Saving Sergeant Kreiger
Disclaimer: Same as before....L1701E, I can't update as often because school started last week. Feel free to create Recondo's encounter with the boys in your way.
~ ~ ~ ~
"Shipwreck, we'll let you know as soon as we find out." The chilling words ran through Shipwreck's brain as clear as they had been when Lady Jaye had told him six days ago.
Cover Girl, or Courtney as he'd been calling her lately except when on duty, had been on a surveillance operation in Los Angeles when she had disappeared. He knew all too well how COBRA and the Heartless treated prisoners and the fact that Courtney was in enemy hands was enough to rend deep into his soul.
He had requested straight from Hawk to go straight to Los Angeles on a solo op to go find her. Hawk's reply had been sympathetic but a denial nonetheless, "Hector, I need you to keep your head in this. I know Courtney's just fine; she probably had to lie low because of pursuit. I can't risk having two operatives lost in the field. Request denied."
The bottle of tequila, the sixth one he'd drank in as many days, was half empty. Polly was sitting on his perch, being unusually quiet. The kids were all asleep, only Shipwreck wasn't getting any sleep.
"Screw regs Hawk, Courtney's in trouble, I know it." Shipwreck said, as he threw on some nondescript civilian clothing and a tan trench coat.
Shipwreck grabbed a 9mm Beretta sidearm and three loaded magazines. He felt an arm grab his right hand, he turned to see Chief Brewster, one of the four SEALs on the task force holding on to him.
"Shipwreck, what in the hell are you doing?" Brewster asked.
"Chief, something I need to do." Shipwreck replied.
"Shipwreck, I know that losing Courtney...." Brewster began.
"God damn it Chief!" Shipwreck practically shouted, "I have to do this."
"Stand down sailor!" Brewster began, drawing himself to full height, though not tall in stature, Brewster was every bit the classic Chief Petty Officer. Hard as a rock, dedicated, and skilled at his trade, Brewster could easily switch moods from the normally good natured man to the hardened countenance of a veteran combat leader.
The authority had its effect, "We're going with you, dummy, stay ready. I've got my three guys ready with the needed gear." Chief began, "Wait for us outside."
Twenty minutes later a humvee pulled up, D'Artagnan, Wassner, and Scuttle all stepped out. Shades and Mario followed them. Bilby and Hedaya were also piling out.
Shipwreck also saw Deep Six, Wet Suit, and Torpedo filing out. "Guys...." He began.
"Shipwreck, Recondo and Cover Girl are missing in LA, our team mates. Hawk approved this op not more than an hour ago." Torpedo began, "Hedaya, Bilby, you guys provide sniper cover from the helicopter."
Other than the sniper team consisting of Mario Juarez and Grover "Shades" Kiley, from the Gamma squadron, all the men on this operation were Navy men. All wore civilian clothes and in various bits of civilian luggage were their weapons and ammunition and other gear.
Shades and Mario carried their rifles broken down in brief cases. They would reassemble the lethal tools of their trade when they reached Los Angeles. "Let's do this." Mario began grimly, the mirth normally part of his tone gone almost entirely.
Shipwreck felt overwhelmed by the response of his team mates and the simple fact that they were going to help him on a dangerous operation. "So much for solo ops." Shipwreck remarked, "Let's do this."
~ ~ ~ ~
'God I hope Recondo got away.' Cover Girl fervently hoped. She was curled into a ball in the corner of a room in a house. It was one of those generic construction numbers, one of those stucco patterned project numbers that the zoning board turned up. Someone more erudite might call the crumbling pueblo façade house in the middle of the ghetto Southwestern architecture, but from what she saw through her blindfold, it was a dump.
She had been here for what felt like an eternity, at least four days since she and Recondo had been reported missing. Those four days were a whirl of interrogations, mind games, and feverish delirium ever since one of the COBRAs had injected her with some green liquid in a syringe.
The thing that was worst than the fever was the fact that one of the Heartless put a gun to her head the first night of captivity and squeezed the trigger. She felt her heart race and stop simultaneously, her life flashing for her before her eyes. The only regret she had was not telling Hector, or Shipwreck as she called him at work, how she really had felt about him sooner. This would really kill him, was her last thought before blackness claimed her.
About a minute later she felt the splash of ice cold water on her face. She could hear Copperhead laughing, "Silly girl, that pistol wasn't even loaded."
That night two Range Vipers held her down, forced her sleeve up and injected something into her. About an hour later she felt an unbelievable chill. Shivering didn't help much, if anything it caused the fever she was currently nursing. Even trying to stand up produced a wave of nausea and exhaustion. There was no way she could know that her captors were suffering as well until she could hear screams of pain and the sound of a body flopping across the floor. Through a small hole in the wall she could see one of the COBRA sponsored gang members that had captured her flopping like a fish out of water. Antennae were starting to grow out of his head, his eyes were glowing, his tattooed skin was starting to turn black and claws began to grow from his hand. After a few more convulsions, a Shadow Heartless stood in the place of a sixteen year old gang member.
COBRA really showed who was in charge last night when Echevarra, the head of this gang of two bit drug pushers tried to be a gentleman and said that the virus injection was no way to treat a lady. He said it with a leering grin that left no illusion of chivalric leanings. Copperhead laughed and shot the boy, who was maybe twenty-three, through his head with a pistol. The Heartless had taken every weapon the gang had at its disposal and had them under tight supervision. When they pulled guard duty, they were armed, of course, but a single Heartless sniper had a telescopic rifle aimed directly at the sentry's heart should he try to rebel.
"Vito!" yelled one of the gangsters at the Heartless drone. Suddenly he too screamed and convulsed as he clutched his chest, as the gruesome transformation took place.
~ ~ ~ ~
"Shit." Mario growled, as he kept his crosshairs on the stucco pueblo house. "More Heartless."
Thanks to data from Recondo, whom the SEALs had rescued together with two Los Angeles teenagers, mutants named Paul and Craig, they were able to find the exact neighborhood where Cover Girl was being held. COBRA had been arming gangs that swore allegiance to it, and arming them with the latest weapons in LAPD arsenals to aid them in wiping out other rival gangs that had not done so.
"Technical. Six O'Clock." Came Hedaya's voice over the radio. A low rider with a fifty caliber machinegun bolted to it drove not more than six feet away from where Shades and Mario had holed up in an abandoned house, their rifles aiming at the house directly in front.
So far those two boys, Craig and Paul, had decided to head for the house, and pretend to join the gang. Already they were being led inside for their screening. Mario watched intently for the signal, which was Craig lighting a cigarette, to confirm the presence of the hostage.
Already the SEALs and the Shipwreck's four man team were in position to storm the house from the back and through a side door. All they needed was a confirmation of Cover Girl's presence and hell would descend upon the COBRAs inside. Speed, surprise, and precision was the name of the game, or there would be more casualties.
The distraction would commence when the cigarette was lit. Hedaya and Bilby would start shooting up the three technicals and the men in them a block away, making the enemy nervous, and then Mario and Shades would commence fire. As soon as the perimeter guards were neutralized, Shipwreck's team and the SEALs would jump right into the fray.
Suddenly Shades tapped him on the back, "There's our viper."
The plume of cigarette smoke was clear enough to be seen out the window. And as he saw it, Mario put a single round into the head of a COBRA viper standing outside the house. Shades squeezed off a second round into a Heartless drone. A gang member tried to run for it, only to be shot.
"Sniper!" Shades shouted and turned his rifle towards a bushy tree in the lawn. In less than a second after aiming his telescopic CAR-15 rifle at the tree he squeezed the trigger and out fell a dead Heartless sniper.
Elsewhere he could hear Bilby and Hedaya shooting up a couple technicals. Mario squeezed off another round that killed a fourth viper when Shipwreck's team hit the side of the house. The back was hit by the SEALs.
~ ~ ~ ~
Armand D'Artagnan fired a shotgun round into the lock of the back door and kicked it down. Scuttle threw a flash grenade into the room, effectively blinding anyone in the room. A Heartless with an Uzi tried to fire only to be splattered across the wall by D'Artagnan's shotgun.
"Clear!" Scuttle shouted, sweeping his MP-5 across his corner of the room.
A short burst of gunfire sounded as Wassner killed a COBRA viper in a green mask and vest. Copperhead fell back, the blood that had been spurting from his nose from the flash grenade mingling with holes from a dozen rounds that had punctured his body.
"Clear!" Wassner shouted.
"Clear!" Armand shouted and then without skipping a beat, blasted the other door down with a third shotgun blast.
Facing him was a sneering gang member determined to kill one of the invading bastards. A hole the size of a softball appeared in his chest as Armand shot him at point blank range. A second gang member raised his hands.
"Down!" Wassner said, kicking him to the floor and flex cuffing him.
Chief, standing behind Armand, tapped the Frenchman on the shoulder. Armand reloaded more shells before he took out another door. Scuttle threw another grenade and in three seconds they jumped into the room, shooting up two more Heartless that were foolish enough to resist.
There was more shooting on the other side of the room as Shipwreck's team was starting to clear out the kitchen. Chief tapped Armand again and with another shotgun round, Armand knocked out the door lock with a cloud of razor edged steel fragments.
Shipwreck was already clearing the living room when he heard the SEALs breaking in through the back. He saw a COBRA viper poke his head around the corner and he put two 9mm rounds through his skull. Deep Six was watching their backs, while Wetsuit and Torpedo were in the middle.
A gang member with a MAC-10 popped out from behind the sink and squeezed the trigger on the weapon, pointing it at Chief. But the scared fifteen- year-old, dealing with an unfamiliar situation had not cocked the weapon. Chief put six rounds into the gangster, putting him down for good.
Already he could see three more Heartless running from Armand's shotgun blasts that had already ripped one of their number in half in a shower of razor edged metal fragments.
A half mutated COBRA viper stumbled out of the bathroom right into three rounds from Shipwreck's handgun. The Heartless, vipers, and gang members with enough sense to flee were being picked off by Mario and Shades, as well as from Hedaya and Bilby.
There was one final room to clear and both teams took positions in case some vipers had holed up inside. Armand aimed his shotgun at the lock....
~ ~ ~ ~
The shooting came so suddenly that despite her weakened state, Cover Girl ducked behind the mattress that was the room's only piece of furniture. She could see flashlights mounted on the end of weapons as a team burst into the room. The sound of a shotgun firing clued her in to what was about to happen. A flash grenade exploded in the room as she ducked her head, covered her ears and opened her mouth. The simple effort exhausted her as she shouted, "Friendlies!"
"Clear!" Armand shouted, Chief behind him.
"Courtney?" came a familiar shout. Weakly looking up, she could see Shipwreck running into the room, "Oh my God! What did they do to you?"
"Get her out of here Shipwreck!" Chief shouted, "This is Red One! Need extraction, ASAP!"
"This is Super Seven Four. You got it!" Peyton Farquahar's voice sounded as his UH-60 landed in the front lawn.
Hedaya and Bilby had already taken positions and were steadily picking off any Heartless that was stupid enough to try and rush the bird. Shades and Mario were doing the same as Shipwreck tenderly bundled Cover Girl into the aircraft and his team boarded. The SEALs followed and the four snipers jumped aboard last. The helicopter took off and flew out beyond the radius of the teleportation shield COBRA had put up around Los Angeles.
~ ~ ~ ~
As soon as the helicopter landed, the two Air Force parajumpers as well as Lifeline, Bree, and Doc were all waiting by the ambulance. Shipwreck stubbornly refused to be separated as they wheeled the gurney through the sterile corridors of the Infirmary with Cover Girl barely clinging to life.
A few hours later: "Hector." Lifeline began, "I've got her stabilized and the fever went down, she's still hovering at 99 degrees. But that virus is something I've never seen, save for in Mindbender's notes. There is a cure in it, but to find it I'm gonna have to ask the devil himself."
As he spoke, he indicated a cryogenic storage container, an experimental device in which Mindbender slept in suspended animation, to delay this transformation from human into Heartless.
"What else can you do?" Shipwreck asked Lifeline.
"My healing touch could work, but I'm not so sure it would." Lifeline said.
Shipwreck walked into the intensive care unit, the EKG attached to Courtney beeping steadily, her pulse was still steady. She was comatose, and had been for at least four hours. At least her pulse was stable, but it still pained him to see her in this state. Her skin was ashen and clammy, an IV protruded from her left arm, and the life support machine was helping her breathe. At least her temperature was being kept stable around 99 to 98.7 degrees.
"Hector." Bree said, "Why don't you get some rest? We'll let you know if anything develops."
"No, Bree." Shipwreck practically begged, "Let me stay. I need to be with her..."
At the look in Shipwreck's eyes, Bree dropped the matter and said, "I'll bring a blanket and a pillow, that couch outside the door is pretty comfortable."
Shipwreck could have been told the building was burning for all that he cared. Someone he cared for was in danger of death, and he could do nothing to help her. The answer lay with a man in stasis two stories down and the abilities of the GI Joe medical staff.
~ ~ ~ ~
Will Cover Girl ever get out of that coma? Will Mindbender cooperate? Find out in the next chapter, to be posted (no promises, school work is a killer), next Saturday.
Disclaimer: Same as before....L1701E, I can't update as often because school started last week. Feel free to create Recondo's encounter with the boys in your way.
~ ~ ~ ~
"Shipwreck, we'll let you know as soon as we find out." The chilling words ran through Shipwreck's brain as clear as they had been when Lady Jaye had told him six days ago.
Cover Girl, or Courtney as he'd been calling her lately except when on duty, had been on a surveillance operation in Los Angeles when she had disappeared. He knew all too well how COBRA and the Heartless treated prisoners and the fact that Courtney was in enemy hands was enough to rend deep into his soul.
He had requested straight from Hawk to go straight to Los Angeles on a solo op to go find her. Hawk's reply had been sympathetic but a denial nonetheless, "Hector, I need you to keep your head in this. I know Courtney's just fine; she probably had to lie low because of pursuit. I can't risk having two operatives lost in the field. Request denied."
The bottle of tequila, the sixth one he'd drank in as many days, was half empty. Polly was sitting on his perch, being unusually quiet. The kids were all asleep, only Shipwreck wasn't getting any sleep.
"Screw regs Hawk, Courtney's in trouble, I know it." Shipwreck said, as he threw on some nondescript civilian clothing and a tan trench coat.
Shipwreck grabbed a 9mm Beretta sidearm and three loaded magazines. He felt an arm grab his right hand, he turned to see Chief Brewster, one of the four SEALs on the task force holding on to him.
"Shipwreck, what in the hell are you doing?" Brewster asked.
"Chief, something I need to do." Shipwreck replied.
"Shipwreck, I know that losing Courtney...." Brewster began.
"God damn it Chief!" Shipwreck practically shouted, "I have to do this."
"Stand down sailor!" Brewster began, drawing himself to full height, though not tall in stature, Brewster was every bit the classic Chief Petty Officer. Hard as a rock, dedicated, and skilled at his trade, Brewster could easily switch moods from the normally good natured man to the hardened countenance of a veteran combat leader.
The authority had its effect, "We're going with you, dummy, stay ready. I've got my three guys ready with the needed gear." Chief began, "Wait for us outside."
Twenty minutes later a humvee pulled up, D'Artagnan, Wassner, and Scuttle all stepped out. Shades and Mario followed them. Bilby and Hedaya were also piling out.
Shipwreck also saw Deep Six, Wet Suit, and Torpedo filing out. "Guys...." He began.
"Shipwreck, Recondo and Cover Girl are missing in LA, our team mates. Hawk approved this op not more than an hour ago." Torpedo began, "Hedaya, Bilby, you guys provide sniper cover from the helicopter."
Other than the sniper team consisting of Mario Juarez and Grover "Shades" Kiley, from the Gamma squadron, all the men on this operation were Navy men. All wore civilian clothes and in various bits of civilian luggage were their weapons and ammunition and other gear.
Shades and Mario carried their rifles broken down in brief cases. They would reassemble the lethal tools of their trade when they reached Los Angeles. "Let's do this." Mario began grimly, the mirth normally part of his tone gone almost entirely.
Shipwreck felt overwhelmed by the response of his team mates and the simple fact that they were going to help him on a dangerous operation. "So much for solo ops." Shipwreck remarked, "Let's do this."
~ ~ ~ ~
'God I hope Recondo got away.' Cover Girl fervently hoped. She was curled into a ball in the corner of a room in a house. It was one of those generic construction numbers, one of those stucco patterned project numbers that the zoning board turned up. Someone more erudite might call the crumbling pueblo façade house in the middle of the ghetto Southwestern architecture, but from what she saw through her blindfold, it was a dump.
She had been here for what felt like an eternity, at least four days since she and Recondo had been reported missing. Those four days were a whirl of interrogations, mind games, and feverish delirium ever since one of the COBRAs had injected her with some green liquid in a syringe.
The thing that was worst than the fever was the fact that one of the Heartless put a gun to her head the first night of captivity and squeezed the trigger. She felt her heart race and stop simultaneously, her life flashing for her before her eyes. The only regret she had was not telling Hector, or Shipwreck as she called him at work, how she really had felt about him sooner. This would really kill him, was her last thought before blackness claimed her.
About a minute later she felt the splash of ice cold water on her face. She could hear Copperhead laughing, "Silly girl, that pistol wasn't even loaded."
That night two Range Vipers held her down, forced her sleeve up and injected something into her. About an hour later she felt an unbelievable chill. Shivering didn't help much, if anything it caused the fever she was currently nursing. Even trying to stand up produced a wave of nausea and exhaustion. There was no way she could know that her captors were suffering as well until she could hear screams of pain and the sound of a body flopping across the floor. Through a small hole in the wall she could see one of the COBRA sponsored gang members that had captured her flopping like a fish out of water. Antennae were starting to grow out of his head, his eyes were glowing, his tattooed skin was starting to turn black and claws began to grow from his hand. After a few more convulsions, a Shadow Heartless stood in the place of a sixteen year old gang member.
COBRA really showed who was in charge last night when Echevarra, the head of this gang of two bit drug pushers tried to be a gentleman and said that the virus injection was no way to treat a lady. He said it with a leering grin that left no illusion of chivalric leanings. Copperhead laughed and shot the boy, who was maybe twenty-three, through his head with a pistol. The Heartless had taken every weapon the gang had at its disposal and had them under tight supervision. When they pulled guard duty, they were armed, of course, but a single Heartless sniper had a telescopic rifle aimed directly at the sentry's heart should he try to rebel.
"Vito!" yelled one of the gangsters at the Heartless drone. Suddenly he too screamed and convulsed as he clutched his chest, as the gruesome transformation took place.
~ ~ ~ ~
"Shit." Mario growled, as he kept his crosshairs on the stucco pueblo house. "More Heartless."
Thanks to data from Recondo, whom the SEALs had rescued together with two Los Angeles teenagers, mutants named Paul and Craig, they were able to find the exact neighborhood where Cover Girl was being held. COBRA had been arming gangs that swore allegiance to it, and arming them with the latest weapons in LAPD arsenals to aid them in wiping out other rival gangs that had not done so.
"Technical. Six O'Clock." Came Hedaya's voice over the radio. A low rider with a fifty caliber machinegun bolted to it drove not more than six feet away from where Shades and Mario had holed up in an abandoned house, their rifles aiming at the house directly in front.
So far those two boys, Craig and Paul, had decided to head for the house, and pretend to join the gang. Already they were being led inside for their screening. Mario watched intently for the signal, which was Craig lighting a cigarette, to confirm the presence of the hostage.
Already the SEALs and the Shipwreck's four man team were in position to storm the house from the back and through a side door. All they needed was a confirmation of Cover Girl's presence and hell would descend upon the COBRAs inside. Speed, surprise, and precision was the name of the game, or there would be more casualties.
The distraction would commence when the cigarette was lit. Hedaya and Bilby would start shooting up the three technicals and the men in them a block away, making the enemy nervous, and then Mario and Shades would commence fire. As soon as the perimeter guards were neutralized, Shipwreck's team and the SEALs would jump right into the fray.
Suddenly Shades tapped him on the back, "There's our viper."
The plume of cigarette smoke was clear enough to be seen out the window. And as he saw it, Mario put a single round into the head of a COBRA viper standing outside the house. Shades squeezed off a second round into a Heartless drone. A gang member tried to run for it, only to be shot.
"Sniper!" Shades shouted and turned his rifle towards a bushy tree in the lawn. In less than a second after aiming his telescopic CAR-15 rifle at the tree he squeezed the trigger and out fell a dead Heartless sniper.
Elsewhere he could hear Bilby and Hedaya shooting up a couple technicals. Mario squeezed off another round that killed a fourth viper when Shipwreck's team hit the side of the house. The back was hit by the SEALs.
~ ~ ~ ~
Armand D'Artagnan fired a shotgun round into the lock of the back door and kicked it down. Scuttle threw a flash grenade into the room, effectively blinding anyone in the room. A Heartless with an Uzi tried to fire only to be splattered across the wall by D'Artagnan's shotgun.
"Clear!" Scuttle shouted, sweeping his MP-5 across his corner of the room.
A short burst of gunfire sounded as Wassner killed a COBRA viper in a green mask and vest. Copperhead fell back, the blood that had been spurting from his nose from the flash grenade mingling with holes from a dozen rounds that had punctured his body.
"Clear!" Wassner shouted.
"Clear!" Armand shouted and then without skipping a beat, blasted the other door down with a third shotgun blast.
Facing him was a sneering gang member determined to kill one of the invading bastards. A hole the size of a softball appeared in his chest as Armand shot him at point blank range. A second gang member raised his hands.
"Down!" Wassner said, kicking him to the floor and flex cuffing him.
Chief, standing behind Armand, tapped the Frenchman on the shoulder. Armand reloaded more shells before he took out another door. Scuttle threw another grenade and in three seconds they jumped into the room, shooting up two more Heartless that were foolish enough to resist.
There was more shooting on the other side of the room as Shipwreck's team was starting to clear out the kitchen. Chief tapped Armand again and with another shotgun round, Armand knocked out the door lock with a cloud of razor edged steel fragments.
Shipwreck was already clearing the living room when he heard the SEALs breaking in through the back. He saw a COBRA viper poke his head around the corner and he put two 9mm rounds through his skull. Deep Six was watching their backs, while Wetsuit and Torpedo were in the middle.
A gang member with a MAC-10 popped out from behind the sink and squeezed the trigger on the weapon, pointing it at Chief. But the scared fifteen- year-old, dealing with an unfamiliar situation had not cocked the weapon. Chief put six rounds into the gangster, putting him down for good.
Already he could see three more Heartless running from Armand's shotgun blasts that had already ripped one of their number in half in a shower of razor edged metal fragments.
A half mutated COBRA viper stumbled out of the bathroom right into three rounds from Shipwreck's handgun. The Heartless, vipers, and gang members with enough sense to flee were being picked off by Mario and Shades, as well as from Hedaya and Bilby.
There was one final room to clear and both teams took positions in case some vipers had holed up inside. Armand aimed his shotgun at the lock....
~ ~ ~ ~
The shooting came so suddenly that despite her weakened state, Cover Girl ducked behind the mattress that was the room's only piece of furniture. She could see flashlights mounted on the end of weapons as a team burst into the room. The sound of a shotgun firing clued her in to what was about to happen. A flash grenade exploded in the room as she ducked her head, covered her ears and opened her mouth. The simple effort exhausted her as she shouted, "Friendlies!"
"Clear!" Armand shouted, Chief behind him.
"Courtney?" came a familiar shout. Weakly looking up, she could see Shipwreck running into the room, "Oh my God! What did they do to you?"
"Get her out of here Shipwreck!" Chief shouted, "This is Red One! Need extraction, ASAP!"
"This is Super Seven Four. You got it!" Peyton Farquahar's voice sounded as his UH-60 landed in the front lawn.
Hedaya and Bilby had already taken positions and were steadily picking off any Heartless that was stupid enough to try and rush the bird. Shades and Mario were doing the same as Shipwreck tenderly bundled Cover Girl into the aircraft and his team boarded. The SEALs followed and the four snipers jumped aboard last. The helicopter took off and flew out beyond the radius of the teleportation shield COBRA had put up around Los Angeles.
~ ~ ~ ~
As soon as the helicopter landed, the two Air Force parajumpers as well as Lifeline, Bree, and Doc were all waiting by the ambulance. Shipwreck stubbornly refused to be separated as they wheeled the gurney through the sterile corridors of the Infirmary with Cover Girl barely clinging to life.
A few hours later: "Hector." Lifeline began, "I've got her stabilized and the fever went down, she's still hovering at 99 degrees. But that virus is something I've never seen, save for in Mindbender's notes. There is a cure in it, but to find it I'm gonna have to ask the devil himself."
As he spoke, he indicated a cryogenic storage container, an experimental device in which Mindbender slept in suspended animation, to delay this transformation from human into Heartless.
"What else can you do?" Shipwreck asked Lifeline.
"My healing touch could work, but I'm not so sure it would." Lifeline said.
Shipwreck walked into the intensive care unit, the EKG attached to Courtney beeping steadily, her pulse was still steady. She was comatose, and had been for at least four hours. At least her pulse was stable, but it still pained him to see her in this state. Her skin was ashen and clammy, an IV protruded from her left arm, and the life support machine was helping her breathe. At least her temperature was being kept stable around 99 to 98.7 degrees.
"Hector." Bree said, "Why don't you get some rest? We'll let you know if anything develops."
"No, Bree." Shipwreck practically begged, "Let me stay. I need to be with her..."
At the look in Shipwreck's eyes, Bree dropped the matter and said, "I'll bring a blanket and a pillow, that couch outside the door is pretty comfortable."
Shipwreck could have been told the building was burning for all that he cared. Someone he cared for was in danger of death, and he could do nothing to help her. The answer lay with a man in stasis two stories down and the abilities of the GI Joe medical staff.
~ ~ ~ ~
Will Cover Girl ever get out of that coma? Will Mindbender cooperate? Find out in the next chapter, to be posted (no promises, school work is a killer), next Saturday.
