Close Pursuit. Cindy Dees

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СКАЧАТЬ the girl in his arms. He moved quickly into the shadows.

      Katie made the mistake of glancing down and saw that they stood at the top of a nearly vertical cliff face. Only the narrowest of ledges kept her from plunging hundreds of feet to the valley floor below. Sick to her stomach with terror and vertigo, she plastered herself to the rock wall at her back and edged forward. Alex ducked into a low opening, and she fell to her knees beside him in relief.

      The three of them were crouched in a tiny crevasse that didn’t rise to the exalted status of a cave. It was maybe eight feet deep at best and no more than three feet tall at the opening, narrowing to a few inches tall in the back. But it afforded them a little cover from the battle raging outside and a moment to catch their breaths.

      The girl started swearing under her breath so colorfully that Katie felt an incongruous urge to laugh. Or maybe that was just hysteria threatening. Either way, the girl’s voice broke on what would have been a scream had she not jammed her burka in her mouth and bitten down for all she was worth.

      It was Alex’s turn to swear. He unceremoniously shoved the girl onto her back to examine her. “Baby’s trying to crown,” he muttered. “Tell her to push with the next contraction.”

      Katie was so relieved she could cry as she relayed the instruction to the girl. The contraction came, and the girl strained, bearing down in the age-old way as Katie supported her shoulders from behind.

      “Again,” Alex ordered.

      “Again.”

      After several more contractions, Alex fumbled in the rucksack and pulled out a flashlight. Covering himself with the girl’s burka, he took a quick look at affairs. When he emerged, he spoke so calmly in English, Katie’s blood ran cold before she even comprehended his words.

      “Tell her to rest for a while and just try to breathe through the contractions.”

      He’d never told a woman to take a break in the middle of a delivery before. Just the opposite in fact. He always had her give the women pep talks and tell them at all costs to keep pushing until it was over.

      She relayed the instruction and then murmured, “What’s up?”

      “This kid’s head is too big to pass through the pelvic opening. The baby can’t be born.”

      “What do we do now?” she asked as calmly as her exploding alarm would let her.

      “Two choices. Leave the girl and her baby here to die. Or do a C-section and save the kid.”

      “And the mother?”

      “It’s a major surgery. If blood loss doesn’t get her, shock and hypothermia may. And then there’s the problem of noise. If I cut her open without anesthesia, she’s likely to scream her head off and get us all killed.”

      Katie stared at the shadows wreathing his face. How in the hell were they supposed to choose between those options?

      He stared back. At length, he muttered, “Welcome to playing God.”

      A barrage of gunfire below them made her jump. For a minute there she’d forgotten about the war raging outside. The girl lying on the ground beside her panted fast and hard as another contraction gripped her.

      “What would you do?” Alex asked quietly.

      Katie shook her head, horrified to the core of her being. “Ask the mother. It’s her baby. Her life.”

      “How very pro-choice of you,” Alex replied wryly. Then he said more sharply, “So do it. Ask her.”

      Katie was shocked that he had declined to make a unilateral decision. It was so very...human...of him. She turned to the mother and waited out the end of the contraction.

      Holding the girl’s hand, she said quietly, “Your baby is too big to be born this way. Doctor Alex can cut the baby from your belly, but he has no medicine for the pain. If you make any noise, we will all die.” She took a deep breath and added reluctantly, “You may die from the surgery.”

      “If I have no surgery?” the girl asked.

      Katie relayed the question, and Alex outlined the answer sentence by sentence as she translated.

      “You will become exhausted eventually. The placenta will separate from your uterus. Your baby will suffocate and die, and you will begin to hemorrhage. That means you will bleed inside your body. You will die from blood loss.”

      The girl was silent, considering her options. “I hate this baby. I do not care if it lives. But I want to live.”

      Alex nodded briskly. “Then the baby must come out of you.”

      Katie watched as he pulled out a scalpel, clamps and what she recognized as suture materials. He spread a towel on the ground under the girl and another beside himself.

      “How are we going to keep her quiet?” she asked.

      “If we’re lucky, she’ll pass out fast.”

      “That’s not encouraging.”

      “Since we’re being so democratic about this, ask her,” he suggested. “I’ll try to time the incision for during an artillery barrage. She’ll have to do the rest.”

      Katie spoke briefly to the girl. Determination entered the girl’s eyes, and Katie thought that she was more scared than the girl at this point. The girl twisted a length of her burka and told Katie to hold it in her mouth for her when the time came.

      “Ready?” Alex murmured from his crouched position between the girl’s legs. The girl’s grotesquely distended belly, now bared to the cold air, was pale in the darkness. How on earth was Alex going to do a C-section in these conditions?

      The girl put the gag in her mouth, and Katie grasped the ends of it, her entire body shaking with terror. The girl wasn’t shaking much less.

      “Next explosion,” Alex murmured, scalpel poised.

      Kaboom!

      Alex slashed. The girl screamed. The night lit up and blood spouted black and wet from the girl’s belly. A second slash, and the girl thrashed wildly.

      “Hold her down,” Alex ground out. “Placenta’s separating. She’s hemorrhaging.”

      Katie leaned on the cloth gag, pinning the girl’s head to the ground. A knee across the girl’s shoulders helped hold her in place, while Alex knelt on the girl’s thighs. He worked fast, and Katie did her level best not to look at the gore unfolding.

      Instead, she stared into the girl’s panicked, animalistic eyes. All humanity drained out of the girl as she screamed against the gag again and again. And then, just like that, the girl went limp. Her eyes glazed over.

      Is she dead? Katie fumbled under the girl’s jaw for a pulse.

      “Thank God,” Alex breathed. He worked even faster, hacking the baby free of its mother’s body.

      Katie was shocked at how fast Alex had the baby out. Thirty seconds, maybe, all told. A lifetime for СКАЧАТЬ