Sharron McClellan - Breathless

“Ma’am, we’re not going to make it,” Latham said, his voice laced with fear.

“Yes, we are, and Latham, stop ma’aming me,” Jess snapped.

Behind her, the limpet mine exploded.

Definitely bigger than a cap gun.

Next to her, Latham’s eyes widened in fear. Her gaze shifted, adjusted, and she saw her reflection in his mask. Her dark eyes were wide. Panicked.

Then the percussion wave rolled over them, tumbling them in its wake. Someone screamed, and for a brief, agonizing second she thought her head would explode. Blackness claimed her, and she sank into the dark.

The darkness surrounding Jess was absolute. Almost tangible with its thickness. She swam through it like water. But somehow, she knew it was different. Something evil. Slick. Oily.

Still, she swam. She’d lost something. Something important.

No, she realized. Not something. Someone.

“Latham!” She screamed for her recruit. Out of the blackness, she spotted him next to her, sinking facedown into the ocean’s depths. She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him to the surface, but the darkness dragged her down.

Kicking harder made no difference. Pulling at the dark with her hands didn’t help.

Still, she fought. She had to save him.

Then the pull of the abyss flipped Latham over, and she froze in horror. His mask was shattered. His eyes wide and sightless. His mouth gaping in horror.

She tried to let go of the corpse that was once a man—a boy—under her guidance but found herself unable to release her grip. Instead, he acted like a stone, dragging her into oblivion. The farther she sank, the faster she went. Soon, she sped past animals that were the stuff of legends. Giant squid. Eels as long as a barge. Fish with lights for eyes.

Something came from below and grabbed her feet. Shook her like a doll. She lashed out, fighting with every ounce of her being.

She refused to die. Nature would not beat her.

“Jess.”

A voice called to her, pushing past the fear and the panic. “Jess.” She recognized the insistent, familiar baritone. Taylor.

She opened her eyes, blinking at the lights around her. There was no ocean. No depths pulling her down. No darkness that went all the way to hell.

There were white walls. Stainless steel fixtures. Air. A bouquet of daisies on a small table. She was in a hospital.

Disoriented, she untangled her feet from the sheets and yanked the oxygen tube from beneath her nose. Taylor tried to take her hand. She flinched.

He took a step back, waiting. Patient, as always.

Jess blinked again then scrubbed her face with her palms trying to make sense of the world. How had she gotten to the hospital? Why was she here?

“You back with us?” Taylor asked.

Back with them? She didn’t understand. “What?” she asked, her voice croaky. Her throat felt as dry as the desert.

Taylor handed her a glass of water.

She gulped down the tepid liquid then handed the empty glass back to her friend.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yeah. Thanks,” she said, feeling more grounded with each passing second. “What am I doing here?”

“You don’t remember?”

She shook her head. Trying to make sense out of her jumbled memory.

Taylor took her hand, and this time, she didn’t pull away.

“We were on a training mission. There was an accident. An explosion.”

“An explosion?” The incident came back to Jess in broken, disjointed frames. The stripped screws. The wrong countdown. The disabled DPV. The fear in Latham’s eyes as the explosion ripped him from her grasp.

Latham.

“Latham. Where is he?”

Taylor’s gray eyes softened, and he ran a hand over his military short, salt-and-pepper hair. “ICU.”

She opened her mouth to ask if he was okay then stopped herself. If he was in ICU she had her answer. She clenched the sheet in her fist, wishing she didn’t have to go to the next obvious question. “Will he live?” she whispered.

“No idea. If he does, there might be brain damage.” He sighed. “He went quite a while without oxygen.”

“His mask broke,” Jess said, remembering the nightmare. An image of Latham, his face twisted in death, flashed across her thoughts. Just a dream, Jess. She reminded herself. Just a dream.

“Yeah,” Taylor confirmed. “You were holding on to him when we located you. His mask was cracked. Flooded. It took us almost a minute to convince you to let go of him.”

“I was awake?”

“Kind of.”

She shook her head as both her nightmare and reality converged until she didn’t know which was true. Latham had been unconscious, unable to save himself. She’d tried to take him to the surface. She thought.

Whatever the truth, she told herself, he’s alive, and where there’s life, there’s hope. “Take me to him.”

Taylor shook his head. “No can do. You’re confined to bed.”

“No, I’m not.” Not even Taylor could force her to stay in bed. Not when one of her men was hurt.

She pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the cot, wavering as the world tilted around her. Taylor moved to help her, and she waved him off. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”

He sighed again, obviously annoyed by, and resigned to, her decision.

Making sure the pea-green hospital gown was tied in the back, she rose on unsteady legs. He didn’t offer to help again. “Show me,” she said.

He led her down the hall, through a set of doors and into a small pale green room. Machines whirred and beeped. The smell of rubbing alcohol, sweat and death permeated Jess’s nose. She covered it with her palm before she retched at the scent.

But beyond the sounds and the hospital smell was Charles Latham in a bed next to the window, being kept alive by tubes and a ventilator.

The room swayed, but she took a deep breath and shuffled over to her trainee’s bed.

Careful not to jostle any of his tubes, she stroked a palm over his cocoa-colored, shaved head. When he’d come to her for training, his dark, curly hair was just over an inch long and stylish for a Marine. He’d shaved it off. Keeping it simple, he’d said when teased about the transformation.

And now, he lay here. His face puffy. His skin ashen. His body limp.

A shadow of the man she knew.

“I am so sorry, Chuck,” she said.

“Chuck?” Taylor asked.

“He hates Charles,” she replied, unable to think of the boy in front of her as Latham. Under the circumstances, his last name sounded cold. Aloof. Impersonal. The boy in the bed was none of those things. Not to her.

He was a person. Her student. Her responsibility.

She put her hands in her lap and squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to believe that such an energetic, strong young man would not pull through. “You’re going to make it,” she whispered, praying that this room, and the comatose man in the bed, was nothing more than a continuation of her nightmare.

When she opened her eyes, Chuck still lay in bed. Dead except for the machines breathing life into him. “This is my fault,” she said.

“Things happen,” Taylor said from behind her.

“Not things,” she corrected, anger tinting her voice and wiping away any attempt at professionalism. “Sabotage.”

“What?” Taylor asked, surprise in his voice.

Jess shifted to face him. “When we were going to the ship, the DPV gave me trouble. I should have stopped. Aborted the mission. Instead I kept going.”

“Those things foul up. We both know that.”

“Yeah, but if I’d stopped…” She glanced at Latham then continued her story. “We set the limpet. The timer didn’t work. Wouldn’t abort. I looked closer, and the screws were stripped. When we tried to bug out, the DPV failed.”