Looking down at the woman, Goose knew immediately that something was wrong. Her face was slack and still. Fear still showed there, but nothing moved. He saw his own reflection in her glassy eyes.
“No,” Goose said hoarsely. Over the past few days, he’d seen too many dead not to know what he was probably looking at. He pushed himself up.
The woman didn’t move.
“Goose,” Clay said, striding toward him.
“Giselle!” Arnaud called from the alley’s end. “Where is my wife?” He continued in French.
Stunned, Goose gazed at the dark spot in the center of Giselle Arnaud’s red blouse. The spot was not spreading. She wasn’t bleeding. That meant her heart no longer pumped.
Laying his pistol down, Goose tore the woman’s blouse open. The wound was a jagged mess of torn flesh, but—
“There’s no penetration here,” Clay said as he hunkered down beside Goose. “She caught a ricochet. The bullet was too spent to break through her sternum. Deflected from bone.”
“She’s not breathing,” a young Ranger said.
“The bullet stopped her heart,” Goose said, stripping his helmet off. “Impact caught her between heartbeats, stopped her heart. She’s got a chance.” God, please let there be a chance. “Help me start CPR.”
“Giselle!” Arnaud called, sounding closer. “Mon Dieu! What has happened to my poor wife? What are you doing? Sergeant? Sergeant, answer me!”
Glancing over his shoulder, Goose spotted Arnaud only a few feet away now. “Corporal,” Goose ordered, “keep that man back.”
The corporal stepped forward to block Arnaud. The man tried to fight his way past him, but the corporal wrapped his arms around the man and prevented him from walking closer.
Clay tilted the woman’s head back and opened her airway. “No obstruction.”
Ignoring the biting pain in his knee, Goose straddled the woman and put his hands, one on top of the other, over the bloody wound. He leaned forward and heaved, applying pressure in short impacts, rolling his shoulders to use his weight.
“All right,” Goose said, “breathe for her.”
Clay did, putting his mouth over the woman’s, ignoring the standard operating procedure of using safety gear to prevent spreading possible disease. The woman’s life hung by a thread and they knew it. They had no time to drag out the gear.
Arnaud wept in the background, calling out his wife’s name.
“Break,” Goose said.
When Clay pulled back, Goose curled his right hand into a fist and struck the woman’s sternum, hoping to create enough shock to start her stilled heart. Then he settled into the rhythm again, putting his shoulders and his weight into the effort.
“C’mon,” Goose said, keeping count in his head. “C’mon. You can do this. You aren’t gone yet. You’ve got a lot of living to do.” But he wondered how much time had passed since her heart had stalled. After four minutes without a heartbeat, brain damage usually occurred.
He leaned back and let Clay breathe for her again, barely managing the panic that filled him. Everything swirled in his mind, running together in a blur that threatened to overwhelm him. Chris was gone. He was stranded in a war-torn country with no true hope of survival. He would probably never see Megan or Joey again. And this woman whom he’d risked so much to save wasn’t breathing.
It was more than Goose could bear.
This woman was going to die on him, caught by a ricochet that should never have happened.
Clay broke away. Goose straddled the woman again, locking his hands together over her heart and pushing, hoping to revive that fistsized clump of muscle that was the engine for the human body.
If God had raptured the world, if He had taken the children, then why had He left so many other people behind? Why would He take all the children? Why would He take Chris?
God wouldn’t, Goose told himself. God hadn’t done those things. The God he believed in wouldn’t do something like that. Someone else caused the disappearances. Someone else took Chris. If God had done those things, there would be some kind of sign, some—
Miraculously, Goose felt the woman’s heart suddenly flutter under his hands. In disbelief, he drew his hands back and pressed his ear to her chest.
Her heartbeat was erratic at first but quickly settled into a strong rhythm.
“Hey,” Clay said excitedly, “she’s breathing! She’s breathing on her own. You got her back, First Sergeant. You got her back.”
Tiredly, giving in to the pain in his knee, Goose moved away from the woman and stood. He stared down at her.
A moment passed before she opened her eyes and tried to sit up.
“Easy,” Clay said, restraining her with a hand to her shoulder.
“Let me go!” Arnaud demanded, struggling more fiercely now. “Let me go!”
Goose nodded to the corporal, who released Arnaud.
The man dropped to the ground beside his wife. “Ah, Giselle! I thought you were lost to me!”
The woman looked at her husband, then at Goose. “I thought I was. I’m sure for a time I was dead. I was outside my body, standing here in this alley looking down at myself and you and these men. I was so scared. I was screaming for you, but you could not hear me. I thought I would never see you again. I felt like I was drifting away. Like fog giving way to the morning sun.” She shook her head and smiled. “Then I saw the angel.”
“Angel?” Arnaud seemed startled. “There was no angel.”
“There was,” the woman insisted. “There is. I saw it. The angel was at the sergeant’s shoulder as he worked to start my heart. The angel told me everything was going to be all right, that it wasn’t my time yet, that the sergeant was going to save me. Then the angel leaned down and touched my heart, and it started.”
Goose didn’t believe a word of it. The woman had gone through considerable trauma. It wasn’t surprising that she’d imagined the angel.
But she looked at
