Note: Tags are for the book, not individual chapters.
Guardian Program Ch. 38
A novel by R.C.PeterGabriel, all rights reserved.
Officer Connelly, being intimately familiar with this section of Highway, looked to her captor and asked, "We have less than five miles to the junction. Have you decided?"
"Charge it," he replied, while looking straight ahead, but turned to her as he continued. "Just a reminder, if you don't get us to the plane, I'll blow your head wide open! Your neck will look just like your arm!"
"I remember just fine," she stated. "Do you remember what I said about the lights?"
"Yes, they should see our lights before we see them. The moment I see them, I'll turn our lights off for five seconds. Then I'll turn both the siren and the lights on, letting them know they should yield to us. Hopefully, they will, but if not, you're going to hit the shoulder and try to go around. At that point, I'll decide whether or not you're dead."
Connelly asked once more if he was sure that charging the barricade was the way he wanted to proceed, and received a determined nod in response.
She pressed the accelerator to the floor. The speedometer leaned farther to the right, pushing past one-hundred thirty, one-hundred forty, and strained to reach past one-hundred-fifty miles an hour. The gage came to a stop at one-hundred fifty-two miles an hour, everything the cruiser had to give. The landscape was a blur. It took every ounce of concentration she had to hold the car steady.
Feeling as if adrenalin was the only element in her blood, she crested the last rise before spotting four vehicles blocking the road. Three SUVs and one cruiser, all with Royal Canadian Mounted Police emblems on the doors and their emergency lights flashing.
In the back of her mind, she heard the sirens kick on, and the world seemed to warp, stretching out an incredibly long distance. Time seemed to stand still. Her hearing seemed to have turned itself off to everything except the sound of her own breathing and thundering heart. Her eyesight became impossibly sharp. She saw two more Mounties blocking access from Highway 77, with three civilian vehicles waiting behind them, not knowing why or that they were about to witness death. She could see past the blockade to another cruiser, holding traffic a mile beyond.
She looked at the roadblock and saw how two of the SUVs were blocking the shoulders, while one SUV and a cruiser blocked part of each lane in her path. She knew they were not going to move because she could see the vehicles were devoid of drivers. She realized many of the officers standing behind the barricade were in tactical gear that she didn't recognize and that two men, one Mountie and one not, had rifles aimed at her!
Her life passed before her eyes in its entirety. Her joys, her pains, her laughter, the feelings of accomplishment when she wrote her name for the first time, her first kiss, and her high school friends. Becoming a constable, and meeting her husband for the first time. How all of her decisions had come together to allow her the privilege of giving birth to her three beautiful children.
She felt herself being wrapped in a warm embrace of love and comfort. She knew without a doubt that God was with her. She no longer feared death. She was at peace.
Then she blinked.
Time returned. The cruiser shot forward the distance it would have covered under normal time. Being two miles closer to the barricade, she realized that they'd given her a space to pass between the back of the SUV and the nose of the cruiser. She aimed for the gap, as the muzzle flashes from two rifles burned into her consciousness. She somehow counted three flashes from one rifle set for a three-round burst, and one from the other.
Turning her head, she saw the last of four holes appear in the windshield, then continuing her turn, she saw that her captor would no longer hold sway over her life. The coroner would later count three entry wounds. Two in Bettany's head, and one in his neck.
Returning her eyes to the road all she had time to do was pull her foot from the accelerator and jerk the wheel to the right. She clipped her side mirror on the back of the SUV.
Sound chose that moment to return as the mirror slammed into the side window with an explosion of glass. She screamed and fought for control of the dangerously skidding car.
Just over a hundred yards later, the car came to a stop in the center of the road, its nose aimed slightly to the wrong side.
Constable Connelly calmly opened her door and without looking, told Bettany to go into the light. She exited and left the door open as she started to walk back the way she had come. She only made it seven steps. "Too tired," she whispered to herself. "I'll wait here." With that she lowered herself to the road and laying herself out near the center striping, she closed her eyes.
The world seemed to spin in slow circles as she waited. It didn't take long for help to arrive, maybe fifteen seconds. Then someone was checking the pulse in her neck and a second later several people were surrounding her, all sounding concerned.
She could hear a heavy vehicle pull to a stop nearby, as someone spoke to her. "Officer Connelly, can you hear me? ... I need you to open your eyes."
People were cutting the straps on her ballistic vest and she felt the pinch of a needle near her brachial artery. She raised her eyebrows and realized her eyes felt heavy. Putting a little extra effort into the task, her eyes fluttered open a few seconds later.
"AAAHHHhhouch!" she cried out, as someone removed the cuff from her stump. She looked up at the growing crowd of Mounties and tactically clad individuals then closed her eyes again. "No pain meds. Please, I don't want to fall asleep before I see my husband and children!"
Rolling her head slightly to the side, she opened her eyes again just long enough to see what they were doing to her stump and look at the insignia on their uniforms. A suspension bridge was embroidered over the words Bridge Security, and the name Michael DeLuca. DeLuca was carefully wrapping her stump in a gauze bandage and wetting it down with some kind of clear liquid. She hissed through the pain from her arm, as someone put an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. She hissed again, as a rubber tourniquet was placed around the proximal edge of the gauze.
"Connelly, you don't need to worry," said the man on the other side of her. "I'm Dr. Ben Pierce, the team's medic. We're not going to let you die. There is no need to endure the pain. Let me at least give you something to take the edge off." He paused a few moments while she turned to him and reopened her eyes.
She studied his face, assessing him. When he smiled and nodded, she gave a slight nod in response. "Good, this will also help keep some of your blood inside where it belongs. Your blood pressure and heart rate will drop a little as your body is relieved of some of its stressors." Using a very slow push, he administered a milligram of morphine.
"Shepherd, how are we looking on shot? And read me her vitals. I can see that she's in mild shock but seems to be compensating well, I need to know how long we have until she starts to crash. We have a strong patient on our hands, but no one is immortal."
"Bettany must have self-loaded, the shot is varied in size, some buck and some bird. She has six in her hip and leg, with five in her left shoulder."
Connelly's eyes widened as she looked for the face of who had spoken. He wasn't looking at her, he was looking at the screen of a phone. "No large vessels compromised, other than in her lower right arm that is. Her left clavicle is fractured. I'm surprised she could drive at all, between that and the massive contusion on her entire upper left torso. She's lost approximately 1,242ml of o-positive blood. BP 130/112, strong pulse, sinus tachycardia at 156, shallow respirations at 40 per minute, O2 sats at 93%, all brain functions normal, other vital organs all normal.
"Oh, and one more thing." Shepherd looked into her eyes for the first time and opened his mouth to speak, but glanced around at all the others and showed his phone to Dr. Pierce instead.
