and pocked—some of those shots he’d heard had been from bullets fired directly at it, as if attempting to get inside, in pursuit of...?
Hope exploded inside of him, even more colorful and bright, and Thomas emerged from the brush, stopping only to grab one of the casings.
Cool to his touch, it was not their rifle’s caliber, and his hope grew even stronger as he moved toward the hatch.
The metal frame of the small door was streaked with blood, and ice-white fear slammed back into his body with a rush that he ruthlessly tamped down as he quickly keyed in the code that would open the lock.
The hatch popped and he swung it open and leaned inside.
And found himself staring into the barrel of the hunting rifle.
A few inches above it was Tasha’s fiercest warrior-face. But then her eyes widened.
“You’re alive!” She breathed the words he was inwardly shouting as she immediately lowered the rifle onto the floor while he climbed inside and secured the door behind him.
She was already launching herself at him, pulling him down to the floor and nearly knocking him over as the part of him that was flooded with relief waged war with the hospital corpsman who could not ignore those streaks of blood.
“You’re hurt,” he managed to say, only allowing himself the briefest moment of ferocious contact from Tasha’s tackle-of-a-hug before pushing her to arms length so he could examine her in the landing’s dim light. “Were you shot?”
“No,” she told him. “I’m okay. Oh my God, Thomas, I’m so sorry.”
Her face was grimy and tear-streaked and her eyes were rimmed with red. She looked a little dazed sitting there, but other than that bore no real sign of shock. She had a scratch on her forehead, up by her hairline, but that wasn’t bleeding enough to warrant those handprints on the door.
But now Thomas saw that there was blood on him, on his right hand and arm, simply from embracing her, and he slipped back into firefight mode, because she was definitely not okay. He got onto his knees and pulled back even further from her and looked at her hands—her left was bloody. He turned her and yeah, the entire left sleeve of her winter jacket was bloodstained.
His caveman brain spun and screamed about arteries and bleeding out, while his soldier and scientist brain coolly assessed. This hadn’t just happened. The shell casing he’d picked up hadn’t been hot. He’d heard the shots fired and it had taken him twenty long minutes to get all the way back here. She’d been sitting here for all that time. This wasn’t a bleed-out amount of blood. She was not going to die.
His caveman agreed. He would die himself before he let that happen.
“Whoa!” Tasha was genuinely shocked as she looked down at her arm. “What did I do?”
“You left the shelter,” Thomas told her grimly as he yanked down the zipper of her jacket. He was carrying the hunting knife he’d taken from the body by the ski lodge, and ER protocol would have him slice open her sleeve. But she wasn’t bleeding out, she was merely bleeding, and he didn’t want to destroy one of the few pieces of warm clothing they had left. “You got yourself shot in the arm.” He hoped it was only in the arm, and he scanned the rest of her quickly. The blood on her jeans seemed to be from her arm—aside from a pair of skinned knees.
“I think I would’ve noticed being shot in the arm,” she countered.
“Adrenaline can do amazing things,” he told her, pushing her jacket off her shoulders. “Can you help me?”
She pulled her right arm, the uninjured one, out of her jacket first even as she wiggled her left fingers. “I can use my left hand. And move my arm. It doesn’t hurt. See?” She demonstrated further, but immediately stopped, cradling her arm to her chest. “Hoh shit, now it hurts! Oh my God!”
She was free from the jacket except for that left sleeve, and Thomas was desperate to see the extent of her injury. Still, he stopped, but she held out her arm to him. “Band-aid pull! Do it, fast!”
So he did.
“Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!” she said.
“It helps if you say fuck.” Thomas tossed the bloody jacket aside. Her shirt had a row of buttons up the front and long sleeves. Again, her left sleeve was saturated with blood. He could see there was a tear, upper arm, posterior,