The impact was instant. Jed slumped, like he’d had a bucket load of the morphine he hated so much. His head collided with something warm and solid.Dan. Someone groaned. Huge arms came around him. Yeah, definitely Dan.
“Jed? Look at me, come on, man. Talk to me.”
Jed opened his eyes. The room was dark and unfamiliar. Something scratched at the back of his hand. An IV. Really? Another damn fucking IV?
Dan nudged him back into awareness. “You okay?”
Jed shook his head. He was used to pain, but this?This hurts.
“I know, dude, but they’re gonna fix it, okay? Whatever it is, they’re gonna fix it. Max is coming. Stay with me until he gets here.”
The words went over Jed’s head. All but three.
Max is coming.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“MAX,YOUneed to get here. Something’s really fucking wrong.”
Max threw Jed’s truck into a space. In his dubious peripheral vision, he saw Dan’s hulking frame pacing outside the hospital’s main entrance, and his heart dropped. He’d driven to the city like a man possessed, but the sickening sensation in his stomach told him he was already too late.
He dashed across the parking lot. “Dan? What happened?”
Dan shook his head, his face drawn. “I don’t know. He puked a couple of times last night, but I didn’t think anything of it. I passed out in the chair, and when I woke up….” He shook his head. “Man, he didn’t even know I was there.”
“But he was fine when I left him.” Max pushed through the revolving hospital doors and made for the stairs. “Fine” was a relative term. Jed had been grouchy, but he hadn’t seemed any sicker than usual.
Dan caught Max’s arm. “Max, he’s not on the ward. They moved him to ICU.”
Max stopped dead in the corridor. “ICU? What the fuck for?”
Dan pulled him toward the elevator, pressed the call button and yanked him inside. “They said something about an infection, but they weren’t sure. I couldn’t get any sense out of anyone, and Jed was rambling some shit about driving in the rain.”
Max swallowed hard.Driving in the rain. How did he know?
The elevator shuddered as it heaved its way up the hospital building to the fifth floor. Max didn’t go in elevators much. Flo hated them. Shit. Flo. In his haste to get to Jed, or perhaps knowing she’d object to him driving Jed’s truck, he’d left her at the cabin. He needed to call Kim to go fetch her, or Carla, maybe. Maybe Dan had already called Carla.
“Max?”
“Huh?”
Dan tugged him out of the elevator and leaned him against the wall. “Still with me?”
Max willed his delinquent brain to get a grip. He felt nervous without Flo, but he couldn’t drop now, dammit. Jed needed him. “I’m fine. Where is he?”
“Down the hall, but they won’t let us into the room yet. Max, listen to me. Jed’s in trouble, okay? They had to sedate him and put a tube in his throat. They don’t know when he’ll wake up from that.”
“Just tell me where he is.”
Dan relented. A blur of blank corridors and faceless nurses passed Max by, and a few moments later he found himself staring at the stuff of his worst nightmares.
Max clamped his hand over his mouth, sure he was still at home asleep—asleep andalone. He took an uncertain inventory of the monitors stacked up around the bed. Some he recognized from his own time in an ICU on the other side of the world, but others he’d never seen before. His eyes fell on the tube forcing air into Jed’s lungs.
Life support. Fuck. He was talking to me a few hours ago. How did this happen so fast?
Dr. Howarth touched his arm. “You can come in, Max. It’s okay.”
Max drifted forward, and the closer he got the less prominent the plethora of equipment became, and then all he could see was Jed lying lifeless and unmoving in the bed.