Cover Of Night

He was already half asleep, but he gave a contented sigh and nestled closer. Cate curled one arm under her head and the other over his waist, and tucked her thighs snugly against the curve of his ass. Belatedly she remembered that the cuts on his shoulders and arm needed tending again, but his breathing had gone slow and deep just in the last thirty seconds and she didn’t want to wake him.

Warmth began to steal through her, and with it came drowsiness. Beyond the wall of boxes, voices were going silent as people settled down for what rest they could get. The men had organized a guard system, Sherry had said; tucked underground here, no bullets could reach them. They1 were relatively safe until morning, when they could find out exactly what was going on. There was no reason why she shouldn’t sleep.

She snuggled closer to his back and moved her free hand, sliding it from his waist, up his abdomen, to his chest. Feeling his heart beating tinder her touch, she went to sleep.

Long moments after he’d been hit, Teague struggled to a sitting position. He couldn’t see; blood was pouring from the wound at the top of his forehead, getting into his eyes and blinding him. Agony pounded in his head with Satan’s drumbeat. What the fuck had happened? He didn’t know where he was; his searching hands couldn’t find anything familiar, just rocks and more rocks. He was outside, he knew that much. But where, and why?

He waited, experience telling him that memory would return as he came to full consciousness. Until then, he pressed his hand over the jagged cut to slow his blood loss, ignoring the pain the pressure caused.

The first thing he remembered was an ungodly bright flash of light, and a boom as a giant fist punched him in the head.

Shot, he thought, then discarded that idea. If he’d been shot in the head, he wouldn’t be lying here wondering about it. The shot had missed, then, but not by much. His face felt on fire, as if all the skin had been stripped off. The slug must have hit the boulder right below him, blasting him with pieces of rock.

As soon as the word slug formed in his mind, he thought "shotgun" and the pieces of his memory fell into place. That was the boom he’d heard, following so closely on the heels of his own shot that the two sounds had overlapped.

He wondered if anyone else had heard the shotgun; why hadn’t someone called on the radio to check on him? His thoughts were still so sluggish that several moments went by before he realized he’d been unconscious and wouldn’t have heard the radio even if someone had tried to contact him.

Radio. Yeah. He reached for it, found it clipped to his belt right where it was supposed to be; he unclipped it, fumbling because his hands were wet with blood, and then sudden caution made him freeze. If he dropped the radio, he might not be able to find it. Carefully, making certain he had a solid grip, he started to key the "talk" button – and stopped.

He could call for help. Hell, he needed help. But-he wasn’t helpless. He could do this on his own. When you ran with a pack of wolves, you didn’t show weakness or you could find yourself eaten alive. Billy wouldn’t turn on him, and neither would Troy, but ‘league wasn’t so certain about Blake. He was damn certain about Toxtel and Goss – certain they’d turn on him in a New York minute. If he couldn’t make it off this damn mountainside by himself, if he had to be carried out instead of walking under his own steam, they would view him as weak, and he couldn’t afford that.

Okay. He had to do this on his own, then. He took a few deep breaths and forced himself to concentrate, to get past the pounding agony in his head, the dizziness and sense of panic. He had to be operational.

The first, most important thing he had to do was stop losing blood. Head wounds always bled like a bitch anyway, so he could lose a significant amount in a short time, probably already had. He had to put pressure on the wound, a lot of pressure, no matter how much it hurt.

He knew he had a concussion, maybe brain damage that would only worsen with time, but his exploring fingers told him the area around the wound was swelling rapidly. That was good, from what he’d heard. If the swelling was on the inside of his brain, that was bad. He could deal with a concussion; he’d done it before.

Teague braced his back against the rock behind him and drew his legs up, planting his feet as solidly as possible. Leaning forward, he braced his right elbow on his knee and put the heel of his palm against the wound, using his entire body to apply more pressure than he could have accomplished using just arm strength. He ignored the pain exploding in his head, holding firm and steady while he concentrated on breathing and getting through the agony.

While he sat there, he started swiping his left forearm across his face, trying to wipe the blood out of his eyes. The thing about blood was, the shit congealed, then it dried, and it was hard as hell to get off. He needed water to clean his face. There was a ton of it at the bottom of this fucking rock pile, but getting down there was something he’d think twice about attempting in broad daylight without a concussion. No, he had to get back to the road.

Other than applying pressure to the wound, he was limited in what he could do for himself, so that would have to be enough. The good news was, the longer he sat there, the more his head cleared. It still hurt like a son of a bitch, but he was thinking better.

The bad news was, the longer he sat there, the colder he felt.

If the blood loss caused him to go into shock, he was screwed. On the other hand, the temperature had to be in the thirties, maybe even below freezing. Of course he was cold, but hypothermia wasn’t good, either. He had to get off these rocks, the sooner the better. His head was going to hurt worse when he tried to move, but what the tuck, hurting was better than dying.

He moved his hand, waiting to see if blood poured down his face again. He felt a trickle and immediately wiped it away, then pressed his hand back over the wound. The bleeding hadn’t stopped, but it had definitely slowed.