Her Last Defense

by Vickie Taylor

  The problem was, as surely as Macy had reminded him he was still a Ranger, she had also reminded him he was still a man. It had been a long time since he’d even noticed a woman, much less thought of one as anything more serious than an entertaining way to spend an evening, or let off a little steam.

  But Macy Attois had gotten deeper under his skin than most. She had him wanting to do outrageous things just to see her warm coffee eyes widen in surprise. Wanting to protect her from any and all comers, microscopic or otherwise.

  If he really wanted to protect her, he’d leave her the hell alone. She had enough on her plate without adding a down-on-his-luck, soon-to-be-ex-Ranger.

  He actually considered warning her off. Telling her he was damaged goods. That he wouldn’t be a Ranger, wasn’t sure he’d be much of anything, once this nightmare was over, the monkey caught or found dead, and he got back to Dallas so he could sign his resignation. Trouble was, he suspected telling her would only draw her to him more.

  Big-hearted as she was, he’d bet she couldn’t pass by a three-legged dog on the side of the highway, either, without stopping to pick it up.

  His bad shoulder aching, he straightened up and leaned on the machete he’d been swinging. The underbrush was nearly impenetrable in this part of the forest. The going had been slow, as they’d taken meticulous care through the gauntlet of thorns and trip vines, knowing their furry little friend could be waiting for them on the next tree limb or behind the next tangle of scrub.

  “How much farther to the next trap?” he asked, wishing he could mop the sweat off his forehead. With the clouds had come an almost stifling rise in the humidity.

  He settled for sliding the CDC supply pack that carried the basics—water, first-aid kit, flashlights—off his back and rolling his neck to work the kinks out.

  Macy frowned at her GPS. “About three hundred yards.”

  He suppressed a groan. Might as well have been three hundred miles, as thick as it was out here. They’d set out shortly after eight this morning, yet it had been nearly noon before they’d reached their first set of assigned coordinates to find an empty trap. After that they’d hit about one an hour. Of the four they’d checked, two had been empty. One contained a seriously pissed-off possum and the last was in several mangled pieces. Clint wasn’t sure if it had been broken when it was dropped from the helicopter, or some critter had smashed it for the food inside.

  A javelina could do that. The wild pigs had been known to raid campgrounds and leave nothing behind in one piece, including the campers.

  Macy peered upward through the boughs overhead. “It’s going to rain, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  Her sigh cut straight through him. “José was raised in captivity. I don’t know what he’ll do if he’s caught out in a storm.”

  “You’re worried about the monkey?”

  “I’m worried about catching the monkey. Whether he decides to hole up and ride it out, or panics and makes a mad dash for who-knows-where, it makes it harder for us to find him.”

  Of course. He should have realized that.

  “We’d best get back at it, then.” He hefted the machete over his shoulder and made a hacking cut at the wall of growth before them. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find him before we all get drenched.”

  They didn’t.

  The thunder rolled in first, then the wind turned around out of the north, bringing a chill and kicking up bits of leaves and dirt. When the rain finally came, it came in sheets. The pitiful ponchos included in their supply packs did little to protect them. They were soaked to the skin and shivering within seconds.

  Reaching back to help Macy over a rotted tree trunk downed in their path, Clint thought he felt her shiver. It was hard to tell for sure, since he couldn’t see anything of her except a blurry swash of color. Apparently they didn’t make gas masks with windshield wipers.

  “We need to find some cover,” he shouted over the drumming rain.

  She shook her head and passed him by. “We need to keep going.”

  But even as she said it, she stopped. She swayed slightly, then took a step back. Clint leaned around her shoulder to see a twenty-foot ravine so steep it might have been the edge of the world. A rush of runoff water careened through the bottom of the gorge, twirling broken limbs and clumps of debris in its currents.

  “Great,” he said.

  “How do we get across that?”

  He wished he had an answer for her. “You wait here. I’ll scout out a crossing.”

  “No, wait.” He had already turned to leave. She reached out for his arm. “We should stay togeth—”

  She tripped over a low vine and the ground beneath her feet gave way. As if it was happening in slow motion, Clint saw her arms flail, her legs shoot out from under her.

  Then a flash of lightning blinded him. He yelled, but the thunder obliterated the sound.

  Wildly, he grabbed for her. Caught a bit of cloth, then lost it. Felt an elbow scrape by his palm. And finally latched on to one thin wrist.

  Concentrating on the feel of each fragile bone crushed in his grip and not letting go, he opened his eyes and found that some time in the last half second, he had landed on his belly in the mud. He lay at an angle toward the ravine, his legs pointed more or less toward safe territory, his whole right shoulder dangling over the precipice.

  In between gusts of wind and the splatter of rain against his face shield, he could hear Macy’s terrified gulps of air. He tried to snake backward, to pull her up, but he couldn’t get enough purchase on the slippery bank.

  “Hang on,” he told her. Ordered her. Demanded her. “Goddamn it, you hang on!”

  But her hand was small. Her fingers weren’t even long enough to reach all the way up around his wrist in a solid grip.

  And his hand…his hand was trembling.

  He tried to stop it. He begged. He pleaded to God to stop it.

  And then he watched helplessly as she slid out of his weakened grasp and tumbled over the rocks and roots into the water below.

  Macy’s hip collided with something hard and sharp. Her foot caught in something momentarily while her body continued to tumble forward, sending her flying facedown toward the foaming white water below. The GPS she’d been holding slipped away, shattered on a rock. Macy held her breath, knowing she was about to hit bottom.

  Cold, dark water closed over her head. Entombed her. She fought the instinct to gasp, to breathe. She had to wait. Wait until she bobbed back to the surface.

  But her clothes were heavy. They weighed her down. Her boots had already filled with water. She could feel the liquid pressure against her face mask. The seal wouldn’t hold. It wasn’t made for swimming.

  With panic shooting streams of fire into her veins, she fought the coldness. The dark. She kicked her legs. Kicked her boots off. Waved her arms, hoping she was propelling herself in the right direction. Looking for light, she turned her head, and her temple struck a heavy limb. Her mask slipped sideways, then was swept away. The current grabbed her, too, pulling her down and under. She grabbed the limb, which wasn’t floating, but wedged against the bank somehow, and followed it to the surface, climbing it like it was a live tree.

  She’d probably only been underwater for seconds before she surfaced, but she coughed and sputtered all the same. She tasted brackish water. Her arms and legs were numb.

  Teeth chattering, she looked back upstream to see what had happened to Clint, but he was nowhere in sight. How far had the current carried her?

  It didn’t matter. He would find her sooner or later. Right now she had to get out of this water.

  Cautiously she edged along the tree limb toward the bank. It was too steep for her to climb, but maybe Clint could lower something down to her, pull her out when he found her.

  She’d pulled herself along about half of the five-foot tree limb when her knee bumped something hung up on one of the smaller branches below the surface. A piece of white material billowed in the curre
nt. Macy reached out to push the debris out of her way, and the something turned. A human face stared up at her out of the water.

  A face with a neat, round bullet hole in the center of the forehead.

  Chapter 8

  “Macy? Macy!”

  Macy’s silence had Clint crashing heedlessly through the underbrush along the top of the ravine, trying to get a glimpse of her. Her scream froze him in his muddy tracks.

  It wasn’t a scream of pain, but one of terror.

  What the hell?

  The monkey. It had to be. God, she’d stumbled right on the infected monkey. Or it had stumbled on her.

  “Macy!”

  A new surge of adrenaline lit his blood on fire. He jumped a fallen log, skidded on his heels over a rock covered with lichen, and sailed over the edge of the ravine without pause when he caught a glimpse of her in the water below.

  He grabbed an exposed root and used it to slow his slide, then bumped down the rest of the slope on his heels and his butt to find himself standing in hip-deep water next to a dead man.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Macy.

  She nodded, but her teeth were chattering. A knot of fear hardened in his gut when he realized she’d lost her bio mask.

  “It—it’s Michael,” she said.

  “Michael who?”

  “Mike Cain. Our pilot. He’s been shot.”

  And he was a long way from the plane crash. Even the biggest, most desperate coyote wouldn’t have dragged him this far.

  Which meant either the pilot had been shot and thrown out of the plane before it went down, or had survived the crash and walked into the woods before being shot.

  What the hell was he doing? He didn’t have time for this now. He had to get Macy out of here.

  He heaved the pilot to the wide end of the fallen tree, closest to shore, and hooked him over a sturdy limb where he wouldn’t be washed away, and then swept Macy into his arms. She felt small as a child, cradled against his chest, but there was nothing childlike about the plush curves that nestled against his body, or the wave of protectiveness, so fierce it was almost animalistic, that washed up inside him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, squirming against him.

  Knowing she had to be freezing, he pulled her closer to his body heat. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But Michael—”

  “Nothing we can do to help him. We’ll send someone back later.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but he wasn’t listening. He was moving.

  Trying to climb the muddy bank here was useless, so he waded downstream to a spot where it wasn’t so steep.

  When he got her on dry land—figuratively speaking—he set her on a large, flat rock and ran his hands up and down her arms and legs, feeling for broken bones, signs of blood or other injury.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Do you hurt anywhere?”

  “I’m fine. Ow!” She grimaced as he probed her ankle. He immediately gentled his touch, his chest tightening with concern.

  “Okay, I’m not fine. But I’ll live. I just twisted it, I think. It caught on something when I was falling.”

  “It’s starting to swell already. You’re not going to be able to walk out of here.”

  Her gaze roamed the trees on all sides. “To be honest, without my bio mask, I wouldn’t want to try.”

  Christ, the monkey. The virus. She had no protection.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed. Her gaze darted left and then right. “Do you think whoever shot him is still out here?”

  “I doubt it. From the looks of him, he’d been dead awhile.”

  “Do—” A shudder racked her shoulders. “Do you think he could come back?”

  Clint’s jaw went hard. He didn’t think so, but stranger things had happened. “We’re not waiting around to find out. Give me the satellite phone, we’ll call for a chopper to come pick you up.”

  She reached into the pouch at her waist. Her hand came back empty. She didn’t have to tell him what had happened to it. It was somewhere at the bottom of the creek.

  Terror rose in her in palpable waves. What little color had been left in her cheeks paled. Her eyes rounded to huge, dark, sunken saucers set in an alabaster face.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. But it wasn’t. There was an infected monkey and possibly a gunman and God knew what else out here.

  With a growl, he ripped his mask off and lifted it toward her head. The monkey, at least, he could protect her from.

  “What are you doing?” She shoved his hands away. “Clint, no. Put that back on.”

  He clamped one hand around both her wrists. She jerked and wriggled, trying to pull away. “Don’t fight me.”

  “If the monkey is in this area, I’ve already been infected.”

  “And if he’s not, I plan to make sure he doesn’t get another chance.”

  “By giving up your own protection?”

  She managed to get one hand free and lurched away from him. He pulled her back by the other hand and braced her back against his chest. Their hearts pounded each other like two rams butting heads.

  “You’re a doctor,” he said, struggling for some semblance of calm.

  “And that makes my life more important than yours? You’re a Texas Ranger, for God’s sake. You don’t think that’s worth something?”

  The sickness that had been festering in his gut for weeks spread to his mind, his heart. This was his fault. He couldn’t hold her. Hadn’t been able to pull a hundred-and-ten-pound woman to safety when her life depended on it.

  So what was his life worth now?

  “Not as much as it used to be.”

  Barely holding back a growl of guilty frustration, he yanked his biohazard mask over her head and checked to make sure each strap was tight as she watched him through wounded eyes.

  She didn’t understand. How could she? And he wasn’t about to explain.

  Not as much as it goddamn used to be.

  “It’s miles back to camp. You can’t carry me the whole way.” Macy’s face shield bumped the back of Clint’s head as he slipped in the mud, righted himself. She’d been riding him piggyback-style for a good twenty minutes. He was breathing hard, but showed no signs of slowing.

  “We’re not going back to camp,” he said.

  Her arms tightened around his shoulders. The woods on all sides seemed deeper and darker, more dangerous than ever. “Then where are we going?”

  They needed to get back to camp, where it was safe. Where he wouldn’t risk sucking in death with each labored breath he drew.

  She hadn’t been able to convince him to take back his mask, the jerk, and it wasn’t like she could throw him to the ground and force it on him.

  “Back to the last trap we checked,” he huffed. “I think there’s a place there we can hole up until we can get some help.”

  It was a fire tower, he explained when they were close enough to see the metal stilts rising through the tops of the trees. The Forestry Service used to use them as observation posts during fire season, but they were mostly abandoned now. Clint had seen this one a couple-dozen yards away from the last trap they’d checked.

  He set her down at the base.

  She peered up, but couldn’t see what sat atop the stilts for the trees in the way. “How do we get up there?”

  Clint walked around, his head also turned upward. “There should be a ladder. There it is.” He pointed.

  It was a retractable type, like the ones on fire escapes. Probably to keep unauthorized people, like them, from climbing the tower. A metal box housed the pulley system that would lower the steps. Clint used the butt of his gun to whack off the rusted lock.

  “Here we go,” he said as the ladder creaked down. “Can you climb?”

  “I’ll dance the rumba if it means getting somewhere dry.” Somewhere far above sick monkeys and floating corpses. She shivered, wrapped her arms around herself. “Please tell me this thing has a roof.�
��

  “This thing has a roof.”

  “Thank the Lord.”

  He put her on the ladder before him and followed her up, his feet just one rung lower than hers, his body behind her, shielding her and bracing her. Ready to catch her if she fell.

  The seventy-five-foot climb was slow and painful. The steps of the ladder were slippery and her ankle ached. By the time she reached the four-by-four square shack perched far above the treetops, it was all Macy could do to drag herself inside and flop onto her back, spread-eagled. Or as close to spread-eagled as a girl could get in a four-foot-square room.

  The Ranger pulled himself in after her and shook his head like a dog, splattering water across all four walls, then leaned into the small, square hole cut in the wall that looked out over the forest to the west. “I think we’ll be pretty safe up here. Come see.”

  Macy couldn’t summon the energy to move, much less get up and look out the window. She did manage to pull off her face mask. It felt good to breathe unfiltered air again. She inhaled deeply, smelling the forest and the rain. “The virus shouldn’t drift this high.”

  He pulled the rope and retracted the ladder. “I hope José won’t be able to pay us an unexpected visit, either.”

  “He could probably shinny up the stilts, but I doubt he’d climb a metal structure when he’s got all those trees to play in down there.”

  “All right, then.” The Ranger rubbed his hands together. She watched him through heavy eyelids. “That takes care of shelter.”

  Of course, now that they had a roof over their heads, the rain had stopped. Only the occasional stray drop pinged on the tin overhead.

  “Let’s see what we can do about the other necessities.” He dug through his pack, pulling out and inspecting items. “Water. Bananas.”

  “Those are for the traps.”

  “Not anymore. First-aid kit. Disinfectant.” He opened the lid on the bottle of antibacterial gel, squeezed some out in his palm and then tossed the bottle to her before slathering his hands together. “Scrub down,” he said and then kept digging in the pack.

  “Here we go. Survival blankets.” He tore open the plastic pack, unfolded the crinkly silver sheet and handed it to her. “Not exactly a down comforter, but it’ll conserve at least a little body heat. Take those wet coveralls off.”