Page 22 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 3

“Hunh.”Will’s grunt smoked in the chill as he sat back on his heels. “Well, that’s interesting.”

“What’s interesting?” Emma kept her gloved palms firmly clamped on a wad of QuikClot layered over Rachel’s scalp wound. Although Will had already checked for a fracture, feeling carefully through blue latex with his good left hand as she swabbed away blood so he’d have a decent view, she was still leery of pressing too hard. A lot of her training had come back, though. Most of the medical stuff was pretty basic: applying a neck brace and then hefting Rachel out of her seat and onto the sleeping bag Mattie unfurled. Will did the best he could, and he was strong, but with every move that jarred his shoulder, which meant about every move he made, she could tell from the way he sucked in through his teeth that the pain had to be bad. (After dry-swallowing two acetaminophen, he had her slip on a sling from his emergency medical kit so that right arm wouldn’t flop around. He said they’d fix him as soon as he checked her out. Oh. Joy. She was looking forward to both with about as much enthusiasm as a root canal.) She was actually too cold to be much interested in anything except something hot to drink…Wait. I still have that disgusting tea. “What is it?”

Draping his stethoscope around his neck with his working hand, Will regarded Rachel’s abdomen with a speculative eye. “I don’t know.”

“Is it the baby?”

“What?” Mattie was at the front of the ruined fuselage where she’d been dragging luggage from the cargo hold to block off the opening but now turned and said, with a new note of alarm, “Joshua isn’t hurt, is he?”

“As far as I can tell, your brother’s fine. Good movement, heartbeat’s steady, but there’s something.” Will’s frown deepened. Haahing into his left hand to warm it, he placed his palm along the lower margin of Rachel’s belly and gently followed the curve. “I think only your mom can tell us for sure.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. Emma watched Rachel’s abdomen swell and shift as the baby responded to Will’s touch. “Tell us what?”

“If the baby’s dropped at all. It’s been a long time since my ob-gyn rotation. I know how to deliver a baby, but as for whether that’s imminent…”

“Imminent.” The word dropped from Mattie’s mouth like a stone. “You mean, Joshua’s going to be born? Now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Or maybe not, and this is the way she carries him. The problem is this is the first time I’ve examined your mom. I don’t know where Joshua likes to hang out, on the second floor or the first. We’ll have to wait for your mom to tell us.”

“What if she doesn’t wake up to tell you?” Mattie’s eyes welled. “What will happen then? Why are we awake and not her?”

“Because as far as I can tell, she’s got a really bad concussion.”

“Scott watches football. Players with concussions get up all the time.”

“And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re knocked out. That’s what’s happened to your mom, but I don’t think anything worse is going on.”

Mattie looked stricken “What could be worse?”

“A couple things,” Will said. “None of which I think your mom has.”

Mattie’s eyes narrowed. “But you don’t know for sure.”

“No, I can’t possibly. To be sure, I’d need access to a whole bunch of diagnostic tools I don’t have. But let’s not panic yet. It’s only been a couple of hours. Your mom could wake up by nightfall or in the middle of the night or tomorrow morning.”

Or maybe not at all. Emma studied Rachel’s placid features. If this were a Hallmark special, a week would go by, and they’d be on the brink of starvation. Wolves would descend at the moment Rachel went into labor, leaving Emma to deliver the baby because something would’ve happened to Will or maybe he was fending off the wolves or rescuing Mattie or fending off wolves and rescuing Mattie when—cue soaring music—a helicopter miraculously appeared, scattering the wolves and whisking them all away in time for Christmas but not before Emma had swaddled a perfect baby boy in a blanket or something and handed him over to Rachel. She was, in fact, almost positive there’d been an episode like this several years back on NCIS, only Gibbs had delivered the kid while Ziva David kicked butt as only a Jewish Mossad ninja warrior could. God, what a great character. Ziva being Israeli was icing on the cake. For a while there, when she’d been with Ben, and he was doing his undercover work, Emma had toyed with the idea of learning how to fight like that on general principle. She’d even daydreamed of she and Ben taking on the bad guys together.

You’re an idiot. She had to get a grip. Not everything had its correlate in a movie or show. This is reality, Greg—and then she had to wrestle the smile into submission before it settled on her mouth. Gosh, E.T. had been one heck of a good flick.

“Is my mom in a coma?” asked Mattie.

“I’m afraid so, honey. Here, let me show you, okay?” Pulling out a penlight, Will clicked it on then flicked the light into Rachel’s open eye and then away before repeating the maneuver. “There, see how her pupil doesn’t get smaller when I shine the light. That’s what happens to people in a coma. And if I do this?” Pushing up a sleeve of Rachel’s jacket to reveal bare skin, Will gathered a healthy pinch between thumb and forefinger and squeezed. Rachel’s face remained placid, and her arm didn’t move away. “Unconscious people respond to pain. Comatose people don’t.”

“So this is really bad.”

“It’s better not to be comatose, yes. I would love it if she would wake up, and if I knew why she was out or how long she’ll stay this way, I’d tell you. But that sometimes happens in traumatic brain injury. The body’s not dumb. It knows when to take a rest.”

Well, woo-hoo. Let’s hear it for the body. So long as Rachel kept making like the Eveready Bunny, the baby would keep ticking, too. But what if Rachel’s body up and quit? What would they do about the baby then? Will knew medicine, but did he know how to save an unborn child even as the mother’s body gave up the ghost?

And then there was this, the fact of the crash, that they were stranded in the middle of nowhere. She glanced toward the front of the fuselage. There was precious little to see, other than snow. The light had gone a bluish sharkskin gray as the day slid toward dusk. A little while back, Mattie had stamped outside to look for the cockpit, but the snow was too thick, and Will shouted at her to come back before she wandered off and got lost. Even so, Mattie had lingered, yelling for her grandfather, for anyone, but all she got back was the hiss of snow on metal and plastic, the hollow groan of wind, her own voice. Hours had passed with no thump of choppers, no hails from intrepid rescuers risking life and limb.

So where was everyone? Their plane was overdue. All of them were expected and now hadn’t arrived. Hank Cooper should be waiting, and so should this Kujo character. When it got dark and no one showed up…when someone tried calling Burke’s plane and got dead air…they’d know to start looking, right?

Right?

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