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once. The motion set off a renewed explosion of fireworks in his skull.
    “Help is coming. We just need to get as far away from that bear’s meal as we can.”
    Confusion swirled through his thoughts as she somehow dragged him to his feet and thrust a long, straight branch into his hand. She draped his other arm over her shoulders. One step. Another. Each sent a shock wave of pain through his damaged leg, despite the makeshift splint he’d made earlier.
    The bear was at the road kill now—he could hear the sounds of ripping flesh—and then it fell silent.
    Sniffing the air, maybe, and rising on his hind legs.
    The bear grunted as it crashed forward through the brush, then halted—a false charge, probably, intended to warn away any competition.
    Though an empty threat didn’t guarantee the next charge wouldn’t be for real.
    “Can you stand on your own?” Tessa said sharply. She loomed closer for a quick look at his face, then propped him against a tree. “Stay put.”
    A faint wash of moonlight filtered through the overheard canopy. He could see her pull her rifle from her shoulder and double check its load.
    The bear was close enough that Josh could detect its strong odor now, and he could hear it coming straight at them.
    “Hang on,” Tessa said. “I don’t think either of us is ready to wrestle any bears in the dark.”
    She aimed at the sky and the crack of rifle fire cut through the darkness like an explosion.
    Silence.
    Then she fired again and the bear beat a hasty retreat, barreling through the trees like a runaway bulldozer.
    “That bought us time, but we still need to get out of here.”
    “You’re…right,” he managed, trying to focus on where she stood.
    But the ghostly pale birch trees started to shimmer and sway, and the stars spun in the sky as the sharp report of the rifle magnified. Filled the terrain with mortar explosions and billowing sand and a deadly rain of rock and engine parts and bodies…and screams.
    Always the terrified, agonizing screams.
    His vision dimmed. And when he hit the ground, the earth felt like a welcoming embrace.

     
    Tessa sat on a hard plastic chair in the emergency room waiting area, offering a sympathetic smile to a young mother trying to calm the screaming baby in her arms.
    Standing up, she paced the small room, then went to the emergency room doors and stepped outside to breathe the cool night air.
    “Ms. McAllister? Is that you?” A young nurse hurried to Tessa’s side. “You aren’t leaving, are you?”
    Tessa turned, her melancholy thoughts turning to fear in an instant. “Is something wrong?”
    “They’re taking your friend into surgery. The surgeon wants to talk to you, right now.”
    “Me?”
    Nodding, the nurse spun on her heel and hurried away through the double doors marked No Admittance, and led Tessa to the first triage room, where Josh lay on a gurney with IV tubes dangling above him and a digital monitor marking his heart rhythm.
    Dark bruises were already forming on the right side of his face. A laceration angling from his forehead to temple had been closed with butterfly bandages—the wounds a garish contrast to his pale, almost gray skin.
    His eyes were closed. He lay perfectly still.
    And it took very little imagination to imagine that he was already dead.
    She’d once felt nothing but anger toward him, but now all she wanted was to see his long, dark lashes flutter open and to see those hazel eyes sparkle with laughter. Please God, be with him. Help him make it through this.
    A middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, with a stethoscope dangling around her neck, stepped away from the bed and offered her hand. “I’m Dr. West. Mr. Bryant said that he has no relatives here. I understand you’re a friend.”
    A friend. She was hardly that, but she understood the situation. “I guess so.”
    Two orderlies appeared at the door. At the doctor’s nod, they bustled into the room and began preparing the gurney for transport. Within