She hadn’t seen the pickup earlier because she was so focused on the enemy, but if Danny thought it was a jalopy before, she wondered what he was going to call it now. The side facing her was covered in holes, and like the GMC’s, its tank was leaking gasoline. Sheets of glass covered the road and one of the back tires had been shot out, though she didn’t remember hearing anything that sounded like a tire blowing. Then again, given how fast she was emptying her rifle, she probably wouldn’t have heard a bomb going off next to her at the time.
The truck was there (mostly, anyway), but there were no signs of Danny or Nate. Or Mason, for that matter.
“Danny!” she called.
“Here,” Danny said, his voice coming from the other side of the truck.
She jogged the rest of the way and went around the pickup. Danny had his back to her, but she could see that he was crouched next to Nate, who sat with his back against the driver-side door. Their weapons were on the pavement.
“Nate,” she said.
He looked past Danny and smiled at her, but it was overly forced and that realization only made her run faster to him. She went around Danny and kneeled on the other side of Nate, her stomach dropping at the sight of blood gathered around his waist.
“How bad?” she asked.
“I’ll be okay,” Nate said.
She ignored him and fixed on Danny. “How bad?”
“Could have been worse,” Danny said. When she gave him a disbelieving look, he added, “He could be dead.” Then, “Press here,” and pulled his hands from a T-shirt he was holding against Nate’s left side.
She replaced his hand with her own, her fingers turning red as soon as she touched the fabric. She looked down at Nate.
He was smiling at her. Or trying to. “I’ll be fine. Just a scratch.”
“Right. Just a scratch,” she said quietly.
Danny had stood up and was looking around them, his rifle back in his blood-covered hands. “He’s gone.”
“Who?” she said, glancing over.
“Mason.”
She looked around them — at the car lots to both sides of the street, then the empty road out of town behind them. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”
Danny was too busy squinting at the cars in the dealerships to answer, as if he could magically pick up Mason’s scent if he made his eyes small enough. Gaby looked back at Nate, keeping her hands on the bloody bundle of clothing pressed against his wound. As much as the idea of Mason escaping made her furious, she found it easy to push it aside to concentrate on keeping Nate from bleeding to death.
“My fault,” Nate was saying, his voice so soft she barely heard him. “He was my responsibility. I wasn’t paying attention…”
“Shut up, it doesn’t matter.” She was trying to find the balance between pressing too hard and not hard enough against Nate’s side. She couldn’t even tell what color the T-shirt used to be anymore. “What about Nate, Danny?”
Danny slung his rifle. “We’re going to have to look for the bullet and take it out. Can’t leave it in there.”
“You’ve done this before?”
He shrugged.
“Danny,” she pressed. “You’ve done this before?”
“Well, there was that time in a diner, though Willie boy did most of the work. But I think I got the gist of it.”
Nate groaned.
Danny grinned at him. “Relax, Nathaniel-san. Back in college they used to call me Danny the Surgeon, and it wasn’t because I always wore white surgical gloves around campus, though yes, I could see the confusion. Those things are super soft, you know.”
The pickup may have been beaten up before it was shot up, but it was a tough old thing. Despite leaking fuel and brandishing new bullet holes along most of one side, once they replaced the blown tire, the truck was still serviceable, and the engine came alive when Danny turned the key.
“I told you I picked a winner,” Danny said before he righted the vehicle and pushed them down the street.
She sat in the back with Nate, keeping an eye on his paling face and the bandages around his waist. Like the shirt earlier, the white fabric was already soaked with blood and growing a darker shade of red every second.
She must have grimaced at the sight because Nate made an effort to smile up at her. “It looks worse than it really is.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“No, really.”
“Stop lying.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?”
“Because I know you.”
He smiled again. Or tried to again. He was doing a very poor job of it, and she wished he would stop. The effort alone was probably causing him more harm than good.
“You know me too well,” he said.
“Not well enough,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.
She kept her arms around his body to keep him from moving around too much. Danny was driving just fast enough to get them as quickly down the street as possible while glancing at the map of Gallant spread out on the front passenger seat next to him. He only swerved once or twice, which was amazing given everything he was multitasking. He was also amazingly calm, but she wondered how much of that was a façade, or maybe she was just projecting her own fears and emotions onto him. Danny was an ex-Ranger, after all. It wasn’t as if blood was anything new to him.
“How much farther, Danny?” she asked.
“A mile or two,” Danny said. “Can’t go too far in this thing, with your boyfriend back there bleeding all over the upholstery.”
“Sorry about that,” Nate said quietly.
“You’ll clean it up later.”
“Gotcha.”
She put a hand over Nate’s mouth to shush him, then said, “How much gas do we have left?”
“Not enough,” Danny said.
“Maybe we should have siphoned some from the GMC…”
“Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe it’s Maybelline. We’ll be fine.”
“Will we?”
“You betcha.”
He sounded confident, and that more than anything did a lot to ease her mind. This was the new Danny. The leader. Other than Lara, there was no one else Gaby would trust with her life. Except maybe Nate…
“See, we’re almost there,” Danny said as he slowed down and made a right turn.
The road under them went from smooth asphalt to uneven dirt road. Nate groaned in response.
“Danny,” she said.
“I know,” Danny said. “We’ll be there soon. Better he suffers a little now than die a lot later.”
A sheen of sweat had covered Nate’s face as he looked back up at her. She smiled at him, then bent down and kissed him softly on the lips. When she pulled back, he was smiling again, and this time it actually looked acceptably convincing.
“Gotta get us our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.
She nodded. “Definitely.”
“It’ll be nice. Our own room. We can sleep in whenever we want. Finally.”
“You always want to sleep in.”
“Or maybe we won’t sleep at all.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, mister.”
“It’ll be nice,” he said again, and closed his eyes.
She fought the urge to tighten her arms around him, to keep his body steady against hers as the truck continued to rumble down the patch of dirt road, but she was afraid even too much additional pressure would just hurt him.
She kissed his unresponsive lips instead.
Stay alive, Nate. Please, stay alive.
I can’t bear to lose you too…
Gallant had more land than it did people, so the houses on the outskirts of the main commercial area were spread out. The dirt road Danny had turned into eventually became smooth asphalt again, and they passed a series of residential homes with large front and backyards.