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Wait – death?
It could well be the plant.
Halo had to wait for a moment for the terror that flooded his system to give him enough room to think. He found himself using his combat breathing to keep himself in the fight.
Halo pulled out his medical kit. Moving slowly so as not to startle Mary, he approached in a crouch.
Max had curled up against her, and he turned to focus on what Halo was doing. “Just going to check her out, buddy.” If Max decided to guard her, things could turn bad very quickly.
“Turn bad?” he asked out loud as he pulled out a pressure cuff and stethoscope.
He culled through all the other things that Miriam had said. There was a viper in the bog. Though she’d also said in the twelve years of her professional life as a naturalist she had never seen it. A gray snake with a thick black zigzag down its back. Halo began to check Mary head to toe, removing clothes and putting them back on, checking for any sign that she’d been bitten.
Nothing. Halo documented her vitals in his notebook as he worked.
He checked her pulse; it was weak and thready.
Her breathing was shallow.
Her skin clammy.
Her eyes were unfocused.
There had been nothing in the book about what to do if someone had an adverse reaction. But now he remembered Titus asking that question. Marilin said to get the person out of the area and let them breathe fresh air. An hour or so should have them feeling well again. But that was the headaches caused by sensitivity to the plant. Would that extend to a full-on toxic load?
So far, Marilin’s instructions had been dead on.
“Mary, baby. Come, on, sweetheart, we’re going to get out of here.” He tugged her arm, and she fell loosely back against him. “Max, I’m going to leave you off lead. The last thing I need is for you to take off running and pull me over into a pool.” Halo couldn’t imagine Max doing that, especially while wearing a work vest, but Halo couldn’t take any chances.
“I know what to do,” Mary slurred, flapping her hand in the air. “When I went down the slope in Switzerland, I just sat on the back of my skis. Sit back and go. Scary. But down to the bottom.” As she said that, she pushed into a squat on the back of her bog shoes. Her weight shifted to the back, forcing the back edge downward instead of flat, digging into the moss, creating a hole exposing the water beneath.
As she went in, her arms flailed wide.
Halo jerked Mary to the side to redistribute the weight over a larger area. And as he did, he realized that carrying Mary would put over three hundred pounds of combined weight into a concentrated area.
Could he find a solid enough path to get them out of there?
As he processed strategies, he was startled by the abrupt sound of his phone alarm going off.
That was his Labrador tea timer. Bog time was over.
Halo tapped it off. “Mary, I don’t want to hang you upside down over my shoulders unless I have to. It’s quite a ways to the wood line, even farther to the car and away from these plants. If you can hear me and understand what I’m saying, I need your help. I’m going to wear my backpack on my chest, and I’m going to carry you on my back. We’re going to try it anyway.” He maneuvered the pack forward and cinched the straps across his back. “I swear to you, love, that I’m going to get you safe. I just need you to help a little. I need you to wrap your legs around me like when we came down the wall from the fire. Okay? And I need you to keep breathing for me.”
What he didn’t say aloud was, Please, please, please don’t die.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Halo struggled in ways he had never experienced before.
When he was a Commando, he’d often been in bad situations. There were times when he was fighting for the survival of his brothers, times when he was on a solo mission when his life was in his own hands. But here he was in a surreal landscape, navigating an ecosystem that he hadn’t trained in, desperately afraid for the life of the woman he loved.
Loved.
From the point when she hung upside down, and their eyes met on the side of the burning building, Halo had been playing around with the sensation, testing it out, wondering about it.
But now, it was solid in his chest.
And it was coated with absolute fear that his skills wouldn’t be enough to meet this moment.
