Page 70 of Duty Preserved

I was mid-sentence, explaining something to Cole, and the words stopped in my throat because what I was seeing didn’t make sense. Alyson had been crouching beside him, her hand on his ribs, and now she wasn’t where she’d been. She was somewhere in the grass out of sight, and the lion was definitely not nearly as sedated as it was supposed to be.

The lion roared. It sent birds in the surrounding brush jolting to the sky.

Then Alyson’s screams reached us.

I saw the lion’s broad head swinging. And claws. I saw the claws. A foreleg sweeping in an arc that connected with something I couldn’t process as Alyson’s body because my brain wouldn’t let me.

Red in the grass. Red everywhere.

Someone was yelling. Zayn or Baraka or Daniel, I didn’t know; the sounds were coming from everywhere. I was frozen.

Cole moved first.

He covered the distance to Daniel in three strides, tore the dart gun out of his hands, shouldered it, and fired. I heard the compressed air, the thud of the dart hitting. Then Cole was sprinting forward, and I followed, more on autopilot than by conscious decision.

Cole rushed ahead of me, his muscular legs propelling him through the brush faster than any of us could move. It looked like he would reach her in no time when, suddenly, his foot tried planting on ground that wasn’t there. One of the many old burrows hidden in the undergrowth had swallowed his leg. There was a sickening, bone-splintering crack as his foot was anchored but his body kept going forward.

He went down with his leg bent at an angle it wouldn’t take a doctor to identify as a significant problem.

“Someone check on Cole!” I ran past him because I just had to reach Alyson. Someone had to reach Aly.

I dropped beside her. My knees hit the dirt. I pressed two fingers against her carotid. I held my breath and counted. One second. Nothing. Two seconds. Nothing.

Then a flutter under my fingertips.

A pulse. Barely, but there.

She’s alive.

I pulled my hand back and looked at what the lion had done to her. The left side of her face was opened from her cheekbone to her jaw, the skin peeled back in deep parallel furrows that went through everything. Her neck and shoulder were torn in the same pattern. The tissue shredded in long, ragged stripes that were pouring blood into the dirt beneath her. Her eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths.

I needed pressure. I needed it now.

“Zayn!”

Alyson’s kit was on the ground a few feet away, still open from the procedure. I crawled to it and pulled it back to my side. I tore open the sterilized gauze and began trying to pack it into the wound to create more internal pressure. Roll after roll of gauze.

“Aly. Stay with me.” My voice came out level. My hands didn’t shake. I didn’t let them. “You’re okay. I’m right here. Stay with me.”

All around me, I could only perceive pieces of the chaos with how focused I was on her. I heard Zayn on the radio, giving coordinates for an emergency air evacuation. I thought I heard Daniel’s voice, but it wasn’t clear what use he was providing. Baraka was shouting to Zayn about Cole having a broken leg.

All of it was just background noise to me.

“Keep breathing, Aly. Please. Please keep breathing.”

I had packed as much gauze as I could into the wounds. Zayn knelt beside me and handed me a pressure dressing. I couldn’t take my hands off her wounds, though. I couldn’t. Zayn had to slowly work the bandage on around where I was applying pressure until I could quickly shift my grip and slide the new pressure dressing under my hands.

“Help is coming,” he said.

Chapter 19

Donovan

I’d been standing at the airstrip for forty-five minutes.

Andrew had the AMREF crew staged on the runway. He’d gotten them on the ground and ready to receive the casualties. The nearest surgical center was in Nairobi, and this crew was the only way to get there with any kind of chance of keeping patients alive for that long.

Andrew had handled all of it. Calling it in and the coordination with the pilot on approach. He did the job so I didn’t have to, and he didn’t ask me to thank him for it.