Savage Hunger by Terry Spear

pressed against her forehead, leaving an icy imprint as he cursed aloud. His soothing voice was incongruous with his angry words.
    “What’s wrong?” a woman’s voice asked, soft and worried as she drew close.
    “She’s burning up with fever.”
    The woman sucked in her breath. The sound of rain pouring down on the roof overhead should have drowned out any other sound, Kat thought, as hard as it was coming down. But she heard the woman’s audible gasp and wondered who she was. Wondered who he was. And where she was right now.
    Her eyes burned and she couldn’t focus, couldn’t see much more than a blur. The hut was too dark to make out anything more than that.
    The boards creaked as someone moved across them. Then her cover was pulled away and a wet cloth placed on her forehead.
    Neither the man nor the woman spoke again, but Kat was drifting in and out of her world, thinking of all the fevers she could have contracted in the jungle—malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever—and believing she had every one of them at the same time.
    “She should have had the vaccination for yellow fever before she entered the jungle,” the woman said.
    “She should have,” he agreed.
    But had she? Kat couldn’t remember.
    “But if she traveled into the jungle too soon after getting the vaccination…” the woman said, her words trailing off.
    “Hopefully she was vaccinated early enough before she entered the Amazon. We’ve still got a supply of medicine for malaria, but there’s nothing we can do for dengue fever, if that’s what she has,” he said.
    Everything grew silent except for the sounds of the jungle. The doves cooing somewhere nearby. Frogs croaking. Cicadas chirping.
    Kat heard men’s screams, bullets showering the jungle, and felt her wrists burning where the rope tied them tightly together to the metal pole. The damnable metal pole secured deep in the hard-packed earth so there was no way for her to pull free. If she could have gotten a knife to cut through the ropes… Then she thought about the bleeding… her leg, her arm… she was going to bleed to death first. She had to stop the bleeding. She could see her Army buddies scattered around the large tent, dead and covered in blood, could smell the stench… heard Roger…
    No, he wasn’t here. He couldn’t be here. Not on this mission.
    The rain forest. She was in the rain forest. But not there. Not in the tent with the dead men. Somewhere else.
    Her wet shirt lifted, and Kat felt exposed and cold. She began shivering violently.
    “No rash. Probably not dengue fever. Get a fresh cloth, Maya.”
    Maya. Who was Maya?
    “And bring me the medicine for malaria. We’ll try to get her to drink some water.”
    Kat’s eyes drifted shut.
    If she had thought how miserable she would be on a second trip to the jungle… the first fighting the bad guys, the second… the second… What was she doing here again?
    She wasn’t fighting the bad guys this time, was she?
    She should never have come here. The Army… they wouldn’t let her go on another mission. The doctor said she was… was not right yet.
    Tears blurred her eyes. She swallowed hard, trying to recall why she was here again in the jungle.
    The doctor.
    He said if she could… if she could what?
    Her thoughts drifted again.
    The jaguar rested his head in her lap, and she sighed, comforted by his presence. She had never visited anywhere that was as primitive and teeming with life as the Amazon. And she had found just what she had wanted to see—a jaguar, well, two of them, running in the wild — and felt the peace of the jungle when before it had just been a mission. A mission gone bad. And Connor, he had come for her before and he had come for her now.
    She let out her breath hard and sucked in more soggy air.
    The jaguars had even protected her in the tree. Now how astonishing was that?
    But then someone was trying to cut through the ropes binding her wrists, and she screamed. Or tried to scream. Maybe