by Gina Kincade
He barely had time to suppress the rising bile in his throat when a swarm of a hundred or so emerged from the side of the town-square courthouse and started across the green lawn. Fuck. They must’ve heard the gunshots.
“Let’s go.” He closed the distance between himself and Wylee in three wide strides, had her upper arm clamped in his hand in no time, and dragged her around the pile of alley rotters.
The high-quality sedan parked near the rear coffee-shop exit had to be a godsend. The soles of his boots slapped on concrete until he reached the driver’s-side door. A balding man with a logo shirt and a nametag indicating “Manager” sat buckled in. But he squirmed and snarled, as if he’d turned shortly before escaping the car.
Gabe yanked the door open then raced to the other side and did the same. The keys were in the ignition. He prayed the man hadn’t had time to turn over the engine and allow it to sit and idle—and run out of gas. He pressed the button and released the seatbelt and then shoved the guy out the door. The spazzer hit the pavement with a thump.
Gabe climbed over the console and slammed the driver’s door shut. “Get in!” he roared to Wylee, who rushed up, threw her weapons on the floorboard, and scrambled into the passenger’s side door. He turned the key and the motor hummed to life.
“Yes.” He reached over and grasped her hand. The heat of her skin nearly singed his palm. Then he raised his gaze to her beautiful face. It was pink with white splotches, and perspiration covered her normally clear skin in a sheen of wetness. And her eyes. They were bloodshot and glistening by the dashboard lights like a rabid wolf in the night.
His chest seemed as if it had suddenly split in two. He couldn’t catch his breath. And even though he had the fortitude about him to throw the car into drive and screech off in a squall of tires, he could only think about her. He was losing her, the absolute love of his life. She was going to die, and he might have to be the one to pull the trigger.
Goddamn it, no, no, no…
“I-I’m not feeling very well all of a sudden.” She ripped off the leather jacket and set the air-conditioner to blasting. She plopped back against the seat and rolled her head to the side, staring at him under long-lidded eyes and spiked, moist lashes. “It’s happening, Gabe. I…I think I’m about to turn.”
Chapter Four
Wylee swayed. She was so weak. Her seatbelt was the only thing keeping her from pitching forward into the dashboard. She hadn’t clicked the belt into place to keep herself safe, but to keep Gabe safe from her, to prevent her from coming at him if the disease clawed its way out of her while he drove them to the hospital.
By the time he weaved in and out of abandoned cars and dead bodies on the business loop set on the periphery of town, and arrived at Twilight Cove Medical Center, she burned with fever.
“Wylee, take a look. People. Live fucking guards and military all around the hospital.”
She lifted her two-ton head, but her vision had begun to waver and blur. She narrowed her gaze and forced herself to remain awake, to keep her sights set on what might be their refuge. Their home.
“Of all the places in town…” Wheezes marred her voice. She sucked in short breaths between chattering teeth. “Why didn’t we come back here sooner?”
He glanced over at her, and even in her delirium, she caught the worry in his gaze. “We were on an extended vacation together when it all started, remember? Barracuda Island? Surf, sand, good food, and great sex? When we returned, things were a mess. We got ambushed, lost, stranded. And then…” He clamped his mouth shut, looked back at the road. “Never mind. Now shh, don’t talk anymore, babe. Just rest.” He navigated the packed parking lot and turned toward the ER entrance. It was sandwiched between the helipad and the glassed-in, three-story conservatory lobby topped by the cupola she’d always thought fancy and breathtaking.
The hospital campus was awash with light and color against distant flickers of lightning on the pre-dawn horizon. While portions of the city had blacked out over the last week, others remained with electricity. But here, the backup generators would help the medical center to function longer. Was there a backup for the backups? She didn’t know, but at the moment, she felt like shit and couldn’t concentrate enough to worry over it.
The six-story, round hospital wing loomed over the grand entrance. The top four levels included patient rooms and wards, while the lower two, plus the basement, housed administration, some physicians’ offices, imaging, the lab, ICU, and surgery. She suffered an immediate stab of regret; she’d loved working there.
Why hadn’t she appreciated it when she’d had the opportunity?
Her muscles and bones ached like hell; she couldn’t cool down enough, yet she was freezing, and she felt as if she might throw up. Whether due to the rotter disease overtaking her system, or the fact that she would never work there again, she didn’t know.
When he drove under the portico, to the double doors at the ER entrance, a small crowd of people raced out. Wylee recognized several nurses and other staff. But sadness and alarm washed through her when she saw the guards get on one knee and aim their rifles at the car.
Is this what the world had come to? Killing, even at a place meant for healing?
Gabe climbed from the car, jogged around the front end, and opened Wylee’s door.
“Dr. Phoenix. What a relief to see you well and alive. We thought we’d lost you.” Dr. Lane, chief of staff, strode toward the car. He had puffy bags beneath his eyes and he wore dingy street clothes rather than the suit beneath the crisp, white lab coat that used to be his trademark. But he did have the usual stethoscope slung around his neck.
“You and me both, Patrick. Hey, I need an ICU bed—STAT,” Gabe barked, releasing Wylee’s seatbelt and lifting her from the car. “And every single available staff you have.”
It took all the strength she had, but she was able to lift her arms and wrap them around Gabe’s neck. She’d begun to shiver, and his warmth comforted her like a blanket, while his hard chest gave her a solid base to keep her quivering under control.
The scent of death mixed with antiseptic filled her nostrils when he carried her across the bright ER waiting room and passed through the double doors, into the intensive care station. Even in her feverish state, it stunned her that the hospital was a mecca of survivors, those seeking refuge, and remaining staff ready to assist. And all this time she thought Gabe and her were some of the last survivors in Twilight Cove?
“Over here,” Dr. Lane said. “Pod thirteen is the only open one we have.”
“Great. Thirteen,” Wylee groaned.
Gabe rushed her in and placed her on the bed. The stiff hardness beneath her sore muscles caused her to thrash and search for a more comfortable position.
“It’s just a number, sweetheart.” To the half-dozen staff rushing around, flipping on equipment and preparing for her “admission,” he ordered, “I need vitals signs and an IV started. And oxygen—two liters for now—EKG, PT, ABGs, UA, chest and left ankle X-rays, complete blood count, chem panel, antibodies, every goddamn blood test you can think of, or anything I’ve overlooked. Just do everything! Oh, and a tissue biopsy of the left ankle wound, culture and sensitivity, as well as removal of the site. Get rid of the whole fucking bite area. Treat it as you would a suspicious cancerous excision.”
“Yes, Doctor,” many sang in unison. But the first thing they did was don extra precautions gear. Gloves, gowns, masks, respirators, whatever they could find that remained in stock.
They’re going to take a chunk out of her leg? “But, Gabe, I don’t want my ankle to be—”
“Patrick, do we have infectious disease to consult?”
Dr. Lane shook his head, rubbed at the bridge of his nose, and repositioned his rimless glasses. He sighed. “Lost a few of them. Infected after patient care. The rest are working overtime in the lab and out in the field researching with the CDC for a cure, or at least looking for ways to eradicate some of the pain and excruciating rabies-like sympto
ms that go with infection.”
“Goddamn it. What the hell is going on here?” Gabe growled out and kicked the base of the bedside table. It rolled across the small space and crashed into the glass-partitioned wall.
The doctor drew Gabe aside. “Look, Phoenix, I’m sorry to break the news to you, but she’s not going to survive. We’ll have to…put her down.”
Wylee didn’t necessarily hear Gabe’s anger; she actually experienced it reverberating through her. “Put her down? She’s not an animal, Patrick. She’s a human being, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s what we’ve been dealing with since you’ve been on vacation.”
“Some vacation,” Gabe muttered under his breath.
“A bite is almost certain death.”
“Almost?”
“We’ve had two women become infected. They’re still holding on. Sick and feverish, but not turning yet. The rest…gone. Either by necessity or from starvation.”
“Meaning?”
They shuffled a few steps to the side, out of the activity. Wylee could detect Dr. Lane’s outline through the filmy white curtains hanging over the glass wall. He shrugged. “We have almost the entire medical-surgical, orthopaedic, and OB units quarantined with full beasts and the couple of pre-beasts I mentioned. Except for those two, they’re all still restrained in their beds…we had to kill them; some died on their own, we believe from starvation. Human flesh feeds them, keeps them ‘alive,’ if you will. If they go more than a few days without feeding, they die. Before succumbing to the disease coupled with starvation, if they become out of control and chew through their restraints, the guards posted on every floor have been ordered to shoot and kill. The beasts are still up there in their beds. We don’t know what to do with them, except close off the units for now and get them buried one by one.”
The beasts. He’d repeatedly called them “the beasts.”
Fear clawed at her the way the young child had before it chewed through her boot.
That’s what would probably happen to her. They’d tie her to her bed. She’d turn soon. And then they’d kill her just like she’d killed all the others out there.
“Formaldehyde,” Gabe offered.
“Formaldehyde?”
“Yes. You need to get them all embalmed. The rotters don’t seem to like the stuff.”
Dr. Lane nodded and stroked his chin. “Hmm, will have to look into that, although the medical examiner? We lost him.”
“Fuck me.” Gabe thrust a shaky hand through his hair. “Well, I’d suggest the funeral homes. They’re bound to have embalming fluids on hand. We just came from Ashbourne Funeral Home and the leeches appeared to be repelled by the place. Formaldehyde was the only thing I could come up with to explain it.”
Wylee’s eyelids grew heavy. Voices trailed off and faded in the distance.
Staff rushed around her in sterile garb, placing nasal prongs in her nostrils for oxygen, EKG sensors on her chest, drawing blood, rolling portable machines in for tests, stripping her pants off and prepping for a urinary catheter and the biopsy on her leg, prodding and poking at her. The odor of alcohol swabs wafted in the room.
And pain shot through her shoulders when they strapped her down and restrained her wrists, anchoring them to the bedframe.
She lay there and stared unseeing at the lights. Is this what she’d been like as a nurse? Clinical? Robotic?
“Just for your safety,” one pretty young nurse’s assistant named Nicole said with smiling eyes behind a mask too large for her small face.
Thunder rumbled in the distance and rattled the narrow window by her bed. She turned away from them and stared out across the horizon. A dark cloud floated across the night sky and obscured the moon. Lightning blinked, and its jagged beams ripped through the atmosphere and zapped Twilight Cove.
“Yeah, right,” Wylee rasped, her voice sounding far away and slurred.
More like because I’ve become a “beast.”
She’d wanted to say the rest out loud, but her tongue was swollen and her eyelids had gone from heavy, to downright impossible to keep open. She couldn’t even keep her gaze on the beautiful storm sweeping over the city. Perspiration dribbled down her cheeks and forehead, and between her breasts and along her spine. God help her, she couldn’t breathe.
She finally gave in to exhaustion and the let her eyelids shutter closed.
“Temperature is one hundred three point two, Doctor,” someone called out.
The machines went haywire, beeping and dinging, sending stabbing pain through her skull.
“Blood pressure’s diving. Shit. Call a code!” a male nearby shouted, and it seemed to split her head wide open.
“Wylee! Wylee, no!” Gabe’s voice came to her as if it echoed off a canyon wall.
Then she slipped away at the same moment thunder cracked overhead and shook the bed beneath her.
* * *
When she died, her life did not pass before her eyes, as they say it does. Instead, it rewound and went straight back to the day they arrived on Barracuda Island, five miles off the coast of Twilight Cove…
“You’re making me hard.”
Wylee laughed. She loved it when he had that horny edge to his deep voice. “Really?” She twirled a long curl around her finger, struck a sexy pose against the patio slider, and tried for a coy look. “How hard?”
“Plenty hard to get inside you and blow in ten seconds.” His gaze held hers while he strolled across the large deck attached to the lighthouse suite they’d rented on Barracuda Island. Part of the Peach Grove Plantation, it overlooked the white-sand beach of Barracuda Bay on the westward side of the island.
Her breath caught in her windpipe at the sight of him in the button-up, short-sleeved shirt—opened just enough to reveal his chiseled chest—casual cargo shorts, and flip-flops. “You’re making me hard, too,” she insisted, her bare feet gliding over warm deck boards. “My clit, that is.”
He made a purring noise and winked at her. His blue-green eyes glittered and reminded her of the color of the bay water at high noon. “Hold that thought.” He reached for her and jerked her into his arms. She slammed into the wall of his chest. Though the island heat remained from the unusually hot day, she welcomed his body warmth and melted into him.
“Why? I don’t want to waste a hard-on.”
He threw his head back and chuckled. The moonlight glinted off the snow-white rows of his teeth. “Where did you ever hear that?”
“From you.”
“I never said that.”
“Did so. That morning a few weeks ago when I had to be in at four a.m. and work that emergency MVA case while you weren’t on call and got to sleep in.” She wound her arms around his neck and played with the short bristles of hair at the back of his head. It tickled her palms and gave her an urge to grip the longer strands on top and drag his head down between her legs. To force him to lick her “hard-on.”
He shrugged and settled his erection against her lower abdomen. “Do you blame me? It was one of those raging ones, ya know? Besides, you were already wet and horny yourself. You wanted it more than I did.”
Her laugh came from deep in her belly. “What’s this all about, Gabe? Getting my supervisor to let me off for a week—which would normally be impossible, by the way—this surprise vacation, all the romance. You checking me off your bucket list? You dying or something?”
He grinned, but the smile faded when he traced her hairline with his thumb, down to her ear, along her jaw. He kept his gaze on the trail he made, until he got to her mouth. Then he tangled his fingers in her hair and forced her head back. “It’s about me and you, baby. Us.”
His mouth covered hers. They stood beneath a full moon and the scatter of stars, and she made a clicking noise in her thoughts, as if to commit this one tender moment to memory, just like a photograph. She inhaled the salty sea air and heard the squawk of seagulls near the plantation’s peer. His tongue swept over her lower lip then slipped past her teeth. He ti
ghtened the seal and sucked her tongue into his mouth, sparring with it, teasing her until it seemed he tugged on her clit via her mouth.
She wore a low-cut, short cotton sundress and no panties. He backed her against the deck railing, drew up one of her legs, and pinned it between his hip and the hardness of wood. One hand remained fisted in her hair while the other dragged the hem of her dress up until he found her wetness.
“Mmm, good girl. No panties,” he murmured, and slid two fingers inside her.
Wylee choked out her pleasure. He kept stroking her, in and out, in and out. Each time his knuckles grazed her labia, he circled her knot with his thumb and brought her right to the edge of the precipice, but not over it. Gabe never took her over it—not until the very second he was ready, and no sooner.
He traced her jaw with lingering kisses, nibbled on her earlobe, made her shiver and her libido rev up a few more notches. “And you’re so goddamn wet, darlin’. You smell like sweet, honeysuckle sex. I can’t wait to taste your cream.”
“No one’s stopping you.” She closed her eyes and panted, spread her legs farther for him.
“Uh-uh.” He pushed her dress back down. “Not yet.”
Her eyelids popped open. “Not yet? Not yet? Then when?”
He stepped back and straightened his clothing, his comment prefaced by a clearing of the throat. “In a few minutes, I promise. For now, humor me.” He took her hand and drew her across the deck to the steps that led to the beach.
“You’re such a tease,” she groaned. “You have no idea how it feels to have no panties on, to be soaked as hell, and be left to flounder.”
“Wylee. Shhh. Just do what I say.” He tugged her all the way down the stairs until her bare feet sank into warm, dry sand.
Honeysuckle vines climbed up the trellises and deck stilts, infusing the salty atmosphere with wild floral sweetness. The tide inched in and crashed against the sandy shore. Wylee would never forget the peaceful night of sleep she’d had the evening before, the window wide open, wrapped in Gabe and some cool linen sheets. The ebb-and-flow song had lulled her to sleep as she’d listened to the foamy waves rushing in to slap the beach then recede in a gentle backward slide.
