“Pull me up, Vane! Pull me up!”
But he didn’t have that kind of purchase, and he knew his own strength was going to give out fast. His collar was choking him, the binoculars were digging into his chest. Clinging to the soil with one hand, he used the other to grope for the knife, lying only inches away, and then wedged its blade under the straining cord.
“I can’t hang on here!” Eddie grunted. “The rope’s killing me!”
With fumbling fingers, Harley sawed at the cord. It was taut as a piano wire, but he felt a thread start to frazzle. He sawed again, harder.
“Pull!” Eddie huffed, sounding as if the very air was being squeezed from his lungs.
Harley’s parka was wrapping itself around him like a python, and in a few seconds he wouldn’t even be able to move at all. Awkwardly, he worked the blade back and forth, back and forth.
“Pull!”
And then, just as he thought he would pass out, he heard a sharp twang, like a banjo string breaking, and all the pressure, all the weight on him, instantly stopped. The cord whizzed across the snow, while his fingers still held tight to the ground. And then he heard Eddie’s terrified cry, fast diminishing and swallowed in the wind. If there was a splash, it was lost in the storm.
Putting his face down, he felt the cold snow bathing his hot skin, and he simply lay there, breathing slowly, in and out, telling himself, over and over again, that he was still alive, he was still alive.
It was a long while before he had the courage, or the strength, to raise his head, look around, and see that the old woman was gone, too. He was all alone in the dark.
Chapter 40
Improvisation was the name of the game. Any epidemiologist worth his salt knew that you had to be able to turn on a dime when circumstances changed—and in the field, circumstances always did.
In a matter of less than an hour, Slater had managed to get a temporary quarantine tent rigged up inside the nave of the church, with everything from an overhead lamp to a powerful space heater, and he had put the wounded and half-delirious Lantos on a pair of IV drips; one contained a broad spectrum antibiotic to guard against the sepsis that was sure to follow from the slash of the wolf’s claw, and the other a concentrated solution of Demerol that had kept her sedated enough to allow him to do what he had to do. What he really needed was an anesthetist, but when he came to the island, he hadn’t planned to perform surgery on anyone still alive.
Groves and Rudy had been deployed to seal up the windows of the church to guard against any drafts or exposure, and Nika had been enlisted as head nurse. After her reaction to the work he’d had to do in the graveyard—drilling specimens from the deacon’s corpse—he wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle it, but to her credit, she hadn’t even balked at his request. In fact, she’d looked happy for the chance to redeem herself.
“Just tell me what to do,” she said, “and I’ll do it.”
And so she had. He’d had her suit up in everything from gloves to goggles, and now she was standing on the opposite side of the gurney, behaving as if she’d been in operating rooms all her life. When he’d needed her help to set up the IV lines, she took his instructions perfectly, and her nimble fingers did the job without hesitation. When he asked for an instrument, she instinctively seemed to know which one he meant, and when he needed her to hold a sponge, or even put her finger on a suture while he pulled the thread through the wounded flesh, she didn’t blanch—or if she did, he couldn’t see it behind her protective gear.
“You’re doing a great job,” he said, his voice muffled by his own face mask.
“Then why am I sweating so much?”
“We all do. It’s why we burn these damn suits afterward.” It occurred to him that she’d have made a fine country doctor—and from what he’d gathered in town, Port Orlov needed one.