Wounds, Book 1 Read Online Free PDF

never going to find me. They won’t even know where to look. It could be days before they figure out we’re missing and now I’m never getting out of here, I’m stuck, and I’m never getting out, I’ve got to get out, get out, get me out, let me out…!
    “Shut up.” She squeezed her eyes tight. “Shut up, shut up! Don’t panic. Nothing’s for sure. They might find you; they’re probably looking right now, so just shut up, nothing’s certain, absolutely nothing.” But she knew she was lying because there was, of course, one thing of which she was very certain.
    Julian Bashir was dead.
    Chapter
6
    K ahayn smelled the ER before she saw it: a sick, gassy odor of wet gangrene mingling with the full, ripe stink of feces, old blood, and fresh vomit. Stronger than usual today, and when she turned the corner down the last hall, she saw a double line of gurneys wedged head to toe along the left and right walls; a patient cocooned under a sheet, a ream of paperwork on a clipboard, triaging each casualty by diagnosis and urgency. (They were all sick, and they were all urgent. Again, typical.)
    A lanky man with pewter-gray hair stepped into the corridor. Arin wore blue scrubs that blood had dyed black and a dingy white coat that never seemed to come clean no matter what. Spotting her, he stumped down the hall, favoring that gimp knee of his.
    “You took long enough,” he said, jabbing a finger at the bridge of a pair of owlish, steel-rimmed specs that had slid to the tip of his nose.
    “Bleeder,” she said as they headed for the triage suite. “Lung rot. The usual. So, what’s all the fuss about?”
    Arin blew out, stabbed his glasses back into place again. “All kinds of craziness.” Older by almost two decades, Arin wore glasses because he was a tad old-fashioned. Said he’d keep the eyes, until they fell out on their own; no marbles for him just yet, thanks. She envied him the eyes. They were so…natural. Pupils worked very smoothly; you could see the iris muscles contract or lengthen like some sort of miracle, and the tracking from side to side was phenomenal. So efficient. No glitches at all. “Some casualty that slipped past the guards at the perimeter,” he said.
    “Hunh.” She was impressed. “That takes some doing. Guards found him?”
    “On patrol, yeah.”
    “How’d he get in?”
    Arin shrugged. His limp was worse today, and his knee squealed. “They don’t know. One look, though, and they brought it here. Figured they sure weren’t going to get stuck without getting some kind of clearance.”
    “So clear him. Shouldn’t be that difficult.”
    “It’s really not that simple,” said Arin. “Trust me on this.”
    “Why do I feel like the worst is yet to come?”
    He eyed her over his glasses and didn’t smile. “Because it is.”
    They pushed into the ER, past a knot of nurses and one physician working frenetically over one patient who Kahayn could tell by the blood spatter wasn’t going to make it. The ER was arranged in a long rectangle, with curtained bays lining each wall and a triage station centered at the head. Behind the triage station were two critical-care bays. (A joke: You made it to the ER, you were critical. The staff was so overwhelmed that, anything less, and they just laughed in your face.) Kahayn spotted a quartet of uniforms, three with their rifles at the ready. That was bad. She didn’t like rifles anywhere near the ER.
    But it was the man who wore the fourth uniform that told her, instantly, whoever this patient was, he wasn’t run of the mill. The uniform was a bullish man with a neck so thick and short his head seemed glued to his shoulders, and a pair of goggle, walleyes that always unsettled her.
    “Oh, hell,” she muttered. “How’d he get here so fast?”
    Arin grunted. “Like I said, it’s not that simple. Blate’s people told him about the intruder, and then he showed up just as I was getting started. Since then, they haven’t let me near it.