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“Gideon?” Kostya asked.
“I’ll do research,” Gideon replied. “Nolan won’t be able to talk for a while.”
“Shit,” Brax answered. “How bad is it?”
There was a long pause. Finally, Kostya answered. “It’s not good.”
“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” Gideon said.
Brax looked down at Jenny. “They’re researching the problem.”
“You said ‘how bad is it’. They must know something.”
“They were talking about my teammate in the other SUV behind us. He’s been shot. He’s alive, but Nolan is working on him.”
“Shouldn’t you be helping Nolan?” she asked. “I’m fine. I’m just sleepy.”
Brax gave a tight grin. “Honey, they have all the men they need over there. I’m right where I want to be. As for you ingesting animal blood, one of my teammates is researching that, and he’ll call back.” He glanced up at the bag hanging from a hook. It was half empty. “You’ve got a full dose of medicine in you and some saline.”
Jenny relaxed. At least she might know soon what was going on. Now that she was finally out of the hut, there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to let herself die.
“What the fuck? Stop that! It hurts!”
Brax winced, then smiled. At least she wasn’t sounding all weak and pleading. If she had the strength, he’d bet his coveted first edition, signed copy of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein that Jenny would have taken a swing at him.
“Honey, I’m sorry it hurts. I’m doing something called percussion. I’m just tapping on your lower back so it will break up the mucus in your lungs.”
“Well, fucking stop it, you asshole. I thought you were one of the good guys.” She tried to shrug his hand off her back, and as soon as she did, she started to cough. The loud, deep, grating coughs made him wince. The coughs had to hurt, but they were just the thing she needed to do to help her get up the mucus.
The SUV started slipping and sliding as Ryker tried to maintain control as he stopped the vehicle. “We’ve got a problem,” Ryker said into his mic from the front seat. “There’s a couple of trees down, and they’ve dammed up the water. They’ve damn near created a lake.”
9
“Everybody but Nolan and Brax, get out. You two stay with our wounded. I want this cleared ASAP.” Ryker was out of his driver’s side door before Kostya even finished giving his direction. Dammit. Kostya even had Gideon out there clearing the way, instead of continuing to gather intel. Brax sure would have liked to know how far away they were from Silchari. Even with the dry t-shirt, and the two of them sharing his poncho, Jenny’s slight frame was racked with chills, despite her skin being hotter than hell.
Nolan had left his thermometer, and the last time Brax had checked, her fever was up to one-hundred-and three point six. Not good. He would have thought with the antibiotics it would have gone down.
He looked at the water bottle in his hands and opened the cap. He felt powerless. But dammit, he had no other option, he had to get her to drink. What the fuck else was there to do?
“Nolan,” he tapped his mic. “Her fever’s going up. When are the antibiotics going to start working, man?”
“It’s only been thirty-five minutes. Give it time.”
“Does she have that much time? Either she’s coughing or groaning in pain.”
“Brax, those are good things. That means she’s still awake, right?”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “I guess. But still, is it going to be enough?”
“Even with the rain, and having to move the trees, we should be able to get to Chattogram by nightfall.”
He heard his friend's answer, but he couldn’t feel it in his gut. Not when he looked down at the wan features of the woman in his arms. They had to save her. She couldn’t die, not after all of this. She just couldn’t.
“There has to be something else I can be doing besides tapping on her back and waking her up to drink water.”
“She’s chilled, right?” Nolan asked.
“She’s shivering. I know it’s the fever, because her body is hot as fuck.”
