Her Last Defense (4 page)

“Ty Jeffries, the man who managed the cargo,” she added. “And David Brinker.” Her stomach twisted brutally. Unable to stop the rising tide of bile, she pushed Hayes out of her way and ran out of the tent to the edge of the encampment, where she hunkered down behind a scrub mesquite, yanked off her helmet and lost what little food she’d been able to swallow this morning.

Unable to touch her face for fear of contamination, she had no choice but to let the tears flow unabated down her cheeks. As the sobs diminished to hiccups, she heard footsteps crunch through the dry grass behind her. A long shadow fell over her, chilling her clammy skin.

Ranger Hayes squatted down beside her. His gray eyes swirled, unreadable as ever. “Who is David?”

“My fiancé.” Misery permeated her every cell. “At least he used to be.”

C
lint would rather have stuck his arm in a rattlesnake nest than deal with Dr. Attois now. In his years as a Texas State Trooper, and later as a Ranger, he’d seen a lot of victims, with their wide, shocked pupils and pale faces. He’d learned that doling out sympathy wasn’t the way to help them—at least it wasn’t his way. He could call in victims’ advocates and social workers and counselors for that. The best thing he could do for them was give them justice.

But in an accident, there was no justice to be given, no righteous punishment to be meted, and out here, there were no counselors to call. Whatever had to be done was up to him to do.

She sat on the trunk of a fallen cottonwood, her head bowed. The wet trails scrolling down her cheeks made
his breath hitch, his throat close. It made him want to reach out and dry her tears, but he couldn’t touch her, not without risking spreading the virus.

Maybe it was for the best. The last thing he needed was to touch her. No, that wasn’t true. The last thing he needed was to know whether her skin felt as warm and soft and smooth as it looked or not.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She rocked back and forth, her arms hugging her middle. “It’s just—I have a hard time with…the dead.”

“Understandable. You said they were your friends.”

She shook her head, still rocking herself. “No, I have a hard time with all dead people.”

Frowning, Clint squatted down next to her. He spoke as gently as he could manage, but wasn’t sure he pulled it off. It had been a long time since he’d tried to be gentle. “Must have made medical school a bitch.”

Her laugh came out as a hiccup. “I never would have made it through Advanced Pathology if it hadn’t been for the pint of Jack Daniels I kept under my bed. It was the only way I could sleep after…after class.”

Full of surprises, the lady doctor was.

She pulled her lips between her teeth then exhaled slowly. “I haven’t been able to drink whiskey since I graduated.” Her smile trembled then fell. “It tastes like death to me.”

Clint felt the meltdown coming a long second before it happened. The sight of tears clumped in her thick lashes twisted through him like a blade. It took all the grit he could muster to keep his own expression impassive.

A moment later, the tide of grief overwhelmed her.
Tears tumbled out, rained to the ground. “I killed David,” she cried. “It’s my fault.”

He shoved his hands, gloves and all, into his pockets to keep them from reaching for her. “You didn’t cause the plane to crash.”

“I caused him to be on it. He was supposed to come home on the commercial flight, with me, the day before. But I broke off the engagement. I gave him his ring back. He decided to ride back on the charter so he wouldn’t have to be around me.”

Clint had once served a warrant on a drug house that had turned out to be booby-trapped. The doors were wired with explosives, the windows, the cupboards, even the floorboards were rigged, all in an attempt to kill a few cops. Walking through that house hadn’t been nearly as frightening as stumbling through this conversation. He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t good at making people feel better.

“By definition, accidents are random events,” he said, treading carefully and watching her face for some sign of whether he was helping or making matters worse. “You couldn’t have known the plane would go down. Or it could have just as easily been the commercial jet that crashed, and you could have saved his life.”

“At least then it would have just been a plane crash. We wouldn’t be worrying about an ARFIS epidemic.”

“Maybe. Or maybe the plane would have crashed into a school, killed a kid who would have otherwise been president some day. You can’t tear yourself up wondering ‘what if.’ No one knows what the results of their actions will be ahead of time. No one.”

If they could—if he could—he sure wouldn’t have stepped out of his truck in that parking garage six weeks ago and walked right into two gunmen coming off the elevator. He wouldn’t have taken the .38-caliber round in the shoulder that was soon going to change his life forever.

Maybe he wouldn’t have stepped up to the front of the crowd when the CDC team had shown up at the crash site, gotten a close-up look at the wild mane of hair, the warm complexion.

Maybe.

Dr. Attois angled her head to the side, a frown tipping her full lips downward as she studied him curiously. Her eyes were the color of chicory coffee, dark and rich. And they were looking at him as if she was seeing a different man than she’d seen the moment before.

Or as if she’d seen more of him than before. The shield he wore over his emotions was slipping. He stood before it came crashing down.

She blinked as if his movement had woken her. The color came back to her cheeks. “I have to find him.”

He watched as she stood and pulled on her helmet. “What? Now?”

“I can’t leave him out there.”

“There’s nothing you can do for him.”

“I can bring him home! Give him a decent burial, while there’s still enough to bury. Before the scavengers…” Her face twisted.

“What about the monkey?”

“Most likely he was killed in the crash. My team is searching the wreckage again for his remains.”

“The virus?”

She held out her arms. “I’m protected, remember?”

“That suit’ll be shredded about thirty seconds after you leave this clearing. You ever heard of saw briar? Mesquite thorns? Spear grass? These woods are full of them.”

She dropped her arms to her sides, took a deep rasping breath through her respirator. “Even if the macaque did survive the crash, which I doubt, it was infected nearly twenty-four hours ago. With its smaller body mass, ARFIS would overwhelm its system much more quickly than it would a human. One way or another, the monkey is dead or soon will be. The virus won’t be a threat.”

Biting her lower lip, she checked the seals on her wrists and ankles.

He took in her woman-on-a-mission expression and sighed. “At least wait until tomorrow morning. Once the blood tests are done and we’re sure no one’s sick, we can send the men out in search teams. They may not be big-city doctors, but they know these woods and they’re good people. They’ll want to help.”

“That’s a good idea. If I haven’t found David and the others by then, we’ll do that.”

He could tell from her tone that she was only half listening to him. She turned to walk away.

“Damn it,” he called to her back, “it’s a big forest out there. You can’t just go traipsing around it alone.”

She laughed, but there was nothing joyous in the sound. “I was raised in the bayou. My sisters and I played so far out in the bogs even the gators couldn’t
find us. You think I’m afraid of a little walk in the woods?”

As she spoke, she hit the edge of the tree line—and immediately stumbled over a vine that caught her ankle. She caught herself on the trunk of a pine tree just in time to keep from falling on her face, righted herself and disappeared into the foliage.

Cursing his luck and stubborn women under his breath, Clint counted to ten to give his temper a few seconds to cool. Then he counted to ten again.

Finally under control, he yanked the straps on his face mask tight and clomped after her in his rubber booties. The infected monkey might be dead, but the twenty-two men Clint had helped convince to accept the quarantine in the camp behind him weren’t. Not yet. If they got sick, they were going to need her.

He’d be damned if he’d let anything happen to her before he knew they were okay.

Either there was a rogue elephant stampeding through the woods behind her, or the Ranger had caught up to her. An awkward moment passed between them when he reached her side. Macy tried to say something, but her throat closed around a knot in her esophagus and she couldn’t speak. She flicked him a cautious smile instead.

He must have expected her to be angry at his intrusion, because his eyes rounded in surprise for a moment before the steel curtain he hid behind so often slammed down.

The truth was, she was glad for his company. Under
the canopy of trees, the forest felt like a morgue. The temperature was several degrees cooler. Leaves muffled their footsteps. The critters that should have been scuttling around were quiet, as if in deference to the dead.

She didn’t want to be alone with the dead again.

The going was rough, as Ranger Hayes had said it would be. At times the underbrush grew in impenetrable walls. The saw-grass vines seemed alive, reaching out to snag her arms and ankles. Three-inch mesquite thorns sharp enough to puncture the sole of a boot and thick enough to impale a girl to the bone made every step over a broken limb an adventure.

They walked wordlessly until, after nearly an hour, she sat on a mossy boulder near a thin stream to catch her breath.

The Ranger loomed over her, swiveled his head. Sunlight angled through the boughs overhead in sharp beams.

“Gonna be dark before long,” he said.

Out of habit she checked the seals between her suit and gloves. “Couple of hours.”

“We should head back.”

“In a while.”

His forehead furrowed over his face mask. “You do know which way is back, don’t you?”

“Approximately six-tenths of a mile on a heading of ninety-four degrees.”

His scowl deepened. “What’re you, a Girl Scout leader wannabe?”

He looked so perplexed that when she smiled this time, it almost felt genuine. She opened her fanny pack,
pulled out her Garmin, checked the heading to the waypoint she’d made at base, and pointed. “That way.”

He leaned over her. “GPS?”

“Part of the standard CDC field pack.” She patted the zippered pouch sewn into the waist of her suit. “GPS, satellite phone, two-way text pager. Just because I’m not from the big city doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate modern technology.”

“All right, Techno-Girl. You know where we came from. But do you have any idea where you’re going?”

She stood, walked about fifteen feet to her left where there was a break in the trees and pointed up and to the right. “There?”

He followed her outstretched hand with his gaze. Some distance away, six large, black birds glided above the trees. Her stomach plummeted with each heavy swoop of their wings. “Buzzards? You’re chasing buzzards?”

“They’re feeding,” she said, trying not to picture what lay below them.

“It could be anything. A possum, the remains of a deer some hunter left behind.”

“Or one of the men from the plane.”

He took her arm in his hand. “Look, we have to get back. We’ll call the state. They’ve got dogs that can search these woods in a fraction of the time it will take us, and do a hell of a better job at it.”

“We’re almost there.”

When she pulled away from him, he made a sound somewhere between a growl and groan and stepped in front of her, this time holding her in place more firmly.
“You don’t have to do this yourself. Do you hear me? You do not need to be the one to find your friends.”

But his words faded in her mind. Her ears were tuned to another sound. A chirping, trilling chatter. A sound that didn’t belong in the quiet woods.

“Shh,” she said.

“What?”

“Listen,” she whispered, and let her eyes fall partway closed to hone in on the direction of the sound. When she opened them again, she pointed over the Ranger’s shoulder. “There.”

He turned, and the color blanched from his skin. His hand gripped her arm with bruising force.

In a tree twenty feet away, a black-and-white ball of fur scampered out a limb and plucked a nut from a twig, gnawed on it, chattered some more and threw its prize to the ground.

“I’m no doc, doc,” the Ranger said in the most un-emotional tone she’d heard from him yet. “But that monkey doesn’t look dead to me.”

No. Not dead.

Not even close.

C
lint’s right hand reached for the weapon he always carried on his hip and came up empty.

“Impossible.” Dr. Attois’s words were barely audible. She crouched and held out one hand toward the cat-size ball of fur with the pink nose on the tree limb. The monkey mimicked her gesture, holding out its paw. “Here, little monkey, monkey. Here, José.”

“What are you doing?” Clint tried to watch the animal, but all he could see was the puncture on the thigh of the doctor’s biohazard suit. The tear near her elbow. She’d have been better off with a simple gas-mask-type of device such as Clint wore—wasn’t wearing, actually, he realized, and yanked the device over his face, tightening the straps until they cut into the back of his head.

Wouldn’t matter if her clothes were torn to shreds if
she had a mask like his that sealed airtight around her face so the virus couldn’t get in her lungs, or the mucous membranes of her eyes or nose.

“Come here, José. Come on, little guy.”

“José?”

“The monkey.”

An Hispanic monkey from Malaysia. Carrying the most lethal virus of this decade.

Jesus.

Clint checked the straps around his face, tightened them another fraction of an inch. A rivulet of sweat ran down his temple and lodged against the rubber seal at his jaw. “What are you going to do with it if you catch it? You’ve got holes all over your suit.”

“It’s all right. We’re upwind of him. The virus will be drifting the other way. I just need to get close enough for him to see the food.” She dug gently in the zippered pouch at her waist. Paper crinkled, and out came a granola bar. She eased the wrapper off and set the bar on the ground in front of her. “If he finds food here, he’s more likely to stay in the area.”

“Fine. Great.” The trickle of sweat from his forehead was becoming a river. He was going to drown in his face mask if they didn’t get out of here soon. “Let’s go.”

The monkey scampered down the tree trunk and took a tentative step toward Dr. Attois, then another. She rose and backed away slowly, stopping to dig in her pouch again, this time pulling out her GPS.

“What are you doing?” Clint hissed.

“Marking a waypoint so we can give the exact coordinates to a recovery team.”

“You’re calling in a recovery team?”

“I have to. We need to know why he’s not dead, or at least seriously ill.”

“Terrific.” Of course he’d known that. Someone would have to come back for the monkey. Many someones, most likely, in order to find one tiny monkey in a wilderness this size. And every one of them would be risking their lives with each breath they took, regardless of how much protective gear they wore.

“Any more bad news?”

“Yeah.” She studied the leaves twirling on brittle branches. “The wind is changing direction.”

Just out of his second decontamination shower of the day, Clint strode across the compound toward Dr. Attois’s tent in a stride meant to chew up gravel and spit out dust. Once they’d called in the coordinates on Macy’s satellite phone, they’d run like hell all the way back to camp. With Macy’s ripped suit, they’d have been crazy to stick around and wait for the recovery team—a fancy name, Clint had learned for a group of sharpshooters with tranquilizer guns.

Already, news that the infected monkey was alive and well in the woods of southeast Texas had the clearing housing the quarantined workers and their CDC captors buzzing with activity. The news that the recovery team sent after José hadn’t found hide nor hair of the animal at the coordinates Macy had given them had everyone’s nerves jumping.

Three more helicopters had arrived, dropping off additional equipment and troops. The evening sun had
set, and generators droned like overgrown yellow jackets, powering the monstrous lights that had been set up to keep the night at bay. Motion sensors were in place to detect even the smallest breach—inbound or outbound—of the camp’s perimeter, and in case those failed, the uniformed guards with rifles surrounding the little circle of tents were sure to do the trick.

Two more of the army that had invaded the once-quiet forest stood sentry outside Dr. Attois’s tent. There was no mistaking these guys for CDC office drones or scientists, or even young hotheads like Cammo Boy. They were professional security. Thick-necked grunts with guns on their hips and chips on their shoulders.

Clint marched right up to them, stopping a little too close, invading their personal space to see if they’d take a step back.

They didn’t. He hadn’t really thought it would be that easy to establish himself as alpha dog, but it was worth a try.

“I need to see Dr. Attois,” he announced, hating the nasal sound the breathing filter added to his voice.

“She’s not available.”

“She’ll see me.”

A guard with three stripes on his shoulder, apparently the senior officer of the two, gave him a condescending smile. “We’ll tell her you’d like to speak with her. When she’s available.
Ranger
Hayes.”

So, they’d already been briefed on him, and this was how they wanted to play it. Get into a pissing contest over who had the bigger badge.

That was all right. He could piss pretty damned far.

He leaned around the big guy’s shoulder and called, “Dr. Attois, you in there?”

“You’ll have to leave now,” the junior guard ordered. “Civilians are not to leave their tents for the duration.”

“I’m not a civilian.”

“You can either return to your tent on your own, or we’ll escort you there.”

The senior guard’s tone left no doubt in Clint’s mind that “escort” meant “drag.” The young guy latched a rubber-gloved hand on Clint’s shoulder.

Clint knocked his arm away with a chop to the inside of the elbow. “Back off.”

“Go back to your assigned tent.”

Both guards advanced on Clint. Holding his ground, he looked the bigger of the two, the leader, in the eye and balanced on the balls of his feet, fists clenched. “Dr. Attois! I need to speak to you. Now!” he yelled without taking his eyes off the guards.

The junior man grabbed Clint’s arm, tried to leverage it behind his back. Clint twisted in an escape maneuver, but before he got away, the senior guard leaned on his back, doubling him over, and smashed a knee into Clint’s face. Warm blood gushed from his nose. “Aw, now look what you’ve done,” he whined, still bent over, trying to plug his nose and hoping to baffle them just long enough to get the jump on them. “Gone and ruined my pretty blue jumpsuit.”

The distraction worked. The guards rocked back on their heels, thinking the fight was over. Rage thundering in his chest, Clint bulled forward with his head down, knocking the junior guard to the ground. He
shoved the other one behind him and aimed a backward kick at his groin, missing by inches when the man slid aside.

“Stop it. Stop it now!”

The voice was feminine, but there was no doubting the authority in its tone. The guard behind Clint took a step back. The guard on the ground staggered to his feet.

Clint straightened and turned his attention to Dr. Attois, wiping his bloody nose with his sleeve. “I need a word with you.”

“You’re hurt.” She threw a challenging look at the guards.

“I’ll live,” Clint mumbled into his sleeve.

“He refused to return to his quarters, ma’am.”

Clint tipped his head back to stem the flow of blood. “All due respect, doctor, this is a quarantine camp, not a penitentiary.”

She’d taken off her rubber suit and wore Keds, faded jeans and a soft, fuzzy lavender sweater that made his body hum in purely male appreciation. He wondered how blood could still be running from his nose when it felt as though all of it had shot to his groin.

Watching him with curious eyes, she stepped back from the tent flap. “Come inside.”

“Ma’am—” the senior guard complained.

“Enough, Carter,” she said simply as Clint took a step forward.

She stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Take off the booties and gloves and put them in the biohazard container outside. Then step into the pan of disinfectant so you don’t track anything in on the bottom of your feet
and clean your hands, all the way up past the elbow, with the solution on the table.”

He’d just left decon, but he followed orders without comment. Inside, a cool breeze chilled the sweat on Clint’s forehead. He rolled his eyes down until he could see something besides the ceiling and sighed appreciatively. The tents were more like big balloons than traditional camping equipment. They were mushroom shaped, sealed up tight, and each had its own air-filtration system. They reminded Clint of an old movie about a boy with no immune system who couldn’t ever leave his hermetic environment for fear of infection.

Dr. Attois pulled a chair out from a folding table and motioned him toward it. He stood, surveying the neat cot and blanket, table and laptop computer. “Nice place. If you don’t mind living like the boy in the plastic bubble.”

“Beats dying.” She dug through a footlocker and came up with a hand towel and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Now are you going to sit down or do I have to do this standing on my tiptoes?”

She held the bottle of peroxide up. He reached for it. “I can do it myself.”

She pulled the disinfectant out of his reach and nodded to the chair again. “I’m sure you can. But I’m the doctor, remember. Now sit.”

Reluctantly, he sat. Arguing with her wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

She clucked over him as she cleaned around his mouth. “Now what’s so important that you’d risk bodily harm just to talk to me?”

For a moment he couldn’t remember. She leaned over him, and all he could see was the milky column of her throat. She smelled like Ivory soap and her fingers were soft and gentle as they worked. It had been a long time since anyone had touched him so personally. Since a woman had touched him at all.

He couldn’t help but notice every detail about her as she worked over him. The way the light caught her eyes when she smiled. The way she touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip when she was concentrating. His heartbeat thrummed heavily in his veins, as if his blood had turned to mercury.

The unexpected reaction to her chafed him. This after only a few hours in her company? By the time the quarantine was lifted—if it was lifted—he’d be lucky if he was capable of speech.

He cleared his throat.
Telephone.

“I need to use your satellite phone.”

She pulled back from him. The scent of Ivory wafted away, just out of reach. He caught himself just before he leaned forward to capture it again. “I’m afraid that’s not possible. Tilt your head back.”

When he didn’t comply, she eased his forehead backward with the heel of her hand and dabbed at his nostrils with a gauze pad. He grabbed her wrist. Was it his imagination, or did her pulse leap under his fingers?

Their gazes met. Her pupils widened. No, it hadn’t been imagination.

He let her go, easing her back slightly in the same motion. “Look, I need to call my office. Let them know where I am.”

She yanked her gaze away and turned her back to him to put her supplies away. A warning buzz replaced the drumbeat in Clint’s veins.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t let you use the phone. There’s a media blackout. It’s against—”

“I’m not going to call the media. I’m going to call the Rangers. The search for your damn monkey is going to be huge. There are dozens of little towns surrounding the national forest. The evacuation alone is going to eat up nearly every law-enforcement resource in the state. I have to make sure there’re enough cops ready to back us—”

She wheeled. They stood so close that the top of her head was practically under his chin. Her mouth was just inches below his. It opened to speak, paused. He felt the warm rush of her breath. Smelled her mint toothpaste.

“There isn’t going to be an evacuation,” she said. Worry lines fanned out from the corners of her chicory-coffee eyes and her mouth.

“What do mean,
no evacuation?
”

With one last, suffering look, she ducked away. Her hands shook as she screwed the cap on the peroxide bottle and shoved the bloody gauze into a plastic bag.

“They—” She cut herself off, stumbling over her words. “It’s safer if everyone just stays in their homes,” she claimed, sounding as though she was reading a prepared statement. Or propaganda. She kept her eyes carefully averted and her hands busy, closing the first aid kit and stowing it in her trunk.

He forced his clenched fists to relax. His right hand trembled, and he jammed the fingers into his pocket.
Hiding the tremor in his voice wasn’t so easy. It took every one of his years of self-discipline to accomplish the task.

“There’s no reason to cause a panic,” she said. “When we find the animal—”

“
If
you find the animal.”

“We’ll find it.”

“Before or after it wanders into a schoolyard and kills the whole first-grade class, or leaves a trail of virus down Main Street as it picks through the garbage cans looking for something to eat?”

She bit down on her lower lip. He paced the tent, tilting his head back when he felt a slow trickle of blood again in his nostril. “You don’t agree with this, do you?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. The decision has been made.”

“By whom?”

“The head of the CDC, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the President.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows? All I know is the call came down from someone with a lot more clout than me.”

“Your chimp is mobile. There’s no guarantee he’s going to stay in the forest. He could be anywhere by now.”

“Which is exactly why an evacuation isn’t a good idea. If one of them is already infected, and carries the virus out of the area…” She didn’t have to describe the epidemic that could sweep across the U.S. as easily as it had devastated Malaysia. “People are being warned that there is a dangerous animal in the area. They’re being asked to call in if they see him. That’s all we can do for now.”

“
Dangerous
animal?” He got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “What are you telling them?”