on Mai.

Taeya had had her own experiences with killings, but that had been unknown rebel soldiers shooting at their encampment from a dense jungle. When she shot that woman charging at Rick from the animal bay, she’d had a moment of hesitation. How had Rick felt when he shot the blond woman at such close range?

And now Judith and Devin were stalking the last two in the basement. What if one of them managed to slip away? A sick feeling quaked in Taeya’s gut. Had they ambushed Devin and Judith? Were the thugs on their way to sickbay at this very moment?

No time to anguish over that now. Picking up a scalpel, she made a midline incision from Rick’s sternum to below the umbilicus. Best-case scenario, she would close off the bleeding arteries, clamp off seepage from the bowel, and make the necessary repairs.

How was John going to handle all that? Getting the bottled water had been traumatic enough. Devin had meant it when he’d told them to stay put. But sterile water was a necessity.

Taeya had stood guard in the hallway while John and Kat scrambled into the kitchen pantry. She’d never seen Kat move so fast. And once she and John had scurried back into sickbay, their arms laden with bottles, Kat had bent over the sink and wretched.

Now that John was part of Taeya’s surgical team, Kat was their only defense. The color was back in her cheeks, and she’d stopped crying. Sitting at Taeya’s desk, Kat held a gun in both hands, trained on the door.

Working quickly, Taeya divided the peritoneum, bent the retractors, and clamped the tissue open, then began her exploration. The abdominal aorta was undamaged, but there was definitely bleeding. Mesenteric vessels?

“John,” she said softly. “The only way to find the source of bleeding, and to discover Rick’s bowel injuries, is to turn out his intestines.”

“What?”

“I’m going to lift out his intestines and inspect them for injury.”

“Dear God,” he whispered.

She couldn’t afford to lose John to a panic attack. With more confidence than she felt, Taeya explained. “This really is a common procedure. I did my first as an intern. I just don’t want you to freak out.”

His hands shook, but he gave her a nod.

Once she located and secured the bleeding vessel, she examined lengths of the intestines. She counted four tears. Deeper in the cavity, she inspected for damage.

“Good news, John. The kidneys are fine. The ruptures are minimal. I can suture them quickly.”

Without looking up, she called to Kat. “I’m going to need a couple of those water bottles from the hotbox. Don’t come over here. Just hand them to John.”

Kat obviously didn’t want to witness the butchery. She set two bottles on a cart and rolled it over.

Taeya was repairing the innermost rupture when the lights flickered. She glanced up at John. “Tell me they’re not shooting up our power source.”

“I fear that is exactly what is happening. Do not tarry.”

She carefully returned Rick’s intestines to the abdominal cavity. The last three closures could be done from there.

“I’m going to need you to start irrigating the cavity while I work,” she said. “Open one of the bottles of warm water and pour.”

“On your hands?”

“No. Into Rick’s belly.”

Dear God, she was asking so much of people who never should have been exposed to such horrors. Would John and Kat ever get past this?

Warm water washed over her hands. She hoped it was warm enough to keep from shocking Rick’s organs. While John flushed out the cavity, Taeya quickly stitched. But Rick’s cavity was filling too fast. With her toe, she flipped on the switch for the compressor and aimed the suction tube at a pool of water and blood.

“See this, John? Hold it right in this pocket and draw some of the liquid back out. Can you pour and suction at the same time?”

All she got was a feeble nod, but John carried out his tasks.

She was on her last rupture when she heard an explosion. It sounded like shattering glass.

* * *

Alone in sickbay, Taeya slumped at her desk, her head cradled on her arms. Exhaustion seemed to be dulling the pain. But not the raging war in her head.

Where had she gone wrong?

When the power went out, she’d known the odds of a successful completion were drastically reduced. The blood pressure monitor was useless, her lighting was available daylight and a hand-held flashlight. At one point Rick’s heart had stopped. She remembered hearing John sob quietly as she reached into Rick’s chest and massaged the muscle. It had been a desperate last-ditch effort that she hadn’t expected to work.

But it had. She’d gotten his heart going again. She’d even allow a glimmer of optimism to creep in as she closed.

Tears rolled down her arm and onto the desk. There had just been too many variables. Shock from the intestines being out too long. Lavage fluid not warm enough. Was the Diprivan to blame? Too much blood loss?

Someone stroked her head. For an instant, in her semi-conscious state, she imagined it was Rick. Her heart lurched, and she jerked her head up.