Page 87 of Deadly Strain

“No.” She shook her head slowly. “I think this is your everyday average wound infection.”

“Let me see it,” he demanded in his normal bossy tone of voice, and took a step toward her.

Sharp did not get out of his way. “Just so we’re clear, Doctor,” he said low and slow. “Grace’s well-being is my number-one priority.”

“Ah, so that’s what this is about,” Max said nodding as if he completely understood. “I assure you, I will never do anything to jeopardize her health.” He paused as if carefully considering his next words. “Or happiness.”

She couldn’t see Sharp’s face, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders. “Awesome.”

She frowned. She was missing something here, she just couldn’t figure out what. She did know she was going to have to have a talk with Sharp about his attitude.

“Grace,” Max said to her. “Where’s that wound?”

“On my leg.”

He shifted his attention to below her waist. “Take off your pants.”

***

Sharp wanted to wraphis hands around Max’s neck and choke the living shit out of him.Did the guy have any common sense?You didn’t order a woman in an enclosed space this small to take off her pants and expect to get no attention. Not when there were eighteen other guys in there with her.

It didn’t help that after about two incredulous seconds, Grace started to laugh—big, giant, silent guffaws—and kept on laughing until she fell on her ass.

“What’s so funny?” Max asked, tilting his head to look at her sideways, like she was some kind of problem he wanted to fix.

“Pants,” she said, continuing to laugh.

Max crouched next to her and stuck an electronic thermometer into her ear. It beeped, and he didn’t look happy with the result.

“How high is it?” Sharp asked.

“One hundred and four.” Max put the thermometer into a pocket, grabbed Grace under her elbow and tried to haul her to her feet. “I need to look at that wound.”

Sharp strode over and scooped Grace off the ground, her laughter dissolving into giggling and hiccups. He went into the alcove and laid her on the makeshift bed she’d just been sleeping on and began working on her belt and the fastening on her pants. He managed to pull them down and reveal the bandaged wound.

Max cut it off with a pair of scissors he fished out of another pocket.

Red, puffy skin, even worse than before, with each stitch now weeping a yellowish discharge, made Sharp glad the doctor was here for the first time since he arrived.

Grace hadn’t warned him that Max had no bedside manner to speak of.

“Fuck,” the doctor said. “Who put these stitches in?” he demanded of no one in particular. “A baboon? A crackhead? A drunk?” Max stood and walked to the pile of equipment bags not far away in the main cave muttering, “Incompetent morons think they can just throw something together out of dental floss and duct tape and expect it to heal fine.”

He returned with an IV set, a bag of saline and another smaller bag of fluid. “I need something to hang these bags from,” Max told Sharp. “Preferably a couple of feet above her.”

Sharp had seen something that might work lying on the ground in the tunnel. A metal pole, one end twisted and bent. He grabbed it, and by the time he got back to the alcove, Max had the IV needle in the back of Grace’s hand and saline dripping through the line.

Sharp worked the unbent end into the ground and hung the saline from it. He gave it a shake. It seemed sturdy enough.

Max attached the smaller bag to Grace’s IV line and began feeding her the antibiotic.

“Do you have enough for her?” he asked her boss.

“Yes, this isn’t Cipro. What she’s got is a staph infection, not anthrax.” Max stood. “She’s going to need a few hours of sleep before the fever breaks. She looks like shit.”

“It’s been a shitty couple of days.”

Max snorted, but he seemed content enough.

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