by S A Gardner
I growled for good measure. “What’re you hollering about? Dispatch said this was a cold situation, to go in at once and you’d be on our tail. And they were right. So save it, let us use our half a brain saving these two and use your single brain cell setting up your crime scene investigation.”
My barrage surged chagrined pink into the officer’s pale face. “First thing we have to do is identify the victims…”
I didn’t let him finish, volleyed him another blow.
“Yeah, sure, delay us and you’ll be identifying them for the death report. We’re outta here, officer, and the one thing you’re doing now is making sure you’re not clutterin’ our way. You can take a look at’em in hospital once we pull’em through.”
I expected him to put his foot down. Searching the victims for IDs now was due process, after all.
But what do you know. He stood aside, let us load our casualties onto stretchers without even taking a good look at them. Seemed he didn’t dream we weren’t the real deal. He should have. Those didn’t make a habit of yelling at police officers. Said a lot about the power of the unexpected. And intimidation. The man must have read my genuine intention to rip him a new hole if he kept me from my job.
In seconds we were securing our casualties in the ambulance.
Once we were secured ourselves, I shouted, “Floor it, Rafael. Head to Good Samaritan Hospital until you’re sure we’re not being followed.” We held on as the ambulance shot forward. Then I shot out orders. “Fadel, you and Sam take the man. Lucia and I will take the woman. Shout out your findings and measures.”
Then we all plunged into the slice of hell that was fighting for another’s life.
It never got easier. Or any less ugly or scary. I shook to the rhythm of choppy vital signs of both victim and savior, my nerves humming to a cadence of dread and fury and helplessness.
And as usual, I ignored it, pushed on with what had to be done. Synchronizing my moves to Lucia’s, I covered the ABC’s, had our patient intubated, oxygenated, hooked to monitors and fluid replacement through many central and peripheral ports.
I was finishing my exam, staggering under the avalanche of critical findings when Sam’s panted report stormed through me with more bad news. “BP 60/20, pulse 190, atrial tachycardia.”
Fadel elaborated, giving specifics of the man’s dismal clinical picture. “Retroperitoneal hemorrhage from possible ruptured spleen. Pulsating liver hematoma. Stony dull left lung field, shifted mediastinum—massive hemothorax, collapsed left lung, severely compromised cardiac and respiratory function—not to mention I don’t know how many fractured ribs and bones. This man has been stomped on within an inch of his life!”
And his condition was a mirror image of my casualty’s. She had the added complication of a depressed cranial fracture.
“She’s entering ventricular tachycardia!” Lucia cried out.
And wanna bet she’d fibrillate at any moment?
I shouted Code Blue protocols, drowning even the engine’s roar. “Biphasic AED.”
I’d need that automatic external defibrillator. It had larger paddles, was more effective, needed less electrical power, caused less damage to the patient. She had enough.
“Gel. Charge to 150 Joules,” I yelled. “Slow down, Rafael.”
I sheared off the only clothing article I hadn’t cut off during her exam, a lacy white bra cupping her small, destroyed breasts. Blinding stimuli shot up my gloved hands as I spread conducting gel over her caved-in chest and placed the leads of the AED, charring fury quaking me at the extent of her abuse.
In seconds I shouted, “Clear!” then delivered the first shock. I kept the paddles in place, my eyes glued to the cardiac monitor. Come on. Settle down already.
But the frantic, regular waves that had lost every resemblance to the normal spikes of sinus rhythm were only deteriorating into chaos. “Dammit—dammit… VF! Charge!”
I delivered the second, then third shocks, wading through her lack of response and the desperation rising all around me as Fadel and Sam announced our crisis’s opposite; their patient going into asystole. Damn, damn, damn.
He’d flatlined.
We could have avoided this, shrieked inside my head.
If it weren’t for our delay in getting to them, they wouldn’t have deteriorated that far.
And what? I was going to go back in time now and rewrite history, rectify my decisions and their consequences?
Get on with it. You’ve faced situations like this and worse a thousand times before.
I started cardiac compressions. “Lucia, Vasopressin 40 U IV. If no response give epinephrine 1 mg IV, over 3-5 minutes. Then 300 mg of amiodarone if still no response. We’ll keep the cycle of shock and medication going until she’s back in sinus rhythm.” Then I barked appropriate measures to the other team.
We were saving these two.
Two
We didn’t save them.
Getting back to our new Sanctuary had taken three hours. By the time Rafael brought the ambulance to a halt, we’d been slumped around the battered, lifeless bodies of our two unknown casualties for two of those. We hadn’t said a word after each team had declared our charge dead. None of us moved even when the van’s doors crashed open.
I raised ground glass-filled eyes, saw Ayesha and Megumi standing there. Doug and Ishmael formed a second front. Matt towered behind them all. The anxiety blasting off of them almost knocked me sideways.
My breath sheared through my lungs. Please, don’t let these two mean anything special to any of them.
Especially Matt. And Ayesha. They’d already lost too much, too horribly.
I forced my focus to steady, braced for a psychic blow.
None came. The five who made up the rest of my core eight beside Lucia and Fadel stared at the victims for an interminable minute.
After they shared an oppressed glance, Ayesha murmured, “We don’t know them.”
As macabre as it sounded, that was a relief.
I pushed myself up on crumbling legs, discarded gloves smeared with our patients’ violent, gory end. “Then let’s find out who does. Sound a general alarm. Get all our associates here. Especially the Colombian team.”
Now we’d eliminated my homebound team as the target, it only stood to reason this “message” was meant for two of those.
I took a last look at PACT’s handiwork. Was it mine, too? Had I helped kill these two by depriving them of prompt intervention? The intervention the regular EMS would have afforded them if I’d let them reach them instead, hadn’t wasted time in all the cloak and dagger stuff…
“I know that look.” It was Lucia. She reached up and dragged me down from the ambulance as others from our team came up to take the dead bodies to the morgue. “They would have died no matter what, Cali. They didn’t have just a cracked head like Juan or a bullet hole in the chest like Mercedes.”
Yeah. I was still amazed that Lucia’s brother Juan hadn’t ended up brain-dead, was actually back on his feet, and sooner than the others who’d had brain insults caused by Jake’s agent. Mercedes was ahead of him, already the newest addition to our taskforce, just five months after having had her heart blasted by a gunshot and her chest sawed open and wired back together. Said a lot about the resilience of youth. And timely intervention.
Lucia blasted through this train of thought. “We pulled Juan and Mercedes through after a far longer delay in getting to them, Cali, because they had single injuries. But these two—no one could have plugged all the holes. The bastards who did this knew how to inflict so many injuries that would add up into an unsalvageable mess. They meant for them to die, only slow enough so we’d end up going crazy wondering if we could have saved them if we’d done things differently. And you’re playing right into their hands.”
Wow. That girl knew me well. Too well. Seemed everyone did. Seemed I was freaking see-through. And since Damian left they’d been using that knowledge in the most loving, well-meaning, I-will-tear-their-h
eads-off-if-they-don’t-stop-it-soon way.
I shook my head. Lucia clung to me with a warning. “Cali!”
“Yeah, yeah, O Protector Of My Psychological Stability. I know. And I’ll still beat myself over it. But then I’ll survive, as I always do. So leave me be. And thanks.” Before she could launch into another psychoanalytical harangue, I called out to Sam. “Got those ID’s?”
He handed them over and I hurried inside with Lucia tsking in tow. I took a look at the ID’s.
Hm. The man had to be related to Al, the third member of our surgical triumvirate during the Colombian mission. The other two had been Savannah and me. Being an Alvaro, he’d been the only Hispanic besides Lucia and Damian. Wonder who the woman belonged to. I’d soon find out.
I wasn’t looking forward to acquiring this knowledge.
But I knew a few things now. TOP and their trained PACT vicious dogs had no idea I was alive. They would have gone after anyone of mine if they even suspected it. They must have realized that the agent hadn’t been dispersed in the plane crash, or confiscated by the Russian authorities. And now they had, my Colombian team were the best candidates to be in possession of it or of any intel about its fate. Intel they’d already started to kill for.
Damian’s prophecy was coming true. Down to the last letter.
And as he prophesied, they were going for maximum damage right off the bat. Shock and Awe strategy. Wondered what the Colombian team’s reaction would be if they did possess the coveted intel. Would they have succumbed to extortion?
Good thing they didn’t know. Yeah, such a good thing.
Dammit all to hell…
“Leila!” The booming shout fractured my compromised balance. I groped for the nearest door’s support. Leila. That was the dead woman’s name. Someone had identified her.
Char.
Oh, God—no. Not her. How could I have forgotten?
Among us all, she’d had the freshest loss. Her lover Di. In Colombia.
My hands squeezed the doorframe, warding off the images. But they wouldn’t be denied. I saw her again, Diana McPherson, the genius who’d come up with the agent’s antidote, bubbling over with life, telling me I’d given her the time of her life with our adventure in Colombia. Next second I’d seen crimson blossoming on her ample breasts, seen her face seizing in shock, contorting on horror as she realized she was already dead.
We’d fought back , over her literal dead body. I’d been captured but Damian had saved the others. He’d come back for me, and we’d decimated her murderers, returned to the scene of the crime. But not to bury our dead. I’d told Char we had. Not that it had mitigated her agony. She’d hurtled down a spiral of deepening depression alternating with episodes of violent rage.
My hands traced a path across the now-healed bruises of the last of those episodes. I was now her least favorite person in the world. I’d recruited her and Di to be our HAZMAT/anarchy science experts on that mission.
Once Di had fathomed a way to counteract Jake’s agent, my obsessed ex-lover had ordered her death. She’d given him what he hadn’t been able to come up with himself yet, but he wasn’t about to leave someone alive who could thwart his evil genius. My mission, my ex-lover, whichever way Char looked at it, I was the reason Di was dead.
And now because of me, another of her loved ones was, too.
I squared my shoulders. Time to go take the brunt of her anguish square in the face. Most probably literally.
“Oh, no, you’re not!” Lucia, again. “You’re not facing Char right now. You’re not letting her beat you up to purge another of those ridiculous guilt-trips you have such mileage on.”
“It’s my face and I’ll get it smashed if I want to.” I looked over to Ayesha who had joined us, a silent plea asking her to get Lucia off my back.
She only took her side. “Better let Char alone for now to absorb the shock and vent some grief first. She messed you up good last time, almost re-broke your wrist. What good will you be to anyone if she puts you in traction now?”
God. How come I’d ended up with so many mothers?
I mean, really. How come I, the bitch monster Calista St. James, who’d been in so many hells and back, who’d killed more monsters than I’d care to count, elicited such protectiveness in everyone around me? My core team, my father, Sir Ashton. Damian.
But it was Damian’s protectiveness that had known no bounds. He’d crossed all lines to have me safe.
But he wasn’t doing it anymore.
You’re on your own. The words still sheared me, the defeat they’d stemmed from, the desolation they’d engendered.
Since he’d been gone, existence had become a continuous effort at dodging their misery, coexisting with their agony. Damian had followed in my mother’s footsteps. Unable to watch me come to harm, and knowing he couldn’t stop me from putting myself in harm’s way, he’d chosen to walk away so he wouldn’t witness it.
Wasn’t it funny he’d done it when I’d actually thought I’d been playing it safe, for once?
Moist pressure built behind my eyes. Goddamn it. I was too close to the edge. An argument right now wasn’t something this doctor prescribed. I shoved at my friends’ solicitude. “Get out of my way, you two.”
“Only if you promise not to stand there simulating a punching bag if she goes berserk on you,” Ayesha insisted.
“This is Charlene Judd we’re talking about, right?” I scoffed.
Ayesha wasn’t having any of it. “Doesn’t matter she’s almost as big as Damian. You can take her, easy. You just have to want to. At least, to want to not let her pound on you.”
Char was nowhere as big as Damian’s six-foot-five. But then a six-foot woman always felt so much bigger than a man of the same size. And yeah, if I used a fraction of the techniques Damian had taught me, I’d contain anything Char’s raw strength and sheer size could throw at me. I’d incapacitated and killed men way bigger and stronger than her using those techniques.
But I couldn’t use any on her. I wanted her to vent her agony any way she could. If it had been me who’d lost Damian, I would have wished my friends to let me do anything at all to vent the unimaginable, uncontainable pain and rage. Including being target practice for my bouts of desperation.
By the time I reached the morgue where we’d transferred our casualties, I’d gained another guardian. Matt. As big as Damian and as fair as he was dark. Now he was almost back to normal, physically at least, he made a nonnegotiable bodyguard. That he felt his presence necessary said a lot about his faith in Char’s destructive power.
Bet he wasn’t ready for what greeted us. I wasn’t.
In a heap on the floor by Leila’s body, her arms wound tight around her heaving middle, her forehead rhythmically banging the ground, Char redefined the word heart-wrenching.
Trembling, I gave my companions, and the other two room occupants who were warily keeping their distance from Char, a no-further-discussion look. “Leave us.”
Matt expanded his impressive chest. “If she’s taking it that hard, she’ll be even more explosive for it. I’m staying.”
“Then let’s get our fight over with.” I was still wearing the elevator shoes, bringing me up nearer his six foot-four-level eyes. He knew I meant it. His heavy-lidded eyes flared emerald, eloquent with what he thought of my decision. Obstinate idiot.
He still decided to let me be one, compressed his generous lips in irritation, nodded to everyone. They obeyed him, at once. Even Lucia and Ayesha. They never obeyed me this way. Never.
Tell me again why wasn’t he the leader?
The moment they were all out, I approached Char, kneeled by her side. I touched her shaking shoulder.
“Char?”
I expected her to erupt, snarling and tearing. I would have preferred her to. Anything was better than the broken whimper that answered my probing.
Then she raised raw, finished eyes and I almost keeled over. And that was before I heard her tortured choking. “She’s only twent
y-two. She was getting married in September…”
Every brutal emotion buffeted me. I had no words, no heartbeats. Then I felt it, at my back. More torment. Even more mutilating for being silent.
I staggered around and found Al standing over the man’s body, his cheeks wet, his whole body wracked on soundless sobs. Then a whisper bled out of him, meant for his dead relative. “Tio Benito—forgive me.”
I closed my eyes to the sight of his anguish, mine trickling down my cheeks. He believed his uncle had been murdered because of him. He couldn’t know the exact reason why. He’d wonder later. And I’d have to tell him.
Not the truth, but something. I had to let him know that this wasn’t retaliation for his helping us help the helpless. I had to make him exonerate himself of his uncle’s blood.
But whatever he thought, one thing was certain. His uncle would forgive him. All bets were off when it came to me. This was all my fault.
Though I’d never hand over knowledge of the agent’s existence for any reason, for anyone, I could have stopped this before it had begun. And I hadn’t.
And it would get worse. When TOP and PACT found out that their victims hadn’t made it to hospital, they would understand our ruse, know that we’d gotten their message. Before they dictated terms, I had a feeling there would be more messages.
They’d said there would be.
There were.
In the next hours four more attacks took place. Brutal. Lethal.
We gathered around the TV set, switching between channels, watching in impotent, fatalistic horror as almost everyone of my Colombian team recognized a relative or a loved one among the victims.
Our enemies were driving their message home.
The police reported finding it pinned on each victim’s body. A new message. But the same one all through.
There’ll be more. Unless you stop it.
Investigative reporters buzzed all over news channels, hypothesizing the rise of a new serial killing gang who were making a so-far vague extortion demand which no one knew the meaning or target of. From the obvious lack of pattern, some even hypothesized that the killings were a perverted social or militant religious statement of some kind.