Lethal Treatment Read online

  Lethal Treatment

  Dr. Calista St. James—Book One

  S.A. Gardner

  LETHA TREATMENT: (A Dr. Calista St. James Medical Action Thriller—Book One)

  Copyright © 2020 by S.A. Gardner

  Publisher: Seshat Press

  ISBN-13: 978-1-949920-02-4

  All rights reserved.

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  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, stored in, or introduced into a database or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Disclaimer

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  From the Author

  About the Author

  Also By S.A. Gardner

  Prologue

  Northern South Sudan

  I laid my fingers on the baby girl’s twig-like neck, checking her carotid pulse. I knew I’d find none.

  The girl was long dead. Of literal hunger.

  Still, her mother cooed to her, kept trying to coax her to take her shriveled, bone-dry breast.

  My burning eyes tore away from the wrenching sight. But there was no escape. Strewn all around me, burnt bodies languished in the sterile harshness of my emergency light, mutilated wraiths, crowding my vision, warping my mind. And I’d come here thinking I was ready for anything.

  My performance reports at Combat Doctor Project had always included adjectives like imperturbable and steel-nerved. And I’d been thoroughly debriefed about this specific mission.

  The guerrillas who’d been occupying this village had an MO. They descended on civilians, crippled or killed fighting-age males, raped all females, and enslaved all survivors for the duration of their stay. When they departed, they razed everything to the ground, took the sturdy boys as new recruits and left only a few witnesses. The tales those told paved them a path of uncontested future submission, assuring their ascension on the totem pole of this blossoming genocide.

  The mission had been clear-cut. Eliminate the guerrillas before they played out their murderous cycle, and get survivors to the UN camp fifty miles away. My role had been as straightforward. Provide emergency treatment to everyone who needed it between the A and B parts of the mission.

  But nothing could have prepared me for the reality on the ground. A reality that made horror fiction laughable in comparison.

  Being confronted by the enormity of my task had overwhelmed me at first. I’d stood paralyzed under a tidal wave of rage and inadequacy for what had felt like ages, before I’d forced myself to wade through triage. This woman and her baby hadn’t even made my list. One hadn’t needed my help, while the other had already drifted far beyond it…

  My senses made a jarring shift in direction, yanked away by incoming noises. A small army by the sound of it…

  “Fall back, St. James.”

  My mission leader. De Luna. His order fell like a lash across my inflamed nerves, imperative, final. Preposterous.

  I couldn’t fall back. Couldn’t leave my patients. Not after I’d succeeded in resuscitating the most devastated. I still had to help get them out of their razed village.

  A tidal wave of stress hormones engulfed me, expanding my suffocating senses and dwindling stamina.

  I took the dead baby from her mother’s insubstantial grip, laid her to rest on the ground.

  “Run!” I yelled at her, swung to the others, urgency bursting my heart. “All of you, run.”

  I’d depleted the Sudanese I’d learned for this mission, yet they understood me. I knew they did. And thought I was crazy. They stared at me out of skeletal faces with extinguished eyes. Despair made human.

  I sprang up, yanked one after the other, pointing at the bush where the retrieval team would pick them up. I had to convince them I’d buy them the time to reach it.

  I got my gun out, waved it. They got the message. Run, I’m covering you. And they trusted that I would.

  But even after my treatments, they couldn’t run. Most couldn’t even walk. So they crawled or dragged themselves on the ground, long forgotten hope animating their depleted, desecrated bodies.

  Gunfire was coming closer, reinforcements spreading a shock wave of subjugating terror. Then my headlight went out.

  “I gave you an order, St. James.”

  De Luna. He’d turned off my light. His overwhelming presence materialized beside me, his order a gut punch.

  Then my eyes adapted to the African stars’ uncanny light and I saw his massive silhouette. Emanating anger blacker than our camouflage paint and gear.

  I ignored him, continued helping the villagers, and his wrath became talons digging into my shoulder. “If we guard their backs as they crawl away, we’re dead.”

  “If we don’t, they are.”

  “We got all we can out.”

  “You got the ones who could walk out. I’m getting those who can’t.” Those robbed of the basic dignity and autonomy of a functioning body were my mission. But his superior strength was herding me away, depriving me of any chance to do what I had to. Desperation detonated inside my head. I clung to him, tried one last time. “Please—we can—”

  “We can’t save everyone.” His large hand yanked my arm again, shoved me ahead of him. “The team secured the others and are circling around to meet us at the jungle’s edge—”

  “Just in time to help us mobilize those remaining!”

  “Engaging reinforcements isn’t in our plan or capability, and these people won’t make it through the jungle. Now move.” I didn’t. I couldn’t. He shook me, hard. “You’ve been briefed. This is a projected outcome, an acceptable loss.”

  Acceptable loss.

  The grisly verdict crushed down on me, a jackhammer shattering my reason. Something alien, beyond rage and horror and pity, swamped me, possessed me. It screeched one thing until my skull was bursting with it.

  No loss is acceptable.

  My knee came up in an explosive hiza geri. Connected. His grunted curse was more disbelief than pain. Then agony jammed his nervous pathways, doubled him up in a knot of self-protecti
on. I shoved him off balance and he fell, hard.

  Somewhere in my fogged awareness, other voices shrieked. This is wrong. Crazy. Crippling him like that could sentence him to death. You’re sentencing yourself to death.

  I didn’t care. Possible death was in our job description. Not so these people. Experiencing their ordeal and degradation…

  There was only so much horror a mind could take. This was way more.

  And they’d trusted me to save them. Trusted me. I wasn’t letting anyone write them off as acceptable loss again.

  I straddled De Luna and his helpless rage flayed me as he grappled with the paralysis. He’d succeed in seconds. That was how long I had.

  I stripped him of every explosive he had. He had plenty. Our—his—blitz had relied on strategy, stealth, and silenced firearms. Explosives were too unpredictable to be used with hostages in range, had been saved as a last resort.

  But I’d only warranted only an M-9 Beretta as his lowly Global Crisis Alliance medical tagalong, in my first field mission. An afterthought—to defend myself if the big boys and gals of the Preemptive Action Counterterrorism Team had better things to do than keep me safely crammed at the back of formation. After all his trials by simulated fire, I’d been picked, against his will, not for my combat capabilities, which had proven far superior to all his other apprentices, just my “cool under fire” ones.

  Time to put those to good use.

  My plan was simple. Stuff my backpack with grenades, toss it at the guerrillas, then trapshoot it. The explosions should wreak enough damage and chaos to buy the villagers a chance to reach the pickup site.

  I zipped my backpack and heaved up to my feet. De Luna lunged at me. “You insane idiot, get down.”

  Responses he’d honed over twenty-four grueling months propelled me in the air, clearing his pincer tackle. His enraged hiss speared between my scapulas. “They’re shooting blind, but draw their attention and you’ll give them a bull’s-eye.”

  Shadows cried out in the darkness. I swung around, eyes steaming with sweat and sweltering humidity. Grotesque heaps were collapsing to the ground. Stray bullets finding targets. Could have been me. Could still be. Had to make the time I had left on my feet count.

  I hissed back, “Get my patients to safety.”

  He lunged again and I exploded into a run, just like the thousand races he’d put me through, not letting me rest until I’d broken my record and everybody else’s.

  I came to an abrupt halt about two hundred feet from the guerrillas. De Luna was right. They didn’t see me, us. They were heading in the wrong direction. Or were they?

  God, no. They weren’t.

  Another hundred feet away from them, caught in their flashlights, were their targets. Two emaciated villagers, teenagers. The boys had found two barely alive guerrillas and were holding guns to their heads, buying their kin running time. Would the guerrillas negotiate for their comrades’ lives?

  They didn’t even hesitate. Crimson burst from both captive guerrillas and boys, filling my vision, drowning what remained of my reason. And I did it.

  I swung the backpack over my head, revolved around my axis over and over, built a hammer-throw momentum before lettting it catapult out of my hands.

  I hurled myself to the ground as it began its descent right on top of the guerrillas, and emptied my semiautomatic pistol. Every shot found its mark.

  Thank you, De Luna. For that, at least.

  The explosions were deafening. Gratifying. Even at that distance, a piece of shrapnel whizzed over my head. Good. It meant the guerrillas were being shredded. Their screams were more proof.

  Then darkness intensified. One of the distant flashlights flailed my way, illuminating the hot, viscous purple descending on my vision. Blood. Pouring from a scalp wound I didn’t feel. One frantic hand wiped it out of my eyes, the other clamped down on the spurting wound. I had to see….

  God, no! There’d been so many of them, dozens were still standing, were now charging. Right towards me.

  There was no way I could retreat. They would just shoot me in the back. I had to try anyway.

  But before I could fully rise, something slammed into me, almost dislodging my lungs, knocking me down flat on my face.

  De Luna. He’d shoved me to the ground, before exploding over me, bellowing, his machine guns echoing his intimidation. More thunder joined his in a soul-rending crescendo. His team. They’d come back. They stampeded past me, merging with him into an unconquerable unit, meeting the enemy halfway.

  I lay there, unarmed and useless, and watched the carnage.

  When the last explosion and roar and dying gurgle had ebbed from the air and my ears, the first rays of dawn diluted the darkness. My patients were huddled in the distance at the bush’s edge, none of them with further injuries. The guerrillas littered the village they’d come to lay waste to as far as I could see. Blown to mangled masses by my attack or riddled into flesh sieves by De Luna’s—

  De Luna.

  My heart convulsed around shrapnel when I didn’t find his unmistakable shape among those still standing. Then the jagged pieces pierced it when I did see him.

  He was facedown on the ground, his whole left side drenched in blood—

  God, no—he couldn’t be dead. Not him. Not him.

  I found myself on my feet, then crashing to my knees beside him. Tasting my own blood and gagging on the scent of his, I tried to turn him. He jerked beneath my frantic hands. Alive. Alive.

  But he wouldn’t be for long. He was bleeding out. Fast. Too fast.

  My hands shook as I pinpointed his injuries, blurred as I started to stem his hemorrhage. Until he thwarted me. He knocked my hands off as if they burned him, and dragged his torn body on the ground away from my intervention.

  Horror drenched me again when I saw his destination. Three fallen members of his team.

  But even before I hurtled to them, checked them, I knew.

  Unlike him, there would be nothing I could do for them. They were already dead.

  And I as good as killed them.

  One

  Four Years Later

  Los Angeles County, California

  This is all your fault.

  A grating voice hurled the accusation. It took me a second to realize it was inside my head.

  A hot shiver cascaded down my body, and sick sweat started erupting from my every pore.

  God—oh, God—this wasn’t happening.

  Twenty seconds ago, I was repairing our sixty-nine-years-old janitor’s ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm under contrast angiographic guidance. Ten seconds ago, the monitor of the ceiling-mounted unit of my newest acquisition for our hybrid operating room—the so-called “like new” angiographic system—flickered, distorted then blipped out. Smoke and a stench worthy of an expiring cybernetic dragon filled the room, accompanying and confirming its dying throes.

  And it was all my fault.

  I’d let that brief demo persuade me that the unit’s issues were only cosmetic, that it was even a bargain. I’d told myself I’d get around any subpar performance to get more than my money’s worth before it bought the junkyard. My worst estimates hadn’t factored in that it would in the middle of an emergency surgery, on its very first outing in the Sanctuary.

  Another massive misjudgment was that I wasn’t ready with an alternative. Like that intravascular ultrasound machine I’d decided we couldn’t afford just yet. I should have acquired both machines, in brand-new condition, even if I’d had to break someone’s bones. This was so all on me, in so many ways…

  Shut up, St. James.

  All that mattered now was that I had my balloon up Mendoza’s artery and I’d lost visual. A guilt trip was the last thing I could afford right now. I had priorities.

  Yeah, sure. Like that embolism I felt brewing in my coronaries. Even if dropping dead would be the easiest way out of this mess.

  Breathe, moron.

  This wasn’t my first catastrophic intra-surgical co
mplication. And then I was in too far I had to continue the procedure. Blindly.

  Yeah. Wading in blind was always such a viable option.

  Problem was, it was the only one I had.

  Technically, that wasn’t true. There was another option that appealed way more right now. To have a total breakdown and grant myself absolute unaccountability with it.

  Later, I promised myself. When I didn’t have a life under my hands counting on my every last shred of resourcefulness and steadiness.

  But since there were always lives I was responsible for, it seemed I’d have to postpone said breakdown forever.

  Giving myself another brain-jarring mental smack, I gritted my teeth and visualized the last image I’d seen. A virtual map to where I was going and what I had to do next.

  Harrowing minutes later, I thought I’d bridged and sealed the rupture. Now to get clinical proof that I’d succeeded.

  I withdrew the balloon catheter out of the top-of-the-thigh incision, and turned to my assistants, Megumi and Ayesha. Megumi hadn’t taken her eyes off her phone during the disastrous setback. As my anesthesiologist, she thought her role was to blend into the background, and let me, the surgeon, handle problems in peace. Ayesha had also been blessedly silent all through. These two women never took one untimely breath.