Taking a deep breath, he turned back to commanding the battle. The last thing he wanted was to give them a bigger excuse to be angry. He was sure he wouldn’t like it if he made her team angry.
Janna returned to consciousness with the sting of long cuts up and down her arms, as well as many nicks and light wounds with plastic shrapnel in them. They were all surface wounds, though. She slowly and carefully looked around. The entire setup was trashed. There was no way that they could command from here so she turned to the exit. It was blocked, with the framing timbers fallen into haphazard piles.
“Boris, if you’re gonna command the rest of this, you need to get out of here.”
There was silence.
Janna looked around and saw Paul on the ground, but apparently breathing. He was probably unconscious. As she turned further, she saw Boris. He was still in his chair but didn’t seem to be moving. As her vision cleared more, she realized that he looked as if he were pinned to the seat by a three-foot splinter of wood that went through his chest. It was the only way he and the chair could still be together.
Her basic training kicked in. He was the priority casualty if still alive. She moved over to him and checked his pulse. It was weak and thready, but still present. Turning him and the chair so that he was on his side, she found that her initial guess was correct. There was a piece of wood penetrating the back of the seat. She quickly looked around the bunker for the first aid kit, but could not see the familiar red cross of its cover. The kit was probably somewhere under chunks of wood or beneath some of the dirt that had rolled in. She didn’t have time to look for it, let alone dig it out.
She swore. Then she thought about the situation. She had to get the damned splinter off the seat and out of Boris. She was surprised how small the pool of blood was under and around him. The splinter must be sealing the wound.
She started by twisting the chair back and forth around the splinter. It had gone in low on Boris’s chest. It had missed the heart and, despite the fact that it was beating steadily, she couldn’t see any signs of consciousness nor breathing. She twisted the chair back and forth trying to loosen it. She heard the wood whine as she applied gentle pressure. Finally, it broke free. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of the splinter through Boris’s back came free as well, and his blood started pumping out quickly. She swore in dismay and ripped off her BDU shirt to help put pressure on the wound.
Pressing the shirt tightly against the gushing wound, she now had his blood covering much of her body, trickling into many of her own injuries. Something in the back of her mind tickled at her. She tried to place it. Then it clicked. Bethany Anne had mentioned that she had healed a large bullet wound all the way through her body some time ago. She had said that it had taken a lot of energy but that she had been ‘weaker’ back then. Standard first aid practice was to leave an object like this in the wound, but Boris was far older than Bethany Anne. Surely his body had access to whatever energy Bethany Anne had referred to after all that time.
She knew the legends all referred to how fast werewolves healed and the wolves were somewhat scared of Boris. That meant he probably recovered at a similar rate or a group of them would have taken him out. She had a minute or so of indecision and checked his pulse. It was getting weaker. If the splinter was left in, she felt he would die. Taking it out, with his presumably faster healing, might be his best chance., It was then she noticed that her shirt wasn’t soaked through yet. It should have been with the amount of blood that had been coming out. That clinched it for her.
She quickly moved him from the chair and rolled him onto his back. Bracing one foot on his chest next to the splinter and the other on the floor beside his body, she grabbed it just above where the blood was on the splinter. She pulled hard, trying to keep it coming out as straight as possible. As she was pulling it out, Janna could feel her feet slipping. She fell forward when it came out more easily than she had expected. Her face intersected with the small geyser of blood spraying from his chest wound.
Startled, she gasped as she landed, swallowing a fair amount of blood in the process. Rolling away from the wound, she grabbed the BDU top again to put pressure back on the injury. She felt somewhat queasy at having swallowed human (well, Werebear) blood but continued to keep the pressure on for a minute or so. When she pulled the fabric away, there was a thick scab over the area so she checked his pulse again. It was stronger than the last time she had checked.
But he still wasn’t breathing.
She switched to rescue breathing, alternating with light compressions to his chest. As she was taking a breath in over his mouth, he coughed a wet fountain of blood into her face. By reflex, she swallowed more of the blood, not even spluttering as she had earlier. He was now breathing well on his own. She let out a relieved sigh.
The sounds of combat had died down outside, either while she was unconscious or while she had been treating Boris. She looked down at her body. She was covered from head to toe in blood, mostly his. Her vision began to blur as she looked back up at Boris’s face. He was actually quite handsome, she thought vaguely. Then it occurred to her that shock must be kicking in. Why else would she think that about her commanding officer? She looked up at his eyes, saw them opening, and murmured “Such wonderful eyes, my beautiful…” as she collapsed over him.
As Boris regained consciousness, he looked down his body at the person who had, from the look of the blood on their face, been giving him first aid. He heard a ragged feminine voice say “Such wonderful eyes, my beautiful…” and felt her collapse on him. He couldn’t recognize her by looks, as covered in blood as she was. Her odor was also masked. He could definitely tell it was a ‘she’ when the person collapsed on him. He checked her pulse. It was strong and steady. He shook his head to clear it and realized three things.
The bunker was wrecked and all the equipment in it was a write-off.
From the sounds of things, the battle was over. As he doubted he had been out for long, he felt the most likely reason was that they had one convincing victory.
And finally, the bunker was partially collapsed in on itself. There was currently no exit. The woman who had collapsed on him had to be Janna. His mind fought to think clearly, Janna had called him ‘My beautiful…’?
Boris spent several moments as he tried to get his mind wrapped around her comment.
Had they both been hiding their attraction from the other? Was it just shock that had caused her to say that? How could he deny his own attraction to her now? How could they work together now? These were amongst the questions that rocketed through his mind. It wasn’t like he could answer them right now so he shook himself and refocused on the problems that he could address.
While his mind kept whirling, he moved the only two tables left intact into a shelter for Paul and Janna. The blood on the floor, the disarray of the room in general and the position of the chair in which he had been sitting told him what the extent of his injuries must have been.
He saw the massive splinter of wood and winced internally. With him unconscious and the splinter through his body, Janna may have saved his life by her actions. Impaling was one of the few things that Weres couldn’t necessarily deal with for more than a couple of hours. When the body couldn’t expel the object, healing the damage was blocked.
She was either incredibly smart and willing to take risks, or foolhardy. He didn’t really believe the reckless option. That opinion was further validated when he found her blood-soaked BDU top. Rather than waste time digging out the first aid kit from a shattered section of the bunker she had chosen to use materials at hand to put pressure on his wound.