Darkness at Dawn (38 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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He didn’t talk and neither did she. What was there to say? They’d either make it or . . . they wouldn’t.
It had to be said. Lucy waited until she felt her voice wouldn’t betray her. She pulled away, looked him straight in the eyes.
“Mike, if—” She coughed to loosen her throat. “If we don’t make it. If we’re still over the Atlantic after twenty-four hours, you’re . . . you’re going to have to contain me, or I’ll infect everyone on the flight, including you.” She met his eyes. “Please don’t let that happen. Don’t make me hurt other people. Please. I couldn’t stand it. Have me put in an airtight container. Tell them to onload something in Mumbai that will contain . . . what’s in me until you can get my body to Atlanta. But first—take care of me. Please take care of me . . . before I get sick.”
She knew perfectly well what she was asking. If it became clear they wouldn’t get to an operating theater in time, she was asking him to kill her and seal her body up.
“Please,” she whispered, voice shaking. “Don’t let me die that death and don’t let me infect anyone.” Her entire body was shaking now. She didn’t want to die. And she especially didn’t want to die vomiting her internal organs, knowing she was going to infect everyone on the flight, including Mike. “Please promise.”
He met her eyes, dark pools of stillness in the vehicle. He understood. “Please,” she said again, a broken record, because there was nothing else to say.
“I promise.” The words were wrenched out of him. Tears welled from her eyes. It would hurt him, maybe break him; she knew enough of him to understand that. But he’d do it.
She could count on him.
She swiped at her cheeks. “Thank you.” He’d make sure she had a swift death and that as far as possible she wouldn’t infect anyone. It made the whole thing somehow easier to bear.
“So everything better go smooth as fucking cream,” he said savagely, “or I’ll rip someone a new one.”
Lucy gave a half laugh and burrowed her face in his shoulder, inhaling the strong scent of man, knowing her pheromones were mating with his.
GODDAMN!
 
He’d promised and he’d stick to his promise. They should make it, but if there was one thing Mike knew down to his bones, it was that Mr. Murphy loved fucking with people.
So they might not make it. Lucy might not make it.
She’d asked him to help her die with dignity instead of like an animal, on all fours, wretchedly vomiting her life’s blood onto the floor of a plane. He’d promised. He’d . . . take care of her himself before he’d let that happen to her. And it was important to her not to hurt anyone, so he’d take care of that, too.
If anyone had asked him for the very best outcome to the mission, he’d have said—coming back within forty-eight hours having sent vital intel and with a sample of the virus.
Fucking brilliant result, that.
Except, whoops, the sample was in Lucy Merritt’s shoulder.
She must have been thinking that when she pulled the trigger. It had been a brilliant move on her part, except, of course, for the minor detail that it would most probably cost her her life.
Because who was he kidding? The flight plan was shaved down to a nothing margin. Everything had to go perfectly for them to make it into the operating theater, and who’d ever heard of everything going perfectly?
He shifted her a little so that she would be leaning more on him. He wanted to touch as much of her as he possibly could. She was light against him, shivering. Not with cold. He took his gloves off, so he could have the feel of her in his hands, cupping her neck. Her breathing was normal, but her pulse was beating rapidly, like a frightened bird’s.
Jesus. How could he lose her when he’d just found her?
Life couldn’t be that unfair, could it?
Yes, it could. The infantryman with the wife and new baby gets shot in the head on the last day of his last tour in Iraq. The freak accident leaves a healthy young boy a cripple for life. Bad things happened all the time.
One of them wasn’t going to happen here. He wasn’t going to let it. He’d fucking pull the plane over the Atlantic himself with his bare hands to make it go faster. They were going to make it in time, and they would cut that monstrous abomination out of Lucy, and when she was better, he’d take her to Portland and introduce her to the family, and they’d fall in love with her as much as he had, and then they’d get married. Because he was never going to find another woman like this, ever again. Gorgeous and smart and gentle and brave. Beautiful inside and out.
He was not going to lose her. Just not going to happen.
He looked down at her, shiny hair loose around her shoulders, the curve of her pale cheek elegant in the faint light off the dials of the dashboard. She wasn’t sleeping. Her eyes lifted, met his. And it happened again, that electric feeling of both desire and homecoming she roused in him. Unmistakable. Unforgettable. Unrepeatable.
They didn’t speak. Everything that needed to be said right now had already been said, and for everything else they had the rest of their lives. He would be with her every step of the way, however long that would be.
His arm tightened a little around her shoulder, and she leaned more heavily against him, her slight weight utterly right.
Mike glanced out the window. It was still snowing heavily, coming down now in sheets. The vehicle was sturdy, though, made for rough mountain terrain and bad weather. The driver was steady. They were making good time. Mike checked his watch. They’d been traveling for two and a half hours. Another half hour to go and they’d be on the tarmac, waiting to be put on the first of two planes that would carry Lucy back to safety.
We’re going to make it
, Mike was thinking, when a loud crack sounded, a huge black tree fell across the road, and the driver swerved, plowing right through a steep bank of snow, tipping over the edge of a cliff and crashing straight down.
Mike came back to consciousness slowly, the smell of diesel fuel strong and acrid in his nostrils.
His face was crushed against a hard metallic surface. He had a moment of complete disorientation, until he realized he was upside down. In a vehicle, upside down. He frowned, touched his chest. He was bruised, sore, but with no major injuries.
Where was he? His neck was stiff. It hurt to turn his head, so he did it slowly. In a vehicle. Darkness. Snow. Two bright yellow cones of light with snow falling through them. Silence, except for a metallic ticking noise.
Two men in the front seats, necks at an unusual angle. Softness against his side.
Cold.
His mind was sluggish, making its way through these clues slowly, one by one, trying to add everything up.
Suddenly, reality snapped back into focus.
The army vehicle that was carrying them to Goempa—that was the first stage of getting Lucy to safety—had crashed and fallen off the road. How far had they fallen?
There was no way to tell. Outside the bright cones of light of the vehicle, visibility was about five feet and all it showed was snow and the bole of the huge fir tree that had stopped their slide down a steep slope. A side window had shattered. Snow was piling in, hissing against the still-warm surfaces of the interior of the vehicle. He heard a soft groan at his side and the static in his head disappeared.
Lucy.
He turned to her, pulled her into his arms. There was only the faint backwash of the headlights. He could barely make out her features, but he could see she was paper white.
The snow was coming in too thickly through the smashed window. Lucy’s entire side was wet. So were his hands. He looked down at his hands, covered in a black liquid, and his heart nearly stopped in his chest.
Blood. His hands were covered in blood. Lucy’s blood.
“Lucy!” He touched her wildly, searching, searching . . .
Lucy lay a hand over his and slowly turned her face to him. “Here.” Her voice was low, weak. She brought his hand to her lower right side and he could feel it. A laceration. Deep, still bleeding.
Oh, God.
Mike scrabbled around for something to use as a pressure bandage. He didn’t dare use their clothes because it was clear that they’d have to find their way back up to the road and walk. They needed all the warmth they could get.
But the driver and the other soldier up front weren’t going to need their clothes. He leaned over the seats, wrestled the heavy jacket off the guy riding shotgun, ripped off a sleeve and pressed it over Lucy’s wound. She sucked in her breath sharply but other than that made no noise.
“The men?” Her voice was weaker than before.
“Dead.” There was no time to mince words. “Keep that pressed to the wound.”
His cell phone was pure static. He called again and again and finally got a weak signal. “Captain Shafer. Dr Merritt and I were on our way to Goempa when our vehicle crashed. Status, over.”
It took three tries, but finally he received an answer. The static almost completely overrode the voice, but he knew he was lucky to be able to communicate at all. Normally, comms went down in snowstorms. They’d obviously given him top-of-the-line gear.
The Greyhound was still on its way, an hour and a half from landing. Mike made a quick calculation. They were almost there—only another ten miles to go, but only one way to do it.
“Coming with Dr. Merritt on foot to exfil point,” he reported. In decent weather, alone, he could have run the ten miles in an hour, easy. He’d done it before. But carrying a wounded Lucy in a snowstorm . . . “Tell the pilots to wait for us.”
“—approaching exfil point. Advise—”
“What?” The signal was degrading. “Repeat, over.”
“Storm system moving south, advise speed, Greyhound cannot take off in strong winds, over.”
Mike’s eyes met Lucy’s.
“Roger that. Tell aircrew we’re coming as fast as we can, over.”
“Mike,” Lucy whispered, putting her bloody hand over his. “It’s okay—”
He didn’t want to hear this bullshit. He knew what she wanted to say. To let her die here.
Bullshit,
bullshit!
He talked right over her, voice loud. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We slid down a cliff. I don’t know how far, and we don’t have time for me to reconnoiter. I’m going to strap you to my back with these guy’s belts and we’re just gonna climb like we did in the Palace. No problem.” He kept talking as he reached over the seats again and stripped off the driver’s jacket, his gloves and his heavy-duty fur-lined hat.
Sorry, guys
, he thought.
But you don’t need this stuff anymore and Lucy does.
Mike clambered out of the vehicle and rummaged in the back to see what he could raid. A big flashlight. A chemical flare. Two canteens of water. Rope. He used the flashlight to check every corner of the back of the vehicle, but that was it.
What he really needed was mountaineering gear—crampons, ice axe, ice screws—to climb that cliff, but there was nothing.
No time to waste on wishing for equipment that wasn’t there.
Mike gently pulled Lucy out of the vehicle. She was trembling, from shock and blood loss. He checked the pressure bandage, which was already almost soaked through with blood. Shit.
He kept his face blank as he made her don the other coat and put the fur-lined hat over her head, pulling the ear flaps down. “There,” he said, keeping his tone light. “You look gorgeous. The latest fashion. The Abominable Snowlady look.”
Her hand in his shook. Her legs wouldn’t carry her much longer, but she raised her head and sketched a smile for him. It nearly broke his heart.
She was twenty-two and a half hours from dying, she was grievously wounded, they were in a snowstorm, and he didn’t hear a word of complaint from her.
Mike lifted Lucy’s chin on the edge of his gloved hand and looked into her eyes, blue gray and beautiful, full of pain.
“We’re going to make it,” he told her quietly. “I don’t care what it takes, we’re going to make it. I am not going to lose you.”
He bent down and kissed her, feeling her warm breath. When he lifted his mouth, he saw tears in her eyes.
“Don’t, honey,” he whispered. “They’ll freeze on your face.”
“No.” She blinked them back. “No tears, I promise.”
And he understood what she was saying. She might die, but she wouldn’t cry. His heart gave a hard squeeze in his chest.
He turned his back and kneeled. “Put the rope around your back then hand the ends to me. When I stand up, put your arms around my neck and your legs around my waist.” He tied the ends of the rope and stood up. She weighed as much as the rucksacks he and his men sometimes had to carry.
The temperature had fallen, or else the cold was starting to seep in. He wanted to shiver, but didn’t. He needed for Lucy to have utter faith in him.
He looked up at the sky for a moment. It looked as if it were only a few feet above his head. Strong mountain winds made the snow swirl madly, at times making it snow up. He switched on the powerful flashlight that had belonged to the soldiers, angling it up. The light disappeared into the mist, revealing nothing. He couldn’t even get a handle on what his field of vision was.

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