Ashley was last, and this time he didn’t do more than the standard, but she just stood there, looking up at him. “Who checksyourmask?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, pulling it down.
But she reached up and smacked-and-yanked anyway—and yeah, he’d forgotten how obnoxious that was. But then she put her hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t even close to the way he’d touched her earlier, but despite that, his heart stuttered—just a little. “Don’t hurt yourself,” she told him quietly. “Don’t push too hard. It’s just a game.”
And with that she went out the door.
***
They were barely five minutes into the game, but deep within the heavily brush-and-pine-treed part of the field, when Kenneth passed out.
One second he was moving quietly along the narrow trail, just behind Jim and in front of Ashley, and the next he was crumpling into the scrub.
At first, Ashley thought he was goofing—but almost immediately she realized that while Clark might’ve pulled an idiot move like that, Kenneth would never.
“Jim!” She whispered, but he heard her immediately, and was down in the dirt almost before she was, checking Kenneth—holy crap—for a pulse. “Oh, my God, he’s burning up.” He was radiating heat through his clothes. She turned to glare at her brother. “What the hell, Clark?”
As Jim pulled out his cell phone, Clark crouched on the other side of her, his face panicked through his mask’s plastic shield. “Don’t look at me! I keep going,Dude, you look like shit, and he’s allCeliac, celiac!”
“Celiac doesn’t give you a fever!”
“Cell service appears to be down,” Jim announced as he reached to take the Team Leader’s bag from Ashley’s shoulders.
She wriggled to get free of the strap, shooting him an incredulous look. “Seriously…?”
Jim already had the walkie-talkie out and on, antenna up. “This is why we carry—” He interrupted himself. “Slade to King, do you copy, over? Come in, Corpsman King, over. Hospital corpsman needed at the paintball field, over.” He turned up the volume before handing the device to Ashley. “Push this to keep calling for him. Be brief—sayover, let him answer. Come on, we’re gonna get Kenneth back to the trailer.”
Ashley immediately got to work. “Team One needs medical assistance, over.”
But before Jim could somehow pick Kenneth up, he roused, his eyes fluttering open as he moaned.
“Hey, kid,” Jim said, his tone as gently matter-of-fact as if they’d run into each other on the way to the mess. “What’s going on?”
“Hurts,” Kenneth gasped.
“Where?” Jim asked.
Kenneth’s response was to curl into a ball and vomit. Ashley and Clark were both far enough away, but Jim’s pants got covered.
He didn’t even flinch. “Well, okay,” he said in that same quietly calm voice. “I’m gonna go with abdominal pain. Let’s get you to the trailer, see if we can’t rouse some assistance via the landline.”
A landline! In the trailer! “I’ll run ahead,” Ashley told Jim. “Give me your cell phone. Sir. In case cell service comes back.”
“Code to unlock is one oh one oh one oh,” he said as he slapped it into her hand. “Go!”
And with that, she was off at a run.
It was probably just a bad case of the flu. Or even food poisoning. And why wasn’t Thomas King answering, damn it?
It took far less time to get back to the open clearing by the trailer because she wasn’t attempting to be quiet. Still, she managed to completely surprise a cluster of men from Team Three who must’ve run at full speed down one of the trails along the fence line to get so deeply into Team One’s territory so quickly. They’d already hunkered down along the length of fencing that was used for target practice, although they all leaped to their feet when they saw her.
And, like an idiot, she ran toward them. “Oh, thank God, you guys, we need—”help.
She didn’t get the word out before they all—there were three of them—raised their markers and opened fire.
Stingwas not the word she would’ve used.
Punchwas more like it.
