AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh shit,” said Danny.
41
JD
The fear surged up inside me, paralyzing me. I stared down at Lorna and Van der Meer’s helpless forms. Oh Jesus.
“Get her to the chopper,” yelled Gina. “I’ll get it started.” And she ran off towards the helicopter.
I scooped up Lorna and ran after Gina, the rest of the team forming up around me. “I’ll call Olivia,” said Gabriel, pulling out the satellite phone. Olivia was his girlfriend, the prison doctor he’d fallen for and who we’d all gone to South America to save. “Her specialty’s toxicology. She’ll know what to do.”
He had a hurried conversation with Olivia, then wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder for me. Olivia’s voice filled my ear, quick and efficient. “We’ve got to narrow down what poisoned her. Any blistering or swelling of her lips?”
I looked down at Lorna. God, she’d gotten even paler. “No.”
“Is she convulsing?”
I looked up at the chopper. Gina had the blades spinning, now, but it would be another minute before she could take off. “No. She just can’t breathe, and she can’t stand, her muscles are weak—”
“Smell her breath for me,” interrupted Olivia. “Is there a scent?”
I sniffed. “Yeah. Kind of like almonds, but bitter.”
“It’s cyanide,” Olivia said immediately. “You’ve got five, ten minutes to get an antidote into her.”
I opened the pilot’s door. “What’s your flight time to the nearest hospital?” I yelled over the roaring blades.
Gina had already programmed it into the GPS. “Forty-three minutes!” she yelled back.
I froze. I thought I’d been scared before but now the fear rose up inside me in a freezing wave. We weren’t going to make it in time. She was going to die in my arms on the way.
The fear washed away all the guilt and toxic self-hate, letting me see things clearly. I loved this woman. I had to have her in my life, no matter what. I’d been wrong to ever push her away and now it was too late.
“JD?” said Olivia in my ear. “JD, what’s happening? Are you on your way to the hospital?”
I’ve never felt so helpless. “We can’t—” I struggled to speak, my voice fracturing. “We’re not going to get there in time.”
I heard Olivia take a deep, shuddering breath. Then she spoke, steady and reassuring. “Okay, then. We’re just going to have to figure out how to treat her where you are.”
I nodded like an idiot, forgetting she couldn’t hear me, and stepped back from the chopper, slicing my finger across my throat to tell Gina to kill the engines. I laid Lorna back down on the deck. Her skin was deathly white and she was limp as a ragdoll. Please, I was begging, please let me have her back. Just let me have her back, I’ll figure out how to be with her, I don’t care how much it hurts.
“We’re treating her here!” I yelled to the team, and they gathered round. A tearful Paige pushed her way to the front and dropped to her knees beside Lorna, grabbing her hand. I knelt on the other side and put the phone on speaker.
“We need an antidote,” said Olivia. “What do you have where you are? Is there a pharmacy? A veterinarian’s?”
“No,” I said, my chest tight.
“How about…a factory, some kind of industrial unit?” asked Olivia. “They’ll have chemicals.”
“We’re on a yacht in the middle of the sea,” I said desperately. “We’ve got—” Colton had found the first aid kit and passed it over. “A first aid kit…fuck, it’s just bandages and dressings!” My hands were shaking with panic.
Olivia went quiet as she thought. “Okay, okay...we don’t have nitrites, we don’t have thiosulfate, we don’t have hydroxocobalamin...glucose! There’s some anecdotal evidence that glucose can work!”
I nodded at Bradan and Kian. They grabbed one of Van der Meer’s bodyguards as a guide and ran off.
“What else can we do?” I asked desperately.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” said Olivia. “In the ER we use activated charcoal for poisonings. It doesn’t bind all that well with cyanide but if you gave her enough of it, it might buy you some time. But that’s not something you’d have there.”
I looked across at Gabriel. He was staring at Lorna but his eyes were distant and I could tell his mind was working overtime. C’mon, Gabriel, think of something, please.
“Water filters,” he said at last. “The galley will have water filters and those are made of activated charcoal. Would that work?”
“If you could grind them up and mix them with water, maybe,” said Olivia.
“A blender,” said Colton. “We put ‘em in a blender.”
“Go!” I told them. “Go!”
They ran off and I sat there stroking Lorna’s hair, listening as her breathing grew more and more desperate. “Hold on, baby,” I whispered. “Hold on.”
Minutes passed that felt like hours. Then Gabriel came running back holding a blender filled with black sludge. At the same time, Bradan and Kian raced over to us, clutching a wad of fruit-flavored glucose gel packs. “One of the bodyguards is a distance runner,” Kian told me. “He had a whole load of these in his cabin.” We ripped them open and squirted the contents into the blender.
