Free Pack Dynamics by Julie Frost Page A

a syringeful of something just short of magic, she hoped, which he injected directly into the bullet hole.
    “Mike’s on his way,” Jeremy said. “He’s about fifteen minutes out.”
    “Do we have that long?” Megan asked.
    “This should stop the worst of it,” Doc Allen said, setting the empty hypo on the floor. “But I need to get him into surgery stat. Ten minutes ago would be better.”
    Fortunately for everyone involved, Alex had such a lively horror of hospitals (“You can die in places like that, Miss Graham.”) that he had his own fully-equipped operating theater right here in the house. It was getting a workout tonight.
    “Jeremy, stretcher,” Megan said, and here she was directing traffic again. He ran out, coming back less than a minute later with the folding one from the basement lab.
    They rolled Ben onto it and carried him down to the surgical suite, which was right off the lab. Alex tended to have the majority of his accidents at home there.
    Doc Allen and Jeremy scrubbed up and sent everyone else out, including Janni, despite her protests.
    Megan headed back upstairs and realized that she hadn’t even checked to see if the bad guys were dead or alive. She decided she didn’t actually care. She got Janni cleaned up and calmed down, then settled in the living room with a cup of tea just before the real police arrived with clipboards and questions. But not too many questions because this was Alex Jarrett’s house, and she was his PA, and it was amazing just how much the cops trusted you when you had billions of dollars at your beck and call and made large, regular donations to the Widows and Orphans Fund.
    The three bad guys were dead. Ben’s shots had been scarily precise, and Megan wondered where he’d learned to handle a gun like that, because he struck her as more the mild geek type than a Rambo. She decided to ask Janni about it later when things weren’t quite so crazy. But right now she was juggling police and the coroner, sending Mike Reed down to the OR to help Doc Allen out with Ben, and holy crap, was that daylight peeking in through the windows? And she still hadn’t called a cleanup crew for the blood all over the place or cancelled Alex’s appointments for the day.
    Speaking of her boss, four rather loud gunshots had been fired in his house, and he hadn’t made an appearance wondering what the hell was going on. When the police left, Megan went upstairs to check on him.
    O O O
    “Suction.” Doc Allen’s voice was cool, but he was losing his patient, and he wasn’t sure he could do a damn thing about it. Even with the nanotech, Ben’s body had sustained too much trauma in too short a period of time, and this wound might prove fatal if Allen couldn’t pull something out of his ass, and quick. This wasn’t the first time he’d roped Hasgrave into assistant duty, and Jarrett’s chief of security was good at it, but he honestly couldn’t help much.
    Removing the bulk of the bullet itself required a fairly basic operation, but it had punched through a rib, tumbled, and shattered, sending shards of bone and metal into Ben’s lung and pericardial sac. Allen managed to repair most of the damage, but something in there was still bleeding, maybe several somethings. Ben was losing blood pressure and still in the same state of shock he’d been in when they’d put him under the knife with no time to stabilize him. Transfused blood leaked into his chest almost as fast as it entered the vein in his left hand.
    “Shit. Shitshitshit …” Allen muttered, digging around. “Where are you, you little bastard…?”
    Mike Reed came in, scrubbed and ready, carrying an aluminum case loaded with, Allen hoped, miracles. “I’m glad you’re here, Dr. Reed. Tell me you’ve got something good in that shiny container.”
    Reed’s gaze took in the monitors, which told an unhappy story, and his brow lowered over his mask. “One thing that might actually work. It’s untested on