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Francisco wrapped the blanket around the victim's torso and legs, careful to leave the frozen extremities uncovered, then glanced at the vitals. Core body temp was 96.1; not too disastrous. He'd dealt with worse. Blood pressure good, heart rate good, nice and regular.
"He's dehydrated," Francisco said quietly, noting the condition of the man's skin. "How long were you out there, hmm?" he asked the unconscious patient. "Better start an IV, D5 one-half normal saline."
Davis nodded.
"How's that blood work coming along?" Francisco called through the open doorway.
"Low on oxygen. Still checking electrolytes, sir."
Francisco fitted the man with oxygen, then carefully examined the frozen extremities. Both hands were nicely frozen, one up to the wrist, the other to the knuckles. Both ears, too... . Fortunately, the frost hadn't bitten too deeply yet. He tugged off incredibly ancient shoes and socks, both pairs held together by the holes.
"Mmm... I've seen worse," he muttered, turning the feet up to peer at the soles, "but they're nicely bitten. He's not going to be ru
"Damned lucky," Davis agreed as he threaded the IV needle into the vein and taped it down.
The nurse came back with the blood work. Francisco glanced at it, then nodded. "Very good. We found him before things got critical. Prepare sixty milligrams of Toradol, John. Whoever he is, he's going to hurt like bloody fire when he comes around. And let's put a steam pad on his chest to help bring up his core temp."
The nurse nodded and vanished in search of the prescribed items. Francisco scribbled on his chart.
The mystery man groaned softly. Francisco glanced up just as his eyelids fluttered. His expression mirrored deep disorientation. He tried to sit up and mumbled something too confused to catch. Davis placed a restraining hand on the man's chest.
When the patient struggled, Francisco helped hold him down. "Hold on there, take it easy. We found you in time. You're going to be fine. Just lie quietly..."
The man appeared to think about that for a moment, then stopped struggling. He moaned again and shut his eyes. Given the fellow's dazed expression, Francisco wondered if he'd walked away from a light-plane crash.
"Let me take a look at your eyes," Francisco murmured.
His pupils responded normally to a pen light. No signs of concussion. Francisco picked up the nearest hand again to examine the webbing more carefully, then noticed a plastic wristlet under the sweater cuff. He tugged it down into view, turned it around—
"What the..."
Francisco glanced up to the man's face. Logan McKee watched him quietly. Francisco stared at the wristband again. VA hospital patient. Mental ward... .
"What'd you find?" Davis asked curiously, looking up from the IV lead he was hooking into the needle.
"An ID bracelet. Mr. McKee," Francisco asked quietly, "can you understand me?"
McKee nodded.
"Good. You're suffering from exposure. Your hands and feet are frozen, but we found you in time to prevent permanent damage, I think. In a few minutes, you're going to start hurting like hell. We'll give you something for pain as soon as we've finished examining you. Don't be too alarmed if you feel a little dazed or confused. Your body temperature has dropped several degrees, but we'll be warming you up nicely in a couple of minutes."
"Okay." McKee's voice was a raw whisper. He shut his eyes and lay still.
Francisco and Captain Davis eased McKee out of his clothing and into a hospital gown. Their intruder couldn't use his hands at all. McKee hissed when the sweater came off over his ears. Further examination revealed no other frostbitten areas. In fact, they found no trace of injury anywhere.
"Is that steam pad ready?"
John was just walking in with it. They draped the heated pad over McKee's torso, then wrapped the Mylar around him again to hold in the heat, taking care not to heat any frozen extremities. McKee started to hurt sooner than Francisco expected.
"Where's that Toradol?"
John handed over a prepared hypo. As McKee's eyes closed under the influence of the drug, Francisco found his thoughts straying again and again to one question. Just how had this man ended up inside their perimeter, dressed for summer, with a VA hospital in-patient wristlet on his arm?
Francisco rubbed his eyes, then the back of his neck. Just one more little mystery to add to the list he'd been compiling over the last couple of months. If Dan Collins hadn't been base commander...
He shook his head. His job, at the moment, was to bring McKee out of danger. He'd tackle disturbing questions later. But he would tackle them. Something decidedly odd was going on. Francisco intended to find out what.
She woke with a vile taste in her mouth and a raging thirst that pulsed through her whole body. Queasiness lingered like ghostly nightmares, along with a half-memory of odd, thumping footsteps and an out-of-balance gait that made the queasiness worse. It took her long moments to remember why she couldn't move and even longer to recall that her name was supposed to be Aelia. A low scraping noise along the floor told her she was not alone. For an instant, all she could hear was a frantic knocking that she finally realized was her own pulse.
Then something splashed with a liquid sound. A moment after that, Aelia distinguished the faint wheeze of human lungs laboring in the muggy heat. She slitted her eyes just wide enough to see a familiar, red-haired man at her bedside. Rufus. Rufus Mancus. The name was eerily familiar, but slid away from her, into a dim, roaring pain in her head.
The door was open again. Pearl-grey light, clear as liquid and smelling sweeter than the air of her prison, slid along the tiled floor. Shadows lay like pencils on edge where broken, dirty brown tiles had tilted up. Other tiles were missing; the floor underneath was packed earth. The floor stank, or maybe the room did, of human waste and stale air. She focused her attention on Rufus. Maybe she could learn something while his back was turned.
Which it was, literally. He faced away from her, intent on emptying a ceramic pot into a wooden bucket. The stink of urine clung in the back of her throat. His coarse brown tunic, dark with sweat, lay molded to his back. Propped against the wall, she found the reason for the odd, thumping footsteps she'd half dreamed: a crude crutch, padded with a sweat-stained bit of fleece. Rufus moved awkwardly without it.
When he straightened, his breath caught a little too sharply. He halted and eased his shoulders under the tunic, then bent to finish filling the bucket. When he moved, nacreous light fell across a ghastly scar along the back of his left thigh, just above the knee. Another scar, lower down, cut across the calf. They were ragged, badly healed wounds, old enough that they'd whitened from the feverish red of new injuries to a sickly pink.
Something about the placement of those injuries tried to ooze its way past the blackness in her mind. She tried, and was at first unable, to grasp the implications of those scars; then cold horror spread through her. Aelia traced the plane of his thigh and saw where the ligaments had been severed, and lower down, along the Achilles tendon—
Her breath choked in her throat. He had been deliberately hamstrung.
Rufus Mancus turned quickly at the tiny sound she'd made. He lost his balance and caught himself against the wall. When he found her shocked gaze on him, a vertical line appeared between his brows. Open puzzlement darkened his eyes for just a moment. Then he said, in that Irish-whiskey voice she recalled so clearly, "I did not mean to wake you."