Her Last Defense (15 page)

“What day, Ty? Move your fingers on the day.” Today was Thursday, she thought. “Friday?” Nothing. “Saturday?” Nothing. “Sunday?”

His index finger tapped once on the blanket.

“Sunday.” Her heart hammered so hard she thought it might burst right through her suit. Just three days.

Her breath hitched. A lump clogged her throat.

Ty’s squirming became thrashing. His chest spasmed. His head bowed back and the chords of his neck stood out.

“Where?” She shouted at him, hoping he would hear her over his pain. “Move your hand if the target is east of the Mississippi.”

Both his hands moved. They swung wildly, but she didn’t think it meant anything. He was delirious, fighting demons she couldn’t see. Fighting death.

“Please, Ty. Try to concentrate a minute longer. Don’t let the men who did this to you get away with it. Don’t let them kill thousands more! Move your hand if the target city is west of the Mississippi.”

He made a strangled sound, full of animal rage. His eyes bulged, bloody and blind. He raised up—God knew where he found the strength—and flailed at the air as if he were being attacked by invisible birds. His IV stand clanged to the floor. Tubes tangled around his neck. His arm crashed against the table next to the bed, sending a tray sailing into the wall.

Macy knew she was in trouble when Ty got hold of her arm, just above the wrist. His grip was surprisingly
strong, fueled by insanity and pain. She didn’t dare wrench herself away by force for fear he would tear her suit. She clawed at his fingers, trying to pry them away. All the while she could feel Clint’s gaze on her. She heard him, muffled through the glass.

“Macy!” His fists thumped on the window.

Ty’s free hand continued to flap and wave. He hit the table again, this time closed his hand over something. At first Macy thought it was a pen—dangerous enough for someone whose life depends on not allowing so much as a microscopic puncture to her rubber suit, much less a gaping tear—then he swung his arm up, and she got a better look at what he held a second before it plunged toward the back of her hand.

The hypodermic the nurse had left behind. A needle which had, just minutes before, been inserted directly into the bloodstream of a man dying of the most lethal pathogen to surface on the face of the earth in fifty years.

C
hrist. Oh, Christ.

Clint threw himself at the window between the observation area and Ty’s room, but the half-inch Plexiglas barrier held. He watched in horror as Macy yanked her arm away from Jeffries, but not before it was too late. At least he thought it was too late.

Please, God, don’t let him have punctured her glove.

He ran. Skidded around the corner and hit the button to open the airlock door that led into the decontamination area, but the door remained closed. A warning light blinked overhead: Occupied.

“Damn.” Through the peephole, he could see her in the first chamber, still in her suit, her arms held out to the side as the Lysol shower sprayed her down. Then she hooked the hanger to the loop on the suit at the back
of her neck, unzipped the bodice and stepped out, leaving the rubberized coveralls, attached boots and outer gloves and all to drip dry. The glove of the left hand bore an obvious tear.

She was already stripping off her inner layer of gloves, the latex pair, carrying one with her as she stepped behind the curtain where he knew she would strip out of her surgical scrubs and rinse her body the same way she’d rinsed the suit.

He braced his hands on the doorframe and hung his head. His heart ricocheted off the walls of his chest with startling ferocity.

A minute passed like an eon. Two. Then he heard the airlock door on the other side of the decontamination area click open and the warning light over his head winked off.

He caught up to her in the dressing room. She’d put on a clean pair of scrubs and stood at a sink pouring bleach on her hands directly from the bottle and rubbing it in.

“Did it puncture the inner glove? Break the skin?”

“I don’t know.” She looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was white as bone. She nodded toward the rumpled piece of latex on the counter. “Check the glove for holes. Pour some more bleach on it first.”

He doused the latex while she scrubbed some more, then pinched the skin on the back of her hand. “No blood. I don’t see a wound,” she sounded calm.

“That’s good. That’s good, right?” He could hardly talk. Adrenaline had his chest heaving for air.

“Good, but not a guarantee. The bleach is stinging
me, as if it got in a wound. The needle may have pierced the epithelial layer, the skin, just not gone deep enough to hit a capillary and draw blood. The virus would still transfer.”

“Dammit, what was a needle doing lying around in there, anyway?”

“I interrupted the nurse and she forgot it. It was—” Tight-lipped, she shook her head. “Just check the glove.”

He opened the scrap of latex at the wrist and held it under a slow-running faucet, the way he’d seen Susan do once at the camp. When the glove was full, he held the end closed and squeezed it gently, watching closely to see if any water leaked out. If it leaked, there was a hole.

He forgot to breathe as he squeezed, and then the world tipped crazily beneath his feet as a tiny bead of water appeared on the surface of the glove and plopped into the sink below.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

Clint sat facing Macy in a plastic chair identical to the one she was seated in. He reached out and took her hands in his.

She swallowed and nodded, her head bowed. Her hair hung over her eyes like a curtain, shielding her from his probing gray gaze. He swept back the heavy mass and lifted her chin.

“You don’t have to do it. I can tell them.”

“I can do it,” she dragged in a heavy breath and straightened up, more for his benefit than because she
felt like it. “It’s okay. It’s part of the risk I accepted when I signed on at the CDC. I’ve always known this could happen.”

“It’s not okay. Not even close.”

“Let’s go. I’d like to get it over with.”

“Macy, we need to talk about this.”

A spurt of anger flashed through her. She lurched out of her chair. “I don’t want to talk about it! I just want to— Want to…”

“Pretend it isn’t happening? That it didn’t happen? You can only put off facing the truth for so long. Believe me, I’ve had a lot of experience trying, lately.”

Her gaze automatically landed on his shoulder, the spot where his shirt hid the scar from a bullet wound. She felt for him, knew that he felt crippled because he didn’t have full control of his body. But he could hardly understand how she felt at this moment, facing the almost certainty of contracting a lethal disease.

“I don’t think you can compare your situation and mine.”

“I wouldn’t begin to. If nothing else, the last few days have taught me that there are a lot more important things in life than having a steady gun hand.”

He moved in close to her, eased her into his arms.

Some part of her told her to resist. If she didn’t have the strength to let him go now, she never would. But she couldn’t. He just felt too good. Too strong, and she needed strength right now. She needed all the strength she could get.

“I just don’t want you to push me away,” he said against her neck, rocking her. “I want to be there for you.”

“You can’t be there. No one can. I’m not contagious now, but in a few hours, the virus will have spread to my lungs. I’ll have to be isolated.”

His arms tightened. His voice hardened. “You’re not going to do this alone. I’ll suit up. I’ll be there with you every minute.”

The thought of him sitting beside her while she thrashed on the bed, wild-eyed and delirious like Ty Jeffries turned her stomach. Vanity? She didn’t think so.

She didn’t want him to have to watch her die the way they’d watched Ty Jeffries die just minutes ago through the observation window. She didn’t want him to remember her that way.

“You have terrorists to catch, Clint. There are a lot more lives at stake than just mine.”

Clint set her back from him and framed her face with his hands. “Yours is the only one I care about. Don’t you get that?”

The admission brought a new stream of tears to her cheeks. Her steely-eyed Ranger, the man who never let on he had feelings, much less displayed them, was looking at her with such tough tenderness, such ferocious love, than the sight of him made her heart swell and ache.

“First thing you’re going to do after we talk to the team is give the doctors here a crash course on this bug. You’ve got to teach them everything they need to know in order to treat you. You’re the expert.”

“There isn’t much they can do other than standard supportive therapy.”

His hands moved from her face to her shoulders. He
shook her lightly. “There must be something else. You weren’t just sitting back and watching people suffer in Malaysia. I know you. What were you trying? What did you think might make a difference that you didn’t have a chance to try before you left?”

She shuffled uneasily. “We tried the standard antiviral treatments. None of them showed any substantial results.”

“Brinker thought he could create a cure using the monkey’s antibodies. What about that?”

“He might have been able to create a cure. In eight or ten months. But not eight or ten hours. I’m not the only one who needs to face the truth, here, Clint. You’re going to have to accept this, too.”

His hands tightened on her shoulders. Myriad emotions played across his face in the span of a heartbeat—fear, anger…grief. Then he pulled her into a bear hug that felt like it could last all winter, except it was interrupted by a noise from the open doorway.

Del cleared his throat again. The captain and Kat stood behind him, open curiosity in their stares.

“You said you needed to talk to us,” Del said to Clint.

Macy let go of Clint reluctantly and turned to his friends. She might be pretending there was nothing wrong to herself, but she wanted them to know the truth.

Clint was going to need them for the next forty-eight hours.

She pulled her shoulders back. “Actually
I
need to talk to you.”

Clint linked his hand in hers in silent support. She squeezed gratefully.

“I wanted to let you know that I won’t be able to help with the investigation the way I’d hoped.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She bit her lip to steady herself and looked up at Clint for the strength to go on.

“I had a little accident in the iso room.”

For twelve agonizing hours, all Clint could do was watch the clock and will the hands to move faster. Then when the incubation period was up, and Macy’s blood test came back positive for ARFIS, all he wanted to do was turn them back.

It wasn’t as if the results were a surprise. He should have been prepared. But how does one prepare for news like that?

Macy accepted the findings with a courage that both made him proud and tore his heart in two. He’d suited up and waited in an isolation unit with her as he’d promised, but eventually she’d wanted to know what was happening with the investigation, so he’d returned to his teammates to check.

And to get a little counseling.

Bull was on his cell phone with someone from Homeland Security, insisting they increase security at water-treatment plants across the country. Kat pretended to be absorbed in whatever she had up on her computer screen, but in reality, every time he looked up he caught her staring at him with eyes full of pity. Del provided the counseling.

“You really fell for her, didn’t you?” he asked.

“If you consider a headfirst dive out of a 777 at thirty-five thousand feet a fall, yeah, I guess I did.”

“That pretty well describes how I felt when I met Elisa.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have a parachute, man. A damn bug stole it. There’s no soft landing in a nice, comfortable marriage at the end of this ride.”

“Hmm.” Del sat back, put his feet on the desk and twiddled a pencil between his fingers.

“What?”

“I’ve never even heard you say the
M
-word, much less use it in the same sentence as
nice,
and
comfortable.
”

“You know my mom dumped my dad before my first birthday. Left me with him.”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about your mom.”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember her. But my dad, he was a tough son of a bitch. I honestly believe he thought by slapping me around and making me work a full day in the oil fields at eight years old, he was preparing me for life. Making me strong. I guess he did make me strong, in a way. I learned to rely on myself, and no one else. We moved around so much, I never really let anyone else into my world. If I made friends, it just made it that much harder to leave the next time we had to pack up.”

“You’re not a kid anymore.”

“No, but old habits are hard to break.” He’d been letting those old defense mechanisms rule his life just a few days ago, when he’d decided to resign from the Rangers and leave Dallas. Instead of turning to his teammates for support, he’d closed himself off from
them. “I just never learned to…connect with people. Never let anyone close enough to connect.”

“I take it Macy has you rethinking this strategy?”

“Yeah. And now that I finally figured out that I need her, I’m going to lose her.” He let his face fall into his hands and rubbed.

“We all know what the odds are,” Del said quietly. “But no one knows for sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the next day. No one but the big chief upstairs, and I don’t mean the governor.”

Clint steepled his hands in front of him and shook his head. “It’s like she’s given up already, Del. She’s not telling her doctors what they need to do, or trying to figure out how to beat this thing. She’s not trying to help herself.”

Bull motioned to Del from across the room. Del stood, but rested his hand on Clint’s shoulder a moment before he walked away. “Then find someone else to help her, partner.”

A half hour later, Clint stood in a hallway staring—glaring, really—at a public phone booth. His partner was a genius, no doubt about it. But that didn’t mean following through with his suggestion would be easy.

Macy needed someone who knew ARFIS as well as she did. Who knew Macy. She needed someone with field experience treating the disease, not just looking at it under a microscope. Only one person Clint knew fit that bill.

And yet for all that, picking up the phone and inviting David Brinker back into her life was the toughest thing Clint had ever done.