Mount Mercy

“Wait!” screamed Beckett. “I can still save him!”

We all turned to look at her. She was frantically scrabbling in a bag, pulling out a portable defibrillator. “I can save him,” she repeated. She looked at me. “But I need his help!”

Colt’s men looked at each other. There didn’t seem to be a second-in-command. Colt was probably too distrusting to allow one. So with their leader gone, they didn’t know what to do. At last, the man with the assault rifle waved me towards Beckett.

All I wanted to do was throw my arms around her and pull her close. But our only chance of making it out of this alive now hung on whether we could save Colt. I raced to Beckett’s side. “How long has he been down?” I asked.

“Not long.” She ripped open Colt’s shirt and started fixing the defibrillator pads. “Get a shot of epi!”

Gritting my teeth, I managed to clamp my frozen fingers around the little bottle and fill a syringe.

“Clear!” yelled Beckett.

Colt’s body jerked as the electricity slammed through him. As soon as he went limp, I gave him the whole dose of epinephrine. Beckett felt Colt’s neck….

“Got a pulse,” she said breathlessly. “We have to stop the bleeding, fast. I’m going to open up his leg while he’s out and try to find the bleeders. There are two bullet fragments in there, too.”

She grabbed a scalpel and started cutting. Colt’s men cursed under their breath as she opened him up. But it was the only way to save him. Now that his heart was going again, the blood was pulsing out of him: we only had minutes.

But this was Beckett. Surgery was what she did.

Despite the cold and the pressure, she dropped into one of those Zen states of focus, the sort I knew I could never manage. Her hands were quick and precise, separating the tissue, finding the bleeders. My hands were still numb but I managed to clamp each one as she found it.

Every so often, she’d lean her shoulder to the left so that it pressed up against mine. Reassuring herself that I was still there. Neither of us had a hand free to touch and there was no time to kiss or even look at each other. But I pressed back against her each time she did it. Yes. I’m here. And she’d nod to herself and work on.

I passed her instruments as she needed them. Whenever my hands were free, I massaged the blood back into them. It hurt like hell, but they slowly began to come back to life. Beckett dug out the first bullet fragment, then the second. She sutured the final artery and we were done. She closed him up, bandaged the leg and we fell back on our asses in the snow, panting with relief. “He’s okay,” she told the men. “He’ll live.”

And then I grabbed her. I didn’t care that we were still being held at gunpoint, didn’t care about the cold air that gripping her waist made my throbbing hands scream in pain. Ever since she disappeared, I hadn’t been able to breathe properly, hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Now I finally had her in my arms, her softness crushed to my chest. We were still in danger but we were together and that was all I cared about. I kissed the top of her head as she nestled against me, then pushed her back, swept the hair back off her face and kissed her, hearing our joint moan of relief as our lips touched. God, she felt amazing, soft and warm in the middle of all this cold darkness. We kissed long and deep, and I felt her hot tears of relief against my cheeks.

Then the barrel of an assault rifle was thrust between us, pushing us apart. “Wake him up,” one of the men told us.

Beckett shook her head. “He’ll make it, but he needs to rest. He’s lost too much blood—”

“Wake him up!” snapped the men. “I know you can give him something, adrenaline or shit like that.”

Beckett and I looked at each other in horror. Beckett put her hands up to try to pacify the man. “Adrenaline could kill him,” she explained. “He’s too weak—”

The gun cocked. These guys were anxious and twitchy. They needed their leader back. Beckett swallowed and looked at me. What do we do?

I slowly nodded. We had to do it, or they’d kill us. But whether Colt woke up or not, we’d be useless to them afterwards and they’d kill us anyway. We needed a way out, quick.

The men watched Beckett closely as she filled a syringe of adrenaline. While their eyes were off me, I grabbed another syringe out of the bag and filled it with Haldol, a powerful tranquilizer, then held it in my palm so they couldn’t see it.