Waves of dizziness floated over her, but she kept herself steady. She tried to take a deep breath, but her badly bruised ribs would not allow it.
She radioed a warning for others not to come into the area of snow infected with the bacteria. Bio technicians would come in first.
“Is anyone else in the house?” Marcus asked the girl. Her pigtails quivered from the trembling.
“Just my daddy and me.” She sobbed and raised her hands toward Marcus in a pleading gesture. “Mommy went to Anchorage and won’t be back till tomorrow.”
“The dad!” Marcus repeated, remembering the shots he’d heard as he entered the house. He ran to the next room. The girl’s father lay in on the floor near the bottom of the stairs. Marcus felt the man’s neck for a pulse.
“He’s still alive!”
Marcus turned the man over and laid him flat on the floor. Gurgling air bubbled in and out of a punctured lung. Marcus ran his hands over the man’s body, inspecting the wounds. The shots had entered his right lung and shoulder. Marcus pressed his hand over the chest wound as Lonnie brought a medical aid bag from the truck in the living room.
They bandaged his wounds, sealing the punctured lung with the airtight plastic wrapper of the bandage. Marcus laid him on his right side to keep the blood from flowing into his left lung. Lonnie radioed for an ambulance for both the man and girl.
A rumble of a large diesel engine erupted behind the house. Marcus envisioned the North Korean’s decomposed body charging the house with a bulldozer. As the sound moved around toward the front of the house, he grabbed the man’s hunting rifle and ran outside. toward
Marcus raised the rifle at toward the massive machine. The dozer lowered its blade to the ground and pushed the deep snow to one side, making a clear path from the road to the front porch. Marcus lowered the rifle as the driver came into view.
“Wazzy?” Marcus shouted.
“S’up, Mojo?” Wasner smiled in response, “I started out in the Seabees, you know? There’s an ambulance waiting for the hurt guy and the kid—I’m just making a path away from the nasty stuff so they can get in. The bio team assured me that the nasties are spreading slowly because of the temperature, so we’re probably safe, but have to hurry.”
He drove the dozer away. Seconds later, a large blue ambulance backed to the porch. Paramedics jumped from the rear doors and ran inside. They wasted no time lifting the father onto a gurney and wheeling him into the back of the ambulance. They stabilized him for transport, setting up IV’s and oxygen.
One of the female EMT’s found the girl’s coat and shoes. She helped her into the ambulance with her father, cleaning more blood from the child with a wet sanitary wipe.
One of the medic’s looked at Lonnie. “Ma’am, you need to go to the hospital.”
“I’m alright,” replied Lonnie.
“No, you’re not.” He said. “I’ve got another ambulance on the way. I’ll wait back until it arrives.”
The door at the rear of the ambulance closed with a loud click, and the large, blocky vehicle took off toward the highway, where a med-evac helicopter waited to rush the man to the hospital in Anchorage.
Marcus watched as the ambulance pulled away. He felt Lonnie put her hand on his shoulder. She let out a long sigh, then leaned into him. Marcus turned toward her. She collapsed into his arms, and kept falling.
Chapter 47
Providence Hospital
Anchorage, Alaska
December 20th
22:00 Hours
A warm, yellow light glowed from the corner of the room. Beneath the lamp, in an institutional-quality red cloth chair, Marcus Johnson sat quietly. He stared at the soft lines of Lonnie’s face, as she lay unconscious in the hospital bed. An IV bag hung from a metal hook above the head of the bed, gradually releasing a flow of life-sustaining liquid into her body.
When they had arrived at the Sisters of Providence hospital in Anchorage early that morning, her bruised face was as pale as the sheets on which she now lay. Her vital signs were erratic. Her pulse, blood pressure, and breathing had been going from fast and furious one minute to slow and relaxed the next.
The door opened as the hands of the clock moved to 10 pm. A thin, dark-skinned man in a white lab coat entered.
Marcus started to rise from the chair, slowed by exhaustion.
“Sit down, Mr. Johnson. You need to get some rest as well, or you will wind up as a patient yourself.”
Doctor Ravi Patel spoke with a strong, but understandable, Pakistani accent that fit his physical features. He strolled over to the bed on which Lonnie lay, picked up the chart, and looked at the numbers the floor nurse had been updating every half hour.
“Well, my friend,” the physician started, “she certainly is a strong woman. I do not understand how she survived, with all that happened to her.” He tapped an index finger on the chart. The pen rattled against the metal surface.
“The bullet graze on the left side of her skull was deep, but did not break bone. That, of course, is not the only wound. She has multiple contusions on the front back and side of the head, two broken fingers, a badly sprained ankle, a bruised shoulder, and four cracked ribs from the gunshot impacts. She is lucky she was wearing a bulletproof vest. Even with that, I am truly surprised she survived the blunt trauma of the bullets with only cracked ribs. When I was doing my residency in Atlanta, I saw two police officers die from similar gunshot wounds, in spite of the vest. The impacts had bruised their hearts irreparably.
“This woman, though ,” he paused and looked at
