It was a heightened state. Cool and calm. Colors were brighter and the world was sharply focused.
No bullets were flying here, but they had been—this was where the shots he’d heard had been fired—still, his training pushed his fear for Tasha far to the side as he stayed concealed and assessed the scene.
Blood—lots of it—and drag marks. Casings—he could see at least three—glinted in the still-early morning light, there on the trail.
That likely meant whoever had been shot had also been shooting, and that after they’d been killed or injured they’d been taken away.
More bad news: The bulkhead was exposed—his careful cover of branches and debris knocked away from the concrete. The metal hatch was dented and pocked—some of those shots he’d heard had been from bullets fired directly at it, as if attempting to get inside, in pursuit of...?
Hope exploded inside of him, even more colorful and bright, and Thomas emerged from the brush, stopping only to grab one of the casings.
Cool to his touch, it was not their rifle’s caliber, and his hope grew even stronger as he moved toward the hatch.
The metal frame of the small door was streaked with blood, and ice-white fear slammed back into his body with a rush that he ruthlessly tamped down as he quickly keyed in the code that would open the lock.
The hatch popped and he swung it open and leaned inside.
And found himself staring into the barrel of the hunting rifle.
A few inches above it was Tasha’s fiercest warrior-face. But then her eyes widened.
“You’re alive!” She breathed the words he was inwardly shouting as she immediately lowered the rifle onto the floor while he climbed inside and secured the door behind him.
She was already launching herself at him, pulling him down to the floor and nearly knocking him over as the part of him that was flooded with relief waged war with the hospital corpsman who could not ignore those streaks of blood.
“You’re hurt,” he managed to say, only allowing himself the briefest moment of ferocious contact from Tasha’s tackle-of-a-hug before pushing her to arms length so he could examine her in the landing’s dim light. “Were you shot?”
“No,” she told him. “I’m okay. Oh my God, Thomas, I’m so sorry.”
Her face was grimy and tear-streaked and her eyes were rimmed with red. She looked a little dazed sitting there, but other than that bore no real sign of shock. She had a scratch on her forehead, up by her hairline, but that wasn’t bleeding enough to warrant those handprints on the door.
But now Thomas saw that there was blood on him, on his right hand and arm, simply from embracing her, and he slipped back into firefight mode, because she was definitely not okay. He got onto his knees and pulled back even further from her and looked at her hands—her left was bloody. He turned her and yeah, the entire left sleeve of her winter jacket was bloodstained.
His caveman brain spun and screamed about arteries and bleeding out, while his soldier and scientist brain coolly assessed. This hadn’t just happened. The shell casing he’d picked up hadn’t been hot. He’d heard the shots fired and it had taken him twenty long minutes to get all the way back here. She’d been sitting here for all that time. This wasn’t a bleed-out amount of blood. She was not going to die.
His caveman agreed. He would die himself before he let that happen.
“Whoa!” Tasha was genuinely shocked as she looked down at her arm. “What did I do?”
“You left the shelter,” Thomas told her grimly as he yanked down the zipper of her jacket. He was carrying the hunting knife he’d taken from the body by the ski lodge, and ER protocol would have him slice open her sleeve. But she wasn’t bleeding out, she was merely bleeding, and he didn’t want to destroy one of the few pieces of warm clothing they had left. “You got yourself shot in the arm.” He hoped it was only in the arm, and he scanned the rest of her quickly. The blood on her jeans seemed to be from her arm—aside from a pair of skinned knees.
“I think I would’ve noticed being shot in the arm,” she countered.
“Adrenaline can do amazing things,” he told her, pushing her jacket off her shoulders. “Can you help me?”
She pulled her right arm, the uninjured one, out of her jacket first even as she wiggled her left fingers. “I can use my left hand. And move my arm. It doesn’t hurt. See?” She demonstrated further, but immediately stopped, cradling her arm to her chest. “Hoh shit, now it hurts! Oh my God!”
She was free from the jacket except for that left sleeve, and Thomas was desperate to see the extent of her injury. Still, he stopped, but she held out her arm to him. “Band-aid pull! Do it, fast!”
So he did.
“Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!” she said.
“It helps if you say fuck.” Thomas tossed the bloody jacket aside. Her shirt had a row of buttons up the front and long sleeves. Again, her left sleeve was saturated with blood. He could see there was a tear, upper arm, posterior, but he couldn’t see how badly she’d been damaged beneath it. Was there an exit wound or was the bullet still in her arm? He started mentally reviewing the contents of the first-aid kit downstairs. “They’ve done studies. People can endure more pain if they swear.”
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she said. “Yeah, sorry, it’s not working.”
He reached for the buttons on her shirt and Tasha looked at him with disbelief as she pulled away, injured arm again tucked in close to her body. “What are you doing?”
“I need you out of that shirt.”
“Words I have yearned to hear for years,” she said.
He met her eyes at that, and electricity sparked between them—immediate and palpable. But then she smiled ruefully. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
That bruised, dazed look in her eyes had vanished. She was back to being her usual alert and sharply funny self. Another good sign that this wound wasn’t dire.
“I need to see your arm,” Thomas said evenly.
“Okay,” she said, using her right hand to unfasten the top buttons of her shirt. “If you insist.”
And it was quickly clear that she was not wearing a bra.
As he turned away, she laughed a little at the obvious Oh shit on his face. “Ah,” she said, “you forgot about the selfless sacrifice of my courageous bra, who gave its life so that we could live in a world free from handcuffs.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I forgot about that. But I still need to see your arm.” He got out the knife. “I’ll cut the sleeve. And I’ll sew it back up for you later.” She’d found a bunch of sewing kits in one of the drawers in the pod’s kitchen.
But she was still unbuttoning. “I kinda used up all the thread.”
“You... what? How?”
“I’m making you warmer pants, Grandpa. Look, this is really not that big a deal. You’ve studied anatomy, I assume. I mean, you are a medic, so...”
“Hospital corpsman,” he corrected her automatically.
“Plus it’s not like you haven’t already seen me naked,” she added. “Okay, just hand me my jacket so I can cover my terrifying lady parts, then turn your chaste, puritanical gaze over to the corner for a moment while I get out of most of this thing. I won’t need your help until I get to the left sleeve. Ow, I mean, fuck.”