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  Lethal Cure

  Dr. Calista St. James—Book Two

  S.A. Gardner

  LETHAL CURE: (A Dr. Calista St. James Medical Action Thriller—Book Two)

  Copyright © 2020 by S.A. Gardner

  Publisher: Seshat Press

  ISBN: 978-1-949920-03-1

  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

  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

  From the Author

  About the Author

  Also By S.A. Gardner

  One

  The downpour battering our van became a barrage.

  It took me a second. Then I realized.

  It wasn’t a downpour anymore. It was a side-pour. A rear-pour. And it was no longer water. It was steel. Bullets.

  We hadn’t been quick enough.

  No, no, dammit! We had been. But the damn torrential rain had washed down our smoke bombs, cleared our enemies’ path. Those who’d survived.

  Made me regret we hadn’t made sure none of them had.

  Okay, Calista St. James. Reality check here. There’d been too many of them. Dozens. And only three of us. As odds went, I should be grateful we were still three, and that we’d gotten out two of the six people we’d smashed into that mini war zone to save.

  Grateful was something I rarely was. Never much to be grateful for in one of our too-frequent, against-all-odds rescues from grisly situations. This time we’d barged in the middle of a white-slavery-auction turned gang-turf-war.

  We’d lost more than we’d saved. And we hadn’t actually saved anyone yet. We’d just reached our van, hadn’t even secured our two casualties.

  Had to change that. Like in the next ten seconds. Who knew just how armored our van was. Sure sounded like it was getting the ultimate endurance test.

  Only bright spot was, the gang filth out there were frothing mad, spewing typically moronic, and so-far ineffectual, violence, shooting at our bulletproof body rather than going for the fatal shot, our tires.

  Couldn’t count on their idiocy for long.

  Muffled curses kept tempo with my movements as they blurred. Every muscle trembled, mainly with the effort of blocking out pain signals. Those were shooting from too many sources, and had congealed into a jumbled distress transmission. My lungs sheared against my ribs with exertion, almost a distraction from the rod of agony that ran the length of my vertebral column, pooling in my lumbar area. Almost.

  Was it any wonder, after forging half a mile through solid sheets of pounding rain, and wading in calf-deep slime and garbage with an unconscious woman bleeding all over my back?

  I snapped the last harness buckle in place, and glanced at my comrade-in-arms, Lucia. She’d secured her own casualty on the other gurney. I opened my mouth to yell for her to grab hold, before telling Matt to floor it.

  I didn’t have time to do either. Matt did floor it. And us.

  Brutal acceleration interrupted my frantic grab for an anchor, hurled me into Lucia. Her chin and my cheekbone made violent acquaintance. Bright pain burst, along with the usual detached internal commentary. There we go—a matching set of black eyes.

  I twisted in mid-pitch, avoided landing on our female casualty for the price of another deep bruise. Before I could fully catch myself, another violent lurch had Lucia’s taller, heavier body impacting me, and we both crashed to the floor.

  My lungs deflated. Her weight kept them that way. Already taxed, they burned with oxygen deprivation. I still clamped my legs around her body, kept her from falling off me. Moving while Matt was executing that manic getaway-car routine would only buy us both more injuries.

  The gunfire storm had abated, but Matt only poured on the speed. The van exploded out of the derelict area, engine howling like a banshee, wheels churning slimy mud.

  We were trying to rise when he yanked the metal behemoth into a hairpin turn, sending Lucia catapulting over me and into the gurney’s steel support. She cried out. Blood spattered, a hot, sickening fizz on my frozen cheek. Damn!

  Her hand lashed out to her head. “Scalp wound…” She gasped her diagnosis, before her hand lurched away to grab an anchor. Blood-slick, it slipped.

  Damn. Dammit. The gurneys and equipment were welded to the floor or harnessed, diminishing chances of further injury to our strapped-down casualties. All bets were off for our own free-floating bodies.

  A yell gurgled out of me. “Matt! Slow down! You’re adding us as new casualties back here!”

  I guess he didn’t hear my news flash. Next second the van launched over a huge bump and sailed in the air for what felt like a whole minute. When it finally crash-landed, we did plenty of the slamming about I’d tried to avoid.

  Struggling to hold onto a strap, I snapped open one of the cabinets lining the van’s sides, snatched a sterile pressure pad out, tossed it to Lucia. She missed it. Blood was seeping into her eye. I lunged before the pad fell into our muddy tracks, caught it, pressed it into her hand. I helped her into the paramedic seat, strapped her in, then staggered to the driver’s compartment.

  At the threshold, I froze. At least internally. It took seconds to process what I was seeing.

  Matt had his huge body hunched over the steering wheel like an overeager kid at the controls of a gory video game. The weeping night outside was filled with fuzzy beacons—on a collision course with us.

  He was going against traffic. On the highway.

  Incoming blares yawned to deafening crescendos, dwindled abruptly as headlights veered away in last-second desperation, like moths at the advance of a berserk swatter.

  I stared, lost in that surreal realm of disbelief. Then horror hit, head-on. I think I screamed. For him to get us on the right side of the road. He must have heard me this time. For he just—did. And how.

  He launched over the dividing island, the crash this time slamming my teeth down on my tongue. Electric blue pain forked straight to my brain.

  Couldn’t squander any focus on the pain. This all went into buckling down, into riding the momentum of the huge arc he made among screeching cars before he joined the stream. We weren’t already in a pile up only because it was 4 am and the highway was relatively empty.

  But he wasn’t finished spreading mayhem. He
accelerated through the cars ahead, his intention seeming to be to ram them if they didn’t swerve out of his way fast enough.

  I screamed again, “Matt!”

  His only answer was a rumbled, “They’re on our tail.”

  I lurched, peered into the side mirror. So they were.

  Then he literally got them there. He slammed his foot down full force on the brakes.

  Everything compressed in my heart’s next beat. The van skidding in imploding deceleration. Burning-rubber stench polluting my lungs. Screeching brakes slitting my eardrums. Every cell in my body fast-forwarding to the moment of collision, panic flooding in from all sides…

  Then the impact. A brutal jolt from behind, violent enough to dislodge my very life force. A-hundred-miles-per-hour worth of crashing mass and unspent momentum almost too forceful to feel, too thunderous to hear. It mushroomed through me in a chain reaction.

  I held on, held together, somehow. The impact went to my only unrestrained part—my brain, floating in its fluids. It didn’t stop with the rest of me, tried to ram an exit through my skull.

  Awareness blinked on and off, pondering how my first action, if I survived, had to be filleting Matt alive!

  He was giving reckless driving a suicidal redefinition. Even among stunt drivers. Hell, even among drunk ones. We might as well have stayed and seen the war through. At least we would have died doing something worthwhile.

  Darkness receded, crimson fury flooding in its wake. “What’s gotten into you, you lunatic?” I snarled.

  Matt just put the car in shrieking gear and blasted forward again. My stomach remained half a mile behind.

  He wiped a soggy dark blond lock from his rugged forehead, shot me a blank glance. “I got rid of our tail, didn’t I?”

  He sure had. I doubted anyone would walk out alive from the receding wreck I now barely saw in the side mirror. I could only hope other cars weren’t piled up behind them.

  “And look who’s talking,” he added.

  Oh, no. He wasn’t bringing up my reputation for leap-first-and-don’t-bother-looking-later. I wasn’t like that anymore. At least, I worked hard every single minute of every single day not to be. It was him who was jeopardizing everyone now.

  “If you don’t like being called a lunatic, stop earning the name,” I snapped. “So you got rid of our tail—and the van’s. Yay for you. Now stop trying to get rid of everyone on the road—and your passengers—if you haven’t already. That crash could’ve finished our casualties for all I know.”

  His massive shoulders rose in a distracted gesture as he pressed his foot harder on the gas pedal.

  I hit him on said dismissive shoulder. “Hey!”

  “What?” he grumbled. “I’m under the speed limit!”

  “Yeah, for escape velocity! Take the next exit and pull over. I’m driving.”

  “You mean I’ll handle our patients instead?”

  Put that way—no. It didn’t matter that he was the better trauma surgeon and emergency doctor. The setting of today’s operation, the thugs, the girls—this had been too reminiscent of how he’d lost his wife. Instead of just covering me until I got our casualties out, he’d let loose on his biggest ever rampage. He must have killed two dozen thugs alone, most with his bare hands. His resident demons had been fully unleashed, seemed to be still eating through his control. In his current volatile state, I didn’t want him anywhere near our casualties.

  But without immediate intervention, they wouldn’t last the hour plus back to the Sanctuary. And now we had to get off the highway, before a patrol caught up with us. Taking back roads was a safer but far longer route.

  What I had was a load of shitty choices. As usual.

  Enough, St. James. Call it.

  A breath scraped my spastic throat. “Keep driving, Matt. But do try not to kill us all. And get us off the highway, now.”

  No response. It was only when I poked him that he seemed to register what I’d said. Then he mumbled, “It’s the quickest way.”

  Frustration, hot and stinging, surged, augmenting my overall distress. “Yeah, to get arrested. You did notice we’re riding a bullet-riddled, smashed-up van fleeing the scene of a massive accident, and chock-full of unlicensed medical personnel, and critically injured people, didn’t you? Get us arrested now, and you’ll bring our whole operation down.”

  “Yeah, and I really needed that lecture,” he growled, screeched into the next exit. “I got us away, we’re in one piece. I’m keeping it that way.”

  I waited for my stomach to fit back roughly in the space it usually occupied, hissed when I was no longer gagging on it. “No bets on the latter part of your statement. Take it easier, okay?”

  I was talking to his absent profile.

  What was this? Demons or no, he’d never behaved this way before. Nothing even near.

  But whatever was going on with him right now, didn’t matter. Snap to it, St. James!

  I gave the cars scattering out of the van’s path, and my friend—precariously designated so at the moment—one last exasperated glance and unbuckled myself.

  “Matt’s done trying to kill us?” Lucia burst out the moment I staggered into the back compartment.

  “Yeah—I guess. Let’s move it.”

  She snapped off her seat belt, exploded to her feet. We snatched open cabinets, hauled out equipment and supplies. I hooked up the suctioning device as she dragged out syringes and cannulas, saline bags, drugs, giving sets and gloves. I caught the pair she tossed me, snapped them on, turned to our patients.

  “Clear airways.” I made way for her to suction their throats while I prepped for intubation. I kept my eyes off our casualties’ faces. Off Juan’s. Yeah, I knew him. Well. At least I knew the gregarious, fizzing-with-vitality Juan, not this pulped, motionless mess.

  Stop it. Couldn’t afford to let emotion into the mix now. It was Lucia I was worried about. I hoped she could handle it. She had to.

  I snatched up Juan’s arm, struggled for balance, and to hit a collapsed vein. I missed three times, heard growls. Mine.

  Once the needle was in, I dumped the syringe’s load in one pump. With a head injury, from that clearly depressed skull fracture, IV lidocaine served a dual purpose—anesthesia, and minimizing a rise in intracranial pressure. For the girl, with her gunshot chest injury, I’d use succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant instead. At least I could administer that intramuscularly.

  “What was that about?” Lucia’s wobbly voice filtered through the gargling of secretions and blood shooting up the suctioning tubes.

  “Matt’s high on an adrenaline overdose, I guess. He’s over it—” I pumped the SC just as the van launched and crash-landed again. Damn. The needle could have broken in her flesh. “I hope.”

  Lucia finished suctioning and turned to vitals. “Sure is a sound decision, letting our resident berserker drive!”

  Assembling the laryngoscope, I took my place at the girl’s head. “Would you rather have him back here, Lucia?”

  Her startled glare said it all. No, she wouldn’t. And Matt’s current berserkerdom wasn’t the only reason why. She had an overblown view of my skills. To her, I was the best.

  I didn’t fancy being anyone’s role model—or idol. In fact, I hated it. I couldn’t figure out how I’d ended up being hers. Crazy girl. But then, she’d joined my team, hadn’t she?

  I guessed they were all a little crazy. All medical people who’d relinquished positions, normality and safety, to join me in this mad life. We’d formed what I euphemistically called an “extralegal medical taskforce.” Our humanitarian aid/vigilante outfit didn’t just reach out to the sick, injured and downtrodden, but went after the criminals and oppressors and exacted punishment. Not to mention relieved them of their considerable earnings. We needed a steady inflow of cash to finance our Sanctuaries, where we offered comprehensive medical and many other services, to all who needed help, and couldn’t get or afford it.

  Lucia was five years my junior, and the youn
gest of our “core eight”—me and the first seven to believe in my cause and make it a reality. She was developing into a hell of a fighter, and the best trauma and surgical nurse this side of Ayesha. She was giving me textbook assistance with everything working against her.

  She now held our patients’ heads, providing the best in-line stabilization for me to slip my laryngoscope between their vocal cords, and slide the endotracheal tubes down their throats. On the first trial each.

  First chance I got, I was treating her to that girls’ night out I’d promised her.

  Yeah, sure. Like she’d want it now. Should have done it the moment the idea struck. Shouldn’t have postponed it to a nebulous “sometime.” In our line of work, sometime meant probably never.

  I secured the endotracheal tubes and she started delivering one hundred percent O2 into lungs that could no longer do their job unaided.

  Next came pumping fluids into them. Placing cannulas in their veins was a nightmare. But we managed it in seconds. Over the past five years, we’d been regularly handling emergencies in against-all-odds conditions. Right now was an almost standard situation.

  Or it would be, if it wasn’t for Juan.

  I snapped a glance at Lucia, found her forehead scrunched in distress, her cheeks shuddering with suppressed anguish. God, how I wished I could spare her help. Spare her. This wasn’t hitting close to home for her. This was right inside it.

  This was her little brother lying there, with his head bashed in.