Her Last Defense

“Give me an hour or two,” she said. Her voice shook, adding to Clint’s misgiving. “I have something else to take care of first.”

He studied the grim-faced guards behind her. Older, these two. More experienced. They’d seen some things, he was sure. Things they didn’t talk about. He could see it in their eyes.

“What else?” he asked.

“It’s…not your concern.”

“If you’re messing with that bug again, out here where there’s still innocent people who could be exposed—”

“It’s not the virus.”

“Then what is this place?”

A wave of torment washed over her expression. “It’s the morgue. I have to identify the bodies.”

Macy stood frozen inside the flap to the tent housing the temporary morgue. She felt as if her respirator had suddenly quit working. She couldn’t draw a breath. Her chest burned, but it wasn’t enough to melt the icy shock that encapsulated her, held her immobile as a statue.

There were only three bodies.

She heard a swish of the tent flap behind her, a quiet step, and knew the Ranger had followed her inside. His hand on her shoulder was like an electric shock. It restarted her heart, jolted her lungs. She gulped in a noisy breath.

“What are you doing here?”

“Earlier, you said the people on the plane were your friends.” His voice was low, rumbling and hoarse through the gas mask he’d finally donned. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

Compassion from the Ranger? It didn’t seem to fit. But then, maybe there was more to the man than a stony countenance and flat eyes. But she wouldn’t bet on it.

“I shouldn’t have to do this at all,” she said, drawing her mind back to the black bags laid in a neat row. “They shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t have happened.”

“If man were meant to fly we’d all be born with boarding passes stamped on our foreheads.”

Ah, there was the hard-assed Ranger she knew.

“Guard?” she called. When he poked his head inside, she asked, “Where are the others?”

“Other what, ma’am?”

“The other…remains.” She couldn’t quite think of them as bodies. Bodies belonged to people. What was in those bags belonged to God.

The burly guard frowned. “That’s all they found.”

Ranger Hayes stepped up beside her. “How many are there supposed to be?”

“Six.” Her heart fluttered like a flock of startled sparrows. “You don’t think—”

“We searched all around that wreck. There were no survivors,” Hayes said, guessing what she was thinking. “Are you sure all six people got on the flight?”

The possibility that it had been a mistake, that David hadn’t been on board flared in a ball of bright hope for a moment, then sputtered out.

“I verified it with authorities in Malaysia right after I was notified of the crash.” Her eyes grew warm, full. “They’re still out there. Somewhere.”

“Lot of scavengers out in woods like these. Wouldn’t take them long to tear apart a fresh kill, carry off the pieces,” the burly guard said.

While images of wolves ripping raw meat off a carcass played in Macy’s mind, the Ranger rolled a heavy gaze to the guard. “Thank you, that was very helpful,” he said dryly. “That will be all.”

The guard ducked out, and Macy walked toward the three black bags. “I need to know who—I need to know.”

But her hands stalled on the zipper. The Ranger’s hands brushed them away. His eyes were the color of a full moon, his expression just as distant. How did he do it? How did he stand in front of the dead and not so much as blink? A chill ran down her spine as the image of Robocop popped into her head. The half-man, half-machine enforcer had nothing on Clint Hayes.

“I’ll open them up,” he said. “You just call out the names. I’ll take care of the rest.”

She wheeled, hating having her weakness on display for a man like the Ranger. This was her responsibility. She wouldn’t shirk it. “No!”

He was already pulling at the zipper tab. She pushed him away. “It’s my responsibility.”

He turned toward her, his brows drawn.

She drew herself up to her full height, diminutive as it was next to his towering frame. “Like I said, they were my friends. I owe it to them.”

After a moment’s pause, he stepped back, watching her speculatively. Macy reached for the bag again. Her hands shook as she pulled on the zipper tab.

The smell hit her first, even filtered through her respirator, the pungent odor of death that seemed to pull the bile up from her gut like a vacuum pump. She clamped her mouth shut and held her breath, her eyes watering and her chest aching as she edged the bag open another inch. She saw the tattered sleeve of a blue polo shirt caked with coagulated blood and dirt. A dark-skinned hand, abraded and charred, slipped out.

Her breath whooshed out and the zipper whooshed shut at the same time. “It’s Cory Holcomb, one of our lab technicians.” And the only African-American on-board. At least she hadn’t had to look at his face, into his dead eyes, to identify him.

Facing away, gasping for cleaner air she gulped in a few breaths before turning back to the next bag.

“You sure you want to go on with this?” the Ranger asked.

“I have to.”

Her heart pounded. Sweat pooled on her palms beneath her rubber gloves. The second zipper eased down though she had no conscious thought of opening it. A shock of blond hair greeted her. A freckled face and a mouth that had once always seemed to be laughing. Now he seemed to be screaming. She could only imagine the terror of his last moments…

Tremors wracking her whole body, Macy reached out and gently pulled his eyelids down over his blue eyes…

“It’s Bob Turner, our copilot.”

She moved on to the next. “Timlen Zufria, a Malaysian doctor who was working with us.”

She zipped the last bag closed and turned, pressing her palm into her stomach to try to calm the churning. The burning. She needed to leave. To run. But the Ranger stood in her way.

“Who else was on board?”

“The pilot, Michael Cain.” A tear brushed her cheek. She’d flown with this crew many times. “He has two kids. A girl and a boy.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and hugged, mentally shaking herself. The Ranger didn’t want to hear her sentimental rambling.

“Ty Jeffries, the man who managed the cargo,” she added. “And David Brinker.” Her stomach twisted brutally. Unable to stop the rising tide of bile, she pushed Hayes out of her way and ran out of the tent to the edge of the encampment, where she hunkered down behind a scrub mesquite, yanked off her helmet and lost what little food she’d been able to swallow this morning.