Page 68 of Painless
“Yo, you seeing this?” someone yelled.
I looked to the left to see Reaper running up the street toward me.
“She’s fine,” I told him before he could ask. “But Jandro’s badly hurt. She’s in her office with him.”
He nodded, the relief palpable on his face. “What do you make of this?” He gestured toward the sky.
“That they’re crash-landing all of a sudden? I have no idea.”
The president clapped my shoulder. “I think the worst of it is over. Gunner’s on his way in. Cover him at the gate, will you? We’ll be with Mari.”
“Yes, president.”
Gunner ran past me, not a minute later, on my way to the gate. “Thanks, Shadow. A lot of the same shit, just dropping out of the sky for no reason. Keep your eyes peeled, though.”
I climbed the metal rungs embedded in our perimeter wall and squinted at the landscape beyond our once-safe home. Broken drones and their parts lay strewn across the desert like some kind of robot cemetery, but nothing else seemed amiss.
“See anyone out there?” I asked Benji.
“Not a damn soul,” he spat. “Some of the tear gas didn’t make it over the wall, so we got faces full of it. Then, still nothing once it cleared. It was like some damn robot uprising. ‘Til their batteries went out.”
“That’s impossible,” I muttered.
The tear gas cleared up hours later, with no drones coming back to life. Near dusk, I took my mask off and filled my lungs with sweet, fresh air. In the last sliver of sunlight, I spotted movement that made me look closer.
Three figures approaching on motorcycles, with a black bird flying above them.
Twenty-Two
MARIPOSA
“God fucking damn it, Jandro.”
I wiped my face with my arm, tears and snot making a mess on my sleeve. But I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop until I saw a fucking heartbeat on that monitor.
“Clear!” I yelled before pressing the defibrillator paddles on his chest again.
His body jumped with the jolt of electricity. But the monitors still displayed a flat line. His kissable, pillowy lips were turning blue.
“Fine, Jandro.” I set the paddles aside and ripped off my gloves. “You want to play that way? You’re just going to make me even more pissed off for when you wake up.”
I went to my cabinet and pulled out the small glass jar of adrenaline. Ripping open a fresh needle and syringe, I stuck the lid and withdrew the highest safe amount to give a human without throwing them into cardiac arrest.
Safe was an iffy word when it came to shooting pure adrenaline, but I was desperate. We already lost Dallas. I wasn’t about to lose one of my men.
“I love you,” I told Jandro’s lifeless body stretched out on my exam table. “But I fucking hate you right now.” With that, I stuck the syringe directly into his elbow and shoved the plunger down.
Nothing happened right away, so I started up CPR on him again.
“Mari,” someone said from the corner of the room. Probably Gunner, I didn’t know. I had to fucking focus.
“Shut up,” I responded, counting through my chest compressions before breathing into Jandro’s mouth again. The butterfly necklace he gave me hung down from my throat, brushing against his chin.
Not a single cell in my body was ready to give up. I would not lose him. I’d break every single rib giving him CPR, before I let him go. But as I kept pressing down, kept giving him my air and trying to jumpstart his heart, the cold grip of fear started to creep in.
Just as I started feeling lightheaded and completely out of breath, the man on the table pulled in a ragged, desperate gasp of air.
The heart monitor beeped to life, almost too fast as Jandro choked and coughed, his body bringing in much-needed oxygen. I slid to the floor, completely drained of energy and also limp with relief. Someone pulled me back up, a solid chest and strong arms wrapping me in a hug. Leather and cloves filled my nostrils as kisses swept across my face.
