by Linda Barlow
I handed her another pair of sterile gloves. “Cut the corner and flush both wounds. You can control the flow by pinching the bottom.”
The hot watered burned my gashes but I didn’t flinch. “Good job, babe. Now scrub it with this liquid soap. Not too rough.”
The soap stung like fuck but again I kept still and breathed deep.
When she finished, she applied some anti-bacterial ointment and I explained how to close the wounds with my pressure bandages. They oughta stop any residual bleeding. I’d trade them off for regular bandages before too much time went by. Fortunately, I had a good kit and adequate supplies.
“Come here.” I kissed her. “You did a good job, Miss Nightingale.”
Our kiss lasted longer than it should’ve and I noted that it was our first kiss that didn’t lead into sex. I pulled away from her, and relaxed on the ground. I needed to rest.
* * *
I must have dozed for a while. After I woke, I checked my wounds. I felt okay so I checked again on Cassie, to make sure she didn’t have anything wrong with her that I’d missed. But she seemed fine so I didn’t bother to wake her.
Next I inspected my bike. There was a hole in the tire, but I had a puncture kit so I wasn’t worried about that. I turned the bike upright. That’s when I noticed the damage.
“Fuck my life!” I cursed.
Cassie roused from her sleep and bolted up. “Shane, you okay?”
I didn’t answer. The right side carrier had been bent by the weight of the fallen bike. “Fuck,” I said again as I dug through the carrier, my hand grasping on the remnants of our lifeline. “Sat phone got damaged.”
“You brought a satellite phone? Do SEALs carry stuff like that everywhere you go?”
I ignored her and started tinkering with it.
“So it’s not working?”
“No,” I snarled. “Fuck.”
“So…” her brow furrowed, “That means you can’t call in air cover or something?”
I shot her a look. I was not in the mood for her smartass comments.
Her tone softened. “No quick rescue, I guess, then?”
“No. We’re on our own.”
The engine started up, but when I applied the front brake, the lever barely resisted my pull. It must’ve blown the seal on the brake when it hit the road split. We were fucked without a front brake. I could probably make it to the next town if it was only a leak. Either way, I would need to get parts to fix it.
We were nowhere near any towns, with limited water, in the desert heat, during a natural disaster.
I walked back over to Cassie. Before she said a word, I could tell by the look in her eyes she was anxious.
“Cassie, we’re going to be fine. I got this. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. We need to conserve our energy.” I held her in my arms and kissed her head.
Over the past couple days I’d been withdrawing from her, trying to deny the feelings I was developing. Like the fact that I was dreading my mom’s wedding, not only because I thought she was making a mistake, but also that I didn’t want to end whatever was happening between Cassie and me. But I didn’t even know what I was feeling. The sex was incredible, but it was more than that. The way she listened to me, the way she saw through all the smartass remarks I dished out, the way she seemed to really want to know the real me.
The other girls I’d slept with since I’d been a SEAL were just interested in being fucked by a SEAL. But Cassie didn’t seem to care about my job; she respected it and admired my strength, but she kept trying to connect with the man under the tough exterior. Asking about my family, delving into my interests in medicine and nature.
We applied sunscreen and sat down together. “No reason to worry—we’re going to be fine.”
Her lips and chin trembled a little. My stomach felt rock hard and a spike of adrenaline bolted through me. I’d been on many missions, saved my brothers’ lives, and fought the enemy. But the most dangerous enemy, the one that wouldn’t surrender to guns and fear, was Mother Nature.
Chapter 33—Cassie
Some sort of icy calm had come over me. It felt as though I were drawing strength from Shane. It had been his steady voice that had gotten me through the patching up his wounds thing. He’d been in pain—he couldn’t hide the way his muscles had tensed every time I touched the injured areas. But if he could control his pain, I could control my nerves.
Fortunately, I wasn’t squeamish about the sight of blood. At school, I’d put in some time as a lab assistant for a vertebrate anatomy course. I’d dissected plenty of mammals and I knew some physiology.
Still, I’d been worried that I’d do something wrong. Make his situation worse instead of better. But it had all gone well.
I had set up camp. Right there on the side of the road. It would be getting dark soon and we needed shelter and a campfire.
He wouldn’t allow us to get too far from the road or from the motorcycle. “You should always stay with your vehicle,” he explained. “And even though this isn’t the highway, there might be other travelers. I’m not going to start out doing something stupid.” He grimaced and added, “Stupider. This whole fucking trip was stupid.”
“Yeah, too bad we didn’t fly,” I shot back.
“Too bad we didn’t stay home.”
It was also too bad about the broken satellite phone. I hadn’t known he had one. What other shit had he brought? SEALs prepared for anything, right? If I had to be stuck with a guy in the desert because of a natural disaster, who better to be stuck with than him?
“We don’t know how bad this earthquake is yet or how wide an area is affected,” he said. “If we had stayed on the highway, there would probably be other travelers and a bigger chance of rescue. Here, that’s not as likely.”
Right, I thought. Don’t rub it in, dammit. “At least we have water.” No longer would I question him for taking up valuable space in the carrier with his multiple water containers.
“Not enough.”
I knew we had two full gallon canteens because I’d filled them myself. I had another 16 ounce one and so did he. That sounded like a lot to me. But then I remembered that a human needs 64 ounces of water a day to survive. More if it’s hot, which it was, or if they need to expend energy doing things like, uh, surviving. That meant we only had enough water for about one and a half days. Maybe less.
“We’re not that far from the Pacific, so we should get some breeze coming off the water. And there is high ground,” he pointed to a hilly ridge that didn’t look too far away. “Water runs downhill. There is quite a lot of vegetation, so there is probably a fresh water source.”
“If we can’t find water, can we drink from a barrel cactus or something?”
He rolled his eyes. “No. That’s a myth. Most barrel cactuses are toxic.”
I thought about the plants I knew of that were safe to eat. There definitely were some. I knew a fair amount about ocean vegetation. I didn’t know a lot about cactuses, though, having come from the Northeast.
I had once taken a course with Dad on survival in the wilderness. If I probed my brain I could probably remember some of the things I’d learned. Water was vital no matter where you were. As were fire and shelter.
“What about solar stills?” I asked, remembering being taught about digging holes in the ground, filling them with vegetation and covering the hole with plastic. The sunlight would shine through the plastic and photosynthesis from the plants would produce a water vapor that could be captured in a container placed in the hole.
“Stills cost energy to build and don’t collect enough water to bother,” he said. But he looked faintly surprised that I had even heard of solar stills, just as he’d been when he found out I knew how to SCUBA dive. Hadn’t this guy ever met up with a woman who could take care of herself? It seemed odd, considering that his mother was an outdoorswoman.
“We can look for water in the morning. You need some help with those tents?”
“N
ope. I’m used to doing it now. Keep resting for a bit longer.” I pressed one of the canteens on him. “Drink some more. You lost blood.”
He didn’t argue. He drank.
I kept checking my cell, but the service remained down. This worried me because cell service in Baja had been amazingly good so far. Shane kept cursing over the broken satellite phone. I guess SEALs didn’t go anywhere without prime communications in the field.
But this wasn’t warfare. It was looking increasingly like a disaster zone, though. The jagged fissure that had split the land extended on both sides of the road. It got wider to our left and narrower to our right until it petered out.
I wasn’t getting anywhere close to the thing. Although I knew I was being silly, and it wasn’t a crater that descended down into the center of the earth, it still freaked me out. If we’d been going just a little bit faster, or if Shane hadn’t reacted as quickly as he had, the earth could have swallowed us up.
I had just finished securing our tents when that ground jerked and shook again, sending me sprawling to my knees. “Just an aftershock,” he assured me, but it rattled me. What if that crevice widened? It could still swallow us, maybe? Or a new one could open?
Shit. I wanted to go home to Massachusetts. I didn’t like this earthquake crap.
I clamped my mouth shut, though. I was not going to complain. Not going to give Shane an excuse to get all patronizing with me again. If he could get through this without panicking, dammit, so could I.
We sat together in front of the fire. Shane gave me some dried fruit and nuts. I ate without comment. It wasn’t a large meal, but I knew the reason for that. Digestion required energy and hydration. You can survive without food a whole lot longer than you can survive without water. If water was scarce, we should not eat too much.
* * *
After supper, Shane got up to tinker with the motorcycle. He insisted he was feeling better, and it did look as if the color was back in his cheeks. He really was a tough guy—a couple of lacerations weren't going to keep him down.
“I’ve got the engine running well enough to take us a short distance,” he said a little later. “We’ll get up early, before the sun. I’d head back to the main highway, but I doubt the bike will hold up that far. I just hope there’s some settlement near the water. Your fucking whale-whisperer dude if nothing else.”
I hoped so, too! “So we should try to get some sleep, huh?”
“Yeah. Sleep is good.”
We huddled together in one of the tents, and despite everything I was worried about, like whether I’d be alive tomorrow night or not, touching Shane made me yearn for him again. “We probably shouldn’t,” I said when he started touching me back. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m not that hurt,” Mr. Badass insisted.
“But it takes energy. Burns calories. Causes sweating and the loss of other body fluids.”
He snorted. “We’ll be fine. I’ve been in much worse situations than this.” A more violent than usual aftershock shuddered through the tent, and I clung to him. “At least there aren’t guys shooting at us. Or dropping explosives on our location.”
I thought of the damage that an earthquake of this size could do. The people crushed or trapped in fallen buildings. I hoped not too many had died. Shane and I were lucky. We weren’t that bad off and tomorrow we’d find water. Nothing to fret about.
I hoped our parents were okay. Oh God…it was too terrible to even consider any other possibilities.
“Shane.” I slid my hips against him and found him hard and ready. “I need you. Please. I need you now.”
His mouth came down on mine and his hand found its way between my thighs. “We’ll take it slow. Calm and cool. No sweat.”
“No sweat,” I agreed, kissing him back.
Yeah, we burned some calories, but it made me feel a whole lot better. Shane left me alone in my tent again, but at least he waited until I was sleeping.
Chapter 34—Cassie
He woke me up before sunrise. He gave me water and an MRE.
I looked around. Even though the sun hadn’t risen yet, there was already a lot of light. But it was such a desolate location. I didn't see anything but desert and hills in all directions.
There had been no traffic on the dirt road since we’d crashed. No low-flying planes overhead. It was as if we were alone in the world, and it was a spooky feeling, as if we were the only two survivors of a global disaster.
He allowed me to check his wounds. I rubbed on more antibiotic cream after he confirmed that they were healing. We were both bruised and sore, but nothing, he insisted, that would stop us from moving on.
We took down the tents and he packed everything back on the bike. He was basically ignoring his wounds today, now that the bandages had been changed. I hoped that would be okay. It still scared me to think he might be hurting.
He got the engine going and I climbed on behind him. The bike was making clattering sounds that it hadn’t made before. This increased as he sped up and took us into the desert, along the border of the fissure the earthquake had left in the earth. When we rocked and bucked, I wasn’t sure if it was the terrain or another aftershock. I just hung on as hard as I could and hoped for the best.
When the fissure jagged to a close, we were able to cross to the far side and arc back in the direction of the road. I’d thought the dirt road was rough, but it was nothing to jolting over the scrubby earth. Several times he had to swerve to avoid rocks and cacti, and once we almost got stuck in the sand. I was hot, sweating and wired with adrenaline by the time we reached the road again.
We rode for a while, our progress slow. The engine was making loud sputtering noises, and I could hear Shane muttering curses. From the sound of things, this vehicle was not going to get us all the way to Cabo without some major repairs. Or even to the next town.
The road was climbing the hills between us and the coast now. Eventually we had ascended enough that I caught a glimpse of the ocean in the distance.
Thank goodness. The sea would at least cool us, right? Even though we couldn’t drink its salty water. The sun was high now and the temperature felt as if it was going to be even hotter than yesterday.
When the road crossed a dry and narrow wash, Shane turned off into the scrub again and gunned it toward some small trees. They looked bushier than the other vegetation, and the terrain along the wash was rocky. I didn’t see any water in the wash, but I did see a lot more greenery. Where there was abundant vegetation, surely there would also be fresh water?
The engine whined and coughed. We rolled to a slow stop.
“Good place to look for water,” Shane said cheerfully as he stood and steadied the bike. “These broad-leafed trees might be trapping water in their root systems. If we’re really lucky, there might be a creek or a stream. See the birds? They hang out at water sources, same as humans.”
We set up shelter, doing everything together. At one point, he nodded and complimented me. “You learn fast.”
I smiled at him, grateful for his praise. “Thanks.”
When we were finished with that, he insisted we sit down in the shade, rest and drink some water. We were going through our supply fast. I wasn’t super thirsty, yet, but I would be soon.
Thirst would be bad. If we were thirsty, we were already dehydrated.
Chapter 35—Cassie
“Now that we’ve rested a bit,” Shane said, “I’m going to look for water.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. There’s no point in both of us wasting energy. You stay here in the shade and conserve your strength.”
“Let me go while you conserve energy. We might need your strength later, since you have more survival skills.”
I thought this was a reasonable suggestion, but Shane didn’t agree. “Don’t argue with everything I say.”
I bit back a retort. I hadn’t been arguing with him much at all since the earthquake had hit. But if I argued now, he’d claim it proved h
is point. “Well, please be careful.”
“Aw. You worried about me?”
This was sarcastic, so I rolled my eyes.
“You’ll be okay,” he said, as if he realized I was apprehensive about being alone. “I won’t be gone long.” He handed me a couple of items from his survival kit. One was a whistle. There were a couple of chemical light sticks. The third item was a knife. “If there is any trouble, blow the whistle three times. Break the light tubes to start them glowing and wave them in the air. I’ll be able to see that.”
“And the knife?”
“That’s just to make you feel kick-ass,” he said with a grin.
I laughed. “You’d better keep it then, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“I have another. You’ll be fine and I’ll be back soon. I am not going far, I promise. Just to the top of that rise. You okay?”
“Yup.”
“Be careful where you step and keep your pants legs rolled down. There might be spiders or even snakes. We have a snakebite kit with the first aid stuff. You know what to do if you see a snake?”
“Run screaming in the other direction?”
“Cassie. This isn’t funny. Stop clowning around.”
Dammit. “If I don’t find something to clown about, I’m afraid I’ll break down.”
Wow, that was honest. I wasn’t sure what had induced me to admit that.
He laid one hand on my shoulder. “Repeat after me: we are going to be okay.”
“How can I repeat that when we don’t know what’s going to happen? We don’t even know how bad this is. How many cities and towns have been destroyed. We don’t know where our parents are, or if they’re safe.” I squeezed my eyes together. I was not going to cry.
“Repeat it.”
I blew out a shaky breath. “We are going to be okay.”
He leaned down and kissed my lips lightly. Despite everything, lust spiked through me. I coiled my arms around his neck and kissed him back, hard. When his tongue slid into my mouth, my body started yearning for him.
