Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 135382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 677(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 451(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 677(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 451(@300wpm)
“What’s going on, Doc?” Alfi Dauterre asked, glancing out the window. “Shit. Those aren’t locals.” He squared his shoulders. He was dressed for the bush, intending to go out hunting later in the day. He pulled his Tilley down over his head and made sure his shoulder holster was secure as the door burst open.
There he was, the “boss.”
“Hey there, mate.” Alfi stepped in front of them. Keniyah had gone out the back and Steph remembered praying they were already making their way to the road that led through the woods and to the village. “What’s the problem?”
The “boss” was dressed in fatigues, his face scarred, but he looked perfectly clean. His uniform appeared to have been pressed and his beard was neat and trimmed. “I hear there’s a doctor works out of this clinic. Got a man down. Need to see him.”
“I’m Dauterre, Alfred Dauterre,” Alfi said. “And you are?”
The man ignored Alfi’s outstretched hand, preferring to pull a gun on him. “I’m the man who will murder you if you don’t present the doctor. Did you call yourself the doctor? I can barely understand you Australians.”
“I’m the doctor,” she said, stepping forward.
She turned to the Kai in her head. “I introduced myself.”
“You didn’t think about pretending you are a nurse, or maybe be a patient?” Kai asked.
She could see herself talking to the big man with the gun. He was telling her about a patient. A man. “No. He came in pointing a gun Alfi’s way. I couldn’t let him shoot someone. At the time, I thought the patient might be his son or someone close to him. He seemed desperate though cold. Some people have that reaction. They detach themselves so they don’t have to feel too deeply. I thought that was what was happening, but I quickly learned something different.”
“Where was Nate?”
A shiver went through her. “He was asleep. He naps for long periods of time during the day. I’d just fed him and I had a baby monitor on him. I thought at the time that Keniyah had gotten him out, but I realized later she hadn’t. I think because he wasn’t in the clinic she either forgot about him or couldn’t make her way around to get him out. I don’t blame her.”
“You’re not angry?”
She shook her head. “I gave her a lot to do. Likely she thought I would get him out.”
“When did you realize he wasn’t safe?”
The scene shifted and suddenly she was in her operating room. She and Anya were working on the man. Anya sucked away much of the blood and Steph could see the wound more clearly.
“I was working on the patient and I heard Nate through the monitor. I had my hand inside the man, trying to get the bullet free, and I heard my son wake up.”
She watched herself falter, the horror of what was happening dawning on her face.
“Don’t you stop, Doctor.” The boss was standing right outside the room, looking inside. “I’ll take care of the child. It’s a good trade-off, you see. You take care of this man, ensure he doesn’t die, and I’ll do the same for the child.” He turned back and shouted. “Find the baby.”
“That must have been a horrible moment,” Kai said.
One of many. “He’d already explained to me that he would kill me and my nurse if we didn’t save the patient. That’s not what he called him. No.” Her mind was working. He’d called the man something else. Something weird. “Verse…something.”
“Go back to that moment. This isn’t the real world. This is your movie and you can fast forward or slow it down. You can select the scene. Go back to when you first spoke to the boss. Run through the scene again. Concentrate on that moment.”
He’d called the man something else. Not a name, but a word. It had been all jumbled up in her head, but now she thought it was important. He’d spoken in English most of the time. But this once, the word seemed to fail him and he’d spat out something in his own language.
What language was it?
“I’ll write it down and we’ll figure it out. Stop trying to force it. Let it slip and flow,” Kai ordered, his voice as calm as the world around her was chaotic.
Because Alfi was trying to step in front of her, putting a hand up as the boss got in her face. She could still feel the tension of the moment, waiting for the small room to explode in gunfire.
“Step back, mate,” Alfi was saying. “This doesn’t have to get violent.”
“If I have to kill you, I will. Do you understand me?” The boss’s face had turned a florid red, and now she was surrounded.
“They were all around me,” Steph told Kai. “They flanked us like they were setting us up for slaughter. I was strangely calm about it. I knew he wanted me to save someone, but Alfi was being overprotective.”