I opened my eyes, and saw that it was Cutter who was standing in front of me. Beautiful, kind Cutter. Not Alex. Not Tank. And certainly not Max, whom I knew had been ripped away from us—along with the pilots and Amy—when lightning struck our plane and disaster struck. The very thought that five people had died before we crashed was unfathomable to me. I still could see the front of the plane breaking apart and swirling away from me as if it was being tossed aside.
As if it didn’t matter.
“Where is Alex?”
“Outside.”
“Is he alive?”
“There are complications.”
My eyes widened when I heard those words. “What complications?”
“Tank is dealing with them now.”
“What does that mean?”
“Jennifer, you need to listen to me—please. We need you get you off this plane now.”
I looked around me, and saw in the haze, a holocaust of wreckage. I didn’t want to ask just how bad things were because I was afraid to know. I was scared to death to know. Had anyone else died? If they had, I couldn’t bear the thought.
Still, there was a part of me that needed to know. “Where is Lisa?” I asked.
“Tank’s already taken her outside.”
“Is she alive?”
“I’m not sure. We just hit the ground, Jennifer. I know you’re shaken and groggy from the bump on your head—and I know that you’re concerned—but I need you to stop asking questions. I have to get to Blackwell and Alexa before it’s too late. And there are items on this plane that Tank and I need to retrieve before the whole thing blows, which could happen at any moment. I need you to help me. Will you help me? Yes? Good. Take my arm. That’s right. Now I’m going to pick you up. See—that wasn’t so bad, was it? Let me get you outside and safely away from the plane.”
I let him scoop me into his arms and lift me—which hurt so much, I felt my stomach cramp again. “I’m losing my child.”
“If you’re carrying a child, you need to know that I’m a trained medic. So is Tank. To the best of our abilities, we can find out if you’re still pregnant—but later.”
“Where are we?”
“I have no idea. We’re on an island of some sort. Come on. Hold tight. That’s right—good. We’re going through the front of the plane.”
“What’s that sound I’m hearing?”
“The engine. It’s malfunctioning. It’s winding up—and heating up. Soon it will blow. I need to get you outside so I can come back for Blackwell and Alexa before it’s too late.”
“Take them first.”
“Not happening. Protocol is that you come straight after Alex. Tank took Lisa, but we both know why. They’re engaged.”
When we passed Blackwell and Alexa, I saw that each were bloodied and bruised, either unconscious or dead.
“Barbara!” I said as we passed her. “Alexa!”
Neither answered. Neither even moved.
“Good God,” I said. “They’re covered in blood. You have to save them.”
“I plan to. Now listen to me,” he said in my ear as we approached the ruined front part of the plane. “It’s raining hard outside. But there is cover just beyond the beach in the jungle. I’ll place you next to Alex and Lisa, and then Tank and I will handle the rest. I need you to be calm now. I need you to do as I say. We can’t lose the others, and we can’t lose whatever supplies we can salvage before the plane becomes a tinder box.”
My stomach was still cramping, but I fought through the pain as best I could. “Understood,” I said.
“Just hold onto me.”
And I did. We went toward the plane’s ruined open mouth, which greeted me with a set of menacing steel teeth as we passed through it, and then Cutter jumped down onto the ground with me in his arms.
I felt a jolt, and then, through the fog that had overtaken me, I became aware that I was being hurried through rough weather and into a tropical forest just beyond the beach. And that’s where I found Alex and Lisa.
With his shirt off for reasons I couldn’t understand, Tank was beside Alex, administering CPR. He slammed his balled fists against Alex’s chest, and said, “Come on, Alex!”
Daniella was kneeling beside Lisa, talking closely into her ear and rubbing her shoulders, arms, and legs.
“Don’t die on me,” she said. “Please don’t die. Lisa, I need you to hear me. Listen to my voice. Come back to me!”
In a daze, I looked over at Lisa, whose left hand seemed to lift before falling again. She was coming in and out of consciousness, but she was alive. I wanted to go to her, but I had no strength to do so. I felt weighted down and heavy. Useless. And so I just lay there on the sand, unable to move as I turned to watch Tank try to bring my husband back to life.
“Breathe!” he commanded.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cutter run away from me toward the plane.
“Breathe!” Tank said again.
But Alex just lay there, nearly as pale as Tank’s white button-front shirt, which was soaked from the rain and wrapped loosely around Alex’s neck. Why was it there? Why was it covered in blood? And then I remembered. In the crash, something had slashed Alex’s throat. He’d been bleeding heavily before I blacked out. At some point, his heart must have stopped. Had he lost that much blood? He must have.
The fear of losing him gave me the shot of adrenaline I needed.
With an effort, I crawled toward them. The pain I felt was excruciating, but I pressed through it, determined to be at my husband’s side and to help bring him back to us. I watched as Tank held Alex’s nose, pressed his mouth over Alex’s mouth, exhaled a sharp breath of air, and then went back to pressing on Alex’s chest. As I grew closer, Tank’s voice was almost a bark.
“Jennifer, stay back.”
“Let me talk to him,” I said. “Let him hear my voice. He needs to hear me now. He needs to know that I’m alive, and that there’s something to fight for.”
While he pumped his fists against my husband’s chest, Tank looked fleetingly at me. “You need to stay out of my way if you want him to live.”
“Is he breathing?”
“Not yet.”
“Alex!” I shouted next to his ear. “It’s Jennifer! It’s your wife! Please fight for us! Please fight for yourself and our child!”
At the mention of a child, Tank’s eyes flicked up in surprise toward mine before he continued with his work.
Watching Alex lie there as Tank struggled to bring him back to life was too much for me to absorb—I wanted to be strong, but instead I started to sob. “I can’t do this without you,” I said to him. “I love you so much. You can’t go now. Now isn’t the time. Let go of whatever’s holding you back. Step away from the light like I did. It’s possible. I’m here to tell you that it’s possible. And that I love you. I am fighting for you and our child. Now do the same for us, Alex! Please! Breathe for us for Christ’s sake!”
Behind me, there was a sudden rushing of footsteps. I turned and saw that Cutter had just laid Blackwell and Alexa down on the ground. He did so with such ease, that it was as if they were as weightless as rag dolls. He must have carried each of them on either one of his shoulders. I looked over at the destroyed plane, and saw that it was billowing massive clouds of black smoke into the rain-slaughtered air. Worse, the engine was starting to make a screaming noise that was loud enough to frighten me.
“Mommy!” Daniella screamed when she spotted them both. “Alexa!”
“I’m going back for supplies,” Cutter said to Tank.
“Don’t—it’s too late. Listen to the engine. It’s going to blow.”
“I’ve got time,” he said.
“No, you don’t! Everything we need to survive is on this island—you know that! Our training has taught us that.”
But Cutter ignored his boss and was gone again, slicing away from us toward the plane through the thrashing rain.
I looked over at Blackwell and Alexa—either they
were dead, or they were alive and unconscious. I didn’t know for sure, but unlike Lisa, neither seemed to be breathing. They were unmoving, and unlike Lisa’s chest, which was rising and falling, I couldn’t tell if theirs were. They seemed completely still to me.
Dead to me.
At that moment, Tank struck Alex’s chest so hard that it caused him to take a sharp breath and lurch upright into a sitting position. His eyes shot open as if he’d been shocked back to life. He sucked in another lungful of air, looked at Tank and me as if he didn’t know who we were, and then slumped back onto the sand.
“Alex!” I said.
He squinted up at Tank, who was looking down quizzically at him, and then he launched into a coughing fit before he finally turned to me. When he saw me, the color rushed back into his face. I reached out for his hand and grasped it in my own.
“Watch him,” Tank said. “He has a gash in his throat. It’s not deep—it didn’t slice through his trachea, which is a blessing. But it did knick an artery, so he needs to try not to cough or the bleeding will only get worse. Keep him calm. If we’re lucky, Cutter will find supplies on the plane that will fight an infection should he get one. Cutter knows where everything is, so let’s hope for all of our sakes that he returns before the plane blows.” He stood up. “Let me tend to Blackwell and Alexa. Let me see if they’re all right.”
“Tank,” I said. “Listen to the engine.”
“I told Cutter not to go, but he made his choice. For all of us, let’s hope it was a wise one.”
And with that, he hurried to help Blackwell and Alexa, neither of whom had yet to move.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Alex,” I said as I moved closer to him. “Can you hear me? Can you talk?”
His hand squeezed around mine, but he didn’t speak. Could he hear me clearly? His eyes were open and blinking up at the clutch of palm trees shaking in the wind above us. His skin and his clothes were soaked, and it appeared to me that the blood stain at his throat was spreading through Tank’s shirt, which worried me to no end.
“In fact, don’t speak,” I said. “You have a gash at your throat.”
“I’m here,” he said in a voice that was so rough, I didn’t recognize it. “But I don’t know for how much longer. I love you, Jennifer. I’m so sorry.”
“You can come through this. Do you hear me? You can beat this.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Then don’t. Not if you love me. Don’t you dare die on me.”
He took a breath and closed his eyes. “Then I won’t. I’ll fight.”
“That’s what I want to hear.”
“Our baby,” he said. “Did we lose it?”
The question cut through me like a blade held long over a searing fire. I wasn’t sure whether I’d miscarried, but in my heart, I felt that I might have, and it devastated me.
Still, right now, I needed to give this man hope, so I didn’t mention the severe cramping I’d experienced after the crash, and was still feeling now to a lesser degree. “We need to hope for the best,” I said. “We need to pray for our child. We need to be well and healthy to protect it. So, no more talking. We need to conserve our strength. Tank is helping Barbara and Alexa now. Cutter is trying to get whatever supplies he can off the plane in case it explodes. That’s all you need to know. There is a black box on that plane that will save us. It’s sending out signals right now letting people know that we’ve crashed, and where we’ve crashed. You know that. Help is on the way. So rest. Not another word.”
Not that one was coming. With his hand still in mine, Alex drifted off—but he wasn’t gone. I could feel his pulse beating in my palm. I leaned over, kissed him on the lips, told him that I loved him, and then sat up and took in my surroundings.
It was daytime, but with the storm raging, the sky was dim with the hail of rain sweeping across the beach in front of me. The ocean was to my right. The plane was to my left, a smashed shell of its former self. I could see the long, deep rut in the sand where we’d crashed, which led straight to the jungle that had stopped our momentum. Though we were sheltered from the worst of the rain, a good deal of it was still beating down on us, but at least it was warm. I lifted a hand to my eyes and looked at the tail end of the plane, which had lost its right wing just at the edge of the beach. The left wing was intact, but the engine was still active, smoking, and sending its high-pitched whine like a curse of dread into the air.
I prayed for Cutter at that moment. I shut my eyes tight and prayed to God that he would leave the plane unharmed and come back to us.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Daniella asked. “What’s going to happen to Mom? To Alexa?”
She was farther off to my right, just beyond Alex, and when I turned to her, I saw that she was cradling Lisa’s head in her lap.
“How is she?” I asked.
“She’s breathing. I think she’ll be OK. She stirred a moment ago. But what about Mom and Alexa? They aren’t moving, Jennifer. Tank has been working on them for five minutes now. Why aren’t they awake?”
“All we can do is pray that they’ll make it, Daniella. We hit the ground hard. I saw something strike your mother’s head when we were going down, so she might just be unconscious. So pray with me. Pray that somehow all of us escape this. Tank is doing his best. He’s trained for just this sort of situation. Are you all right?”
“My head hurts.”
“How is your vision?”
“As clear as the weather.”
Her sarcasm alone told me all I needed to know about Daniella. She was one of the lucky ones. For now, at least, she was going to live. I looked over at Tank, who was kneeling between Blackwell and Alexa. With his shirt off, his back was bright and gleaming in the rain. He didn’t appear to be doing anything to help them, which gave me a start.
“Are they all right?” I asked him.
Before he could answer, there was a rushing sound in the jungle behind us. Immediately, Tank stood and faced the sound.
“What the fuck was that?” Daniella said.
“Quiet,” Tank whispered. He looked around him, found a heavy branch next to Alexa, and picked it up with one hand. It must have been four-feet-long, and yet he did it with such ease, it was as if it weighed nothing. With haste, he stripped away the smaller twigs as if they were matchsticks, quickly whittling the larger branch down into something that resembled a club. Or a massive baseball bat.
A weapon…
He stood completely still and listened over the piercing sounds coming from the plane’s engine to what the jungle had to say to us. The look on his face was focused. Intense. It looked as if he was preparing himself for a fight. What in the hell was near us? Were there people on this island? Was it some sort of animal?
My answer came at once when something rumbled in our direction and unleashed one ferocious mother of a squeal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“They’re about fifty feet away,” Tank said to us quietly. “Do nothing. Don’t move. Don’t do anything threatening. If we have to, I’ll choose that moment. We’re out in the open. That’s on our side. When they show themselves to us, they won’t feel cornered. They might just be curious.”
“Who are ‘they’?” Daniella asked.
“Wild boars. There are several of them. Probably a mother and a few juveniles who were feeding near here when we crashed. There’s a good chance an adult male also is with them, but they are shy. The mother is a different story—she’ll fight if she has to. Worse, the young ones will be more aggressive than her because they don’t know any better. They heard us land, they’ve caught whiff of our scent, and now they want to know what they’re dealing with. The question is whether they’re hungry. What you need to know is that they have poor eyesight, which isn’t good for us.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, until they’re close to us, they won’t know what or whom they’re up against. I need all of you to be aware that their bite can be dead
ly. If they feel threatened, they will raise their hackles, which is a good indication that they’re about to charge.”
Alexa started to moan.
“Alexa,” I said as quietly as I could. “She’s alive.”
“And about to give us away,” Daniella said.
With deftness I’d never seen in him before, Tank scooted down next to Alexa, gently shook her by the shoulder, and made eye contact with her. He said something in her ear before he stood again, this time with his finger to his lips. I looked around for Cutter and saw that he had left the plane and was moving boxes of supplies far away from it onto the beach. He had no idea what was happening to us now, and I wasn’t about to call out to him because it would just attract those animals to us. Tank could handle this. I watched Cutter drop off another bundle before running back to the plane again, hoping in my heart that he’d stop before it exploded.
If it exploded…
If it didn’t—if the engine just died out—that plane could serve as shelter for us. If it did explode, what would become of us then? It was still early in the day. If it did explode, we’d need to create some sort of cover for ourselves before night fell. And how would we do that in this weather, and with so few of us healthy and able to assist?
“What’s happening?”
It was Lisa—thank God it was Lisa. I felt a thrill and an overwhelming sense of relief when I heard my best friend’s voice. “Tell her to be quiet,” I said to Daniella. “Tell her not to move.”
“She’s out of it.”
“No, she’s coming into it. Tell her to say nothing. Tell her to be still.”
But the jungle wasn’t still. I could hear the boars moving toward us at a quick clip. They were crunching through the wet forest, grunting and squealing as they closed the distance between us. My instinct was to protect my husband, so with an effort and despite the pain in my abdomen, I stood in front of him so that I could shield him from any harm that might come his way.
When Tank saw that, he shot me a warning look.
Annihilate Me 2: Omnibus (Complete Vols. 1-3, Annihilate Me 2) Page 22