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