Chapter 19
Donovan
I’d been standing at the airstrip for forty-five minutes.
Andrew had the AMREF crew staged on the runway. He’d gotten them on the ground and ready to receive the casualties. The nearest surgical center was in Nairobi, and this crew was the only way to get there with any kind of chance of keeping patients alive for that long.
Andrew had handled all of it. Calling it in and the coordination with the pilot on approach. He did the job so I didn’t have to, and he didn’t ask me to thank him for it.
I stood at the edge of the runway and waited for the vehicles to come back.
I knew everything already. Zayn had radioed it in from the field. Alyson was mauled. Cole’s leg was broken.
Sarah was fine.
That was the fact I’d been holding for forty-five minutes. Zayn had told me, and I could trust him. She was uninjured and she was working on Alyson.
The dust came first, rising above the far tree line before the vehicles cleared it. The two trucks were moving just about as fast as they could be safely driven, and they whipped onto the camp road that fed straight to the airstrip.
The first truck nearly skidded to a stop. Zayn got out of the driver’s side, and Baraka swung down from the back before dropping the tailgate. I approached, and that was when I saw Sarah in the back of the truck bed.
She was kneeling over Alyson, still keeping pressure on her wounds. Her arms were red to the elbows. Her shirt was soaked through across the front and down her thighs where she’d been kneeling in Alyson’s blood.
Sarah is fine.
My body didn’t care what the radio had said. Every part of me locked up at the sight of her, and the fact that I’d known for forty-five minutes that none of the blood was hers did nothing at all to stop the gut-wrenching feeling of seeing her like that.
I started toward the truck. Two of the AMREF crew were already there, wheeling the first gurney to the back of the truck. One of them climbed up into the bed beside Sarah and leaned in over Alyson.
The dressings covered most of the damage. Sarah had packed the wounds and wrapped what she could. Forty-five minutes of pressure over rough roads, though, had left all sorts of bloodied gear and bandages scattered all over the back.
Hopefully it just looked worse than it was.
Then the AMREF medic shifted, and I caught enough of Alyson’s face. One side. The dressings didn’t cover all of it, and what was visible told me everything I needed to know about what was underneath.
I’d seen wounds. I had a frame of reference for this. One look and my attention moved, because that’s what you did. I couldn’t get fixated on the wounds right now. That was the medics’ job.
The AMREF paramedic was talking to Sarah. Calmly telling her what they were about to do. Sarah’s hands hadn’t moved. She just stayed holding pressure. She wasn’t letting go.
I climbed up onto the tailgate. The truck bed was slick under my boots. Sarah’s eyes came up to mine for the first time. She was running on adrenaline and autopilot. She appeared to be potentially borderline going into shock.
“Sarah.” I kept my voice low and steady. “They’ve got her. You can let go.”
She shook her head. A small, tight movement. Her fingers pressed harder into the bandage.
“They need to take over now,” I said. “The sooner they can take over, the sooner she can get to a surgical center.”
Her jaw was clenched so hard the muscles in her neck were taut. She was looking at me, but I wasn’t sure she was hearing me.
I put my hand over hers. On top of the blood, on top of the gauze, on top of everything that was keeping Alyson alive. That was the first time I’d touched her today, and it was to make her stop.
“I’m right here,” I said. “Let go.”
Her fingers released one at a time. The paramedic slid in and took her position, and Sarah sat back on her heels with her hands in front of her.
She had her crimson-stained palms facing her, and I could see the tremors of her muscles trying to adapt to not applying the pressure she had been holding.
I helped her off the tailgate. Her boots hit the dirt, and she turned immediately back toward the truck, toward Alyson. The AMREF crew transferred her to the stretcher. Sarah stayed right there. Close enough to touch. Her hand found Alyson’s arm and held it as they moved toward the plane.
I stood and watched Sarah walk away from me toward the plane, still covered in her best friend’s blood, and there was nothing for me to do.
I should worry about Cole. Sarah was okay for now.
He was in the passenger seat of the same truck, his left leg extended carefully across the footwell. He hadn’t tried to get out. A broken leg had lower priority than Alyson’s situation. Cole knew that without anyone telling him.
I went around to his side. He looked up when I reached him, and his face told me a lot before he opened his mouth. Pain, yes. His skin was gray under the dust, and his hand gripped the doorframe hard enough that his knuckles were white.
“Tell me what happened.”
“We darted him.” Cole’s voice was tight. “Everything went right. The dart hit true. We waited the full required fifteen minutes, and the lion gave all signs the sedative was working. Alyson then went in for a closer inspection.”
He stopped. His eyes went to the plane where the AMREF crew was loading Alyson.
“We thought he was out cold.” His voice dropped. “He wasn’t. She touched him, started working, and he just—”
He couldn’t finish it. His hand came off the doorframe and pressed against his face, and for a second, I thought he was going to lose it. He didn’t. He collected himself and looked at me.
“How bad is she?”
He asked that before anything about his own leg. Before the break, before whatever was going to happen to him next. He wanted to know about Alyson.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “The AMREF crew is working on her.”
Andrew appeared at my shoulder. He’d done what he could on the logistics side, and he wasn’t about to stand across an airstrip while one of his people was in a vehicle with a broken leg. He looked at Cole, then at me, and didn’t ask what had happened because he’d already heard enough on the radio.
“Your leg,” Andrew said, crouching beside the running board. “I suspect you tried sticking it up that lion’s ass and breaking it off there?”
I could tell he was trying to make light of it all.
Cole closed his eyes for a second. “I was running to get to her. I was so fixated on getting to her that I wasn’t looking where my fucking feet were going.
I just went. My leg sank into a deep fucking burrow, and my ass kept wanting to move forward.
Here we are.” He gestured at the apparent gnarly break in his leg.
Andrew looked at me. I looked at Andrew.
“My notes are going to say: Broke leg attempting to bare-knuckle box a Nemean lion. Classic Hercules archetype,” Andrew said.
“No.” Cole shook his head. “I stepped in a goddamn hole.”
“Not how I’m going to remember it. C’mon, Hercules,” Andrew said. “Let’s get you to this plane so they can get both of you out of here.”
Cole didn’t laugh. I wouldn’t have either. But his jaw unclenched by a fraction, the tension giving way because Andrew had given it permission to.
I looked at the leg. Briefly. Below the knee, it looked like a fourth grader had tried to draw a cursive stick figure. The pant leg stretched tight over swelling that had already started. Cole held perfectly still because any movement sent pain through him.
“I’m done,” Cole stated. He said it to both of us, plain as day. “I’m not walking on this. I’m not coming back for a while.”
Neither of us argued. There was nothing to argue with.
Andrew and I got him out of the truck. It was ugly but the best we could manage. Cole kept his jaw locked and didn’t make a sound, but I felt the effort that took in the way his fingers dug into my shoulder.
We carried him between us across the strip toward the plane. Sarah was there already, standing near the cargo door. She looked at Cole being carried and her mouth pressed into a hard line, but she didn’t speak.
We got him up and into the cabin and settled him across from Alyson’s stretcher. The crew secured him. Andrew checked the straps once more because he couldn’t stop doing the job, and then we backed out.
The second truck pulled up to the edge of the strip as we were reversing. Daniel got out with a bag over his shoulder. He didn’t come to help. He walked straight to the cargo door, his chin set, and didn’t look at any of us.
“I’m going too.” He said it flatly. “I’m not coming back. I’m done with this place.”
Nobody answered. The engines were running, and the crew was signaling for us to clear the door. Daniel climbed in without waiting for a response. He didn’t say anything about Alyson. Whether he was going because of her or in spite of her, I couldn’t tell.
The cargo door swung shut.
Andrew and I backed away from the prop wash and stood beside Sarah at the edge of the runway. Three of us and a handful of rangers watching the plane taxi to the end of the strip, turn into what wind there was, and accelerate.
The wheels left the ground. The plane climbed and banked south toward Nairobi, getting smaller against the sky until it was little more than a faint white dot.
Andrew put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll go collect the rangers. Get them debriefed.” He didn’t say the rest of it, but I heard it anyway. Go take care of her.
I turned to Sarah.
She was standing motionless in the same place, arms at her sides, looking at the sky where the plane had been. She wasn’t crying. She was shut down. The autopilot that had held her together had finished its job and had no more route to follow.
I was scared for her. I was watching her come apart, and I didn’t have a single useful thing to do about it.
“There was so much blood.” Her voice was distant. “I couldn’t—I kept packing it and it kept coming. There was so much of it.”
“I know.”
“Her face. Donovan, her face.”
“I know.”