Her Last Defense

He must have expected her to be angry at his intrusion, because his eyes rounded in surprise for a moment before the steel curtain he hid behind so often slammed down.

The truth was, she was glad for his company. Under the canopy of trees, the forest felt like a morgue. The temperature was several degrees cooler. Leaves muffled their footsteps. The critters that should have been scuttling around were quiet, as if in deference to the dead.

She didn’t want to be alone with the dead again.

The going was rough, as Ranger Hayes had said it would be. At times the underbrush grew in impenetrable walls. The saw-grass vines seemed alive, reaching out to snag her arms and ankles. Three-inch mesquite thorns sharp enough to puncture the sole of a boot and thick enough to impale a girl to the bone made every step over a broken limb an adventure.

They walked wordlessly until, after nearly an hour, she sat on a mossy boulder near a thin stream to catch her breath.

The Ranger loomed over her, swiveled his head. Sunlight angled through the boughs overhead in sharp beams.

“Gonna be dark before long,” he said.

Out of habit she checked the seals between her suit and gloves. “Couple of hours.”

“We should head back.”

“In a while.”

His forehead furrowed over his face mask. “You do know which way is back, don’t you?”

“Approximately six-tenths of a mile on a heading of ninety-four degrees.”

His scowl deepened. “What’re you, a Girl Scout leader wannabe?”

He looked so perplexed that when she smiled this time, it almost felt genuine. She opened her fanny pack, pulled out her Garmin, checked the heading to the waypoint she’d made at base, and pointed. “That way.”

He leaned over her. “GPS?”

“Part of the standard CDC field pack.” She patted the zippered pouch sewn into the waist of her suit. “GPS, satellite phone, two-way text pager. Just because I’m not from the big city doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate modern technology.”

“All right, Techno-Girl. You know where we came from. But do you have any idea where you’re going?”

She stood, walked about fifteen feet to her left where there was a break in the trees and pointed up and to the right. “There?”

He followed her outstretched hand with his gaze. Some distance away, six large, black birds glided above the trees. Her stomach plummeted with each heavy swoop of their wings. “Buzzards? You’re chasing buzzards?”

“They’re feeding,” she said, trying not to picture what lay below them.

“It could be anything. A possum, the remains of a deer some hunter left behind.”

“Or one of the men from the plane.”

He took her arm in his hand. “Look, we have to get back. We’ll call the state. They’ve got dogs that can search these woods in a fraction of the time it will take us, and do a hell of a better job at it.”

“We’re almost there.”

When she pulled away from him, he made a sound somewhere between a growl and groan and stepped in front of her, this time holding her in place more firmly. “You don’t have to do this yourself. Do you hear me? You do not need to be the one to find your friends.”

But his words faded in her mind. Her ears were tuned to another sound. A chirping, trilling chatter. A sound that didn’t belong in the quiet woods.

“Shh,” she said.

“What?”

“Listen,” she whispered, and let her eyes fall partway closed to hone in on the direction of the sound. When she opened them again, she pointed over the Ranger’s shoulder. “There.”

He turned, and the color blanched from his skin. His hand gripped her arm with bruising force.

In a tree twenty feet away, a black-and-white ball of fur scampered out a limb and plucked a nut from a twig, gnawed on it, chattered some more and threw its prize to the ground.

“I’m no doc, doc,” the Ranger said in the most un-emotional tone she’d heard from him yet. “But that monkey doesn’t look dead to me.”

No. Not dead.

Not even close.

Chapter 5

Clint’s right hand reached for the weapon he always carried on his hip and came up empty.

“Impossible.” Dr. Attois’s words were barely audible. She crouched and held out one hand toward the cat-size ball of fur with the pink nose on the tree limb. The monkey mimicked her gesture, holding out its paw. “Here, little monkey, monkey. Here, Josе.”

“What are you doing?” Clint tried to watch the animal, but all he could see was the puncture on the thigh of the doctor’s biohazard suit. The tear near her elbow. She’d have been better off with a simple gas-mask-type of device such as Clint wore—wasn’t wearing, actually, he realized, and yanked the device over his face, tightening the straps until they cut into the back of his head.

Wouldn’t matter if her clothes were torn to shreds if she had a mask like his that sealed airtight around her face so the virus couldn’t get in her lungs, or the mucous membranes of her eyes or nose.

“Come here, Josе. Come on, little guy.”

“Josе?”

“The monkey.”

An Hispanic monkey from Malaysia. Carrying the most lethal virus of this decade.

Jesus.

Clint checked the straps around his face, tightened them another fraction of an inch. A rivulet of sweat ran down his temple and lodged against the rubber seal at his jaw. “What are you going to do with it if you catch it? You’ve got holes all over your suit.”

“It’s all right. We’re upwind of him. The virus will be drifting the other way. I just need to get close enough for him to see the food.” She dug gently in the zippered pouch at her waist. Paper crinkled, and out came a granola bar. She eased the wrapper off and set the bar on the ground in front of her. “If he finds food here, he’s more likely to stay in the area.”

“Fine. Great.” The trickle of sweat from his forehead was becoming a river. He was going to drown in his face mask if they didn’t get out of here soon. “Let’s go.”

The monkey scampered down the tree trunk and took a tentative step toward Dr. Attois, then another. She rose and backed away slowly, stopping to dig in her pouch again, this time pulling out her GPS.

“What are you doing?” Clint hissed.

“Marking a waypoint so we can give the exact coordinates to a recovery team.”