The Primal War : First Elements Saga Book 1

Chapter 8: Rescue Mission

Everywhere he looked, the place was on fire, burning with oil and fuel-soaked fury. Over there was what was left of the C-5, the fuselage in ruins, the wings torn off and gone, and a pair of engines on the ground fitfully burning. Scattered around that fuselage was a number of Val’s tactical team, their bodies broken and mangled, with not a few charred. And then there was the jungle itself, thick and unrelenting in every direction, its humid heat smashing down on him from every direction. Except the one where the plane burned.

“Val!” he shouted, fumbling his first aid kit off his back where it was piggybacked beneath his backpack even as he switched back to Spirit Sight.

“Valentina! Where are you??”

Then he spotted it with his enhanced vision: a faint aura just outside of the field of scattered bodies belonging to her team.

“Val!” Marcus ran forward, heart in his throat. The aura told him he wasn’t too late, but he could see that it was failing fast. Dodging around one of the burning engines, he pushed through the charred underbrush until he spotted her crumbled body.

“Oh shit!” he breathed as he fell to his knees beside her.

“Agent Gray!” Barna without warning boomed into his earpiece. “Are you at the crash site?”

“Yeah. And I have Val in front of me,” he hurriedly reported as he fished out an injector filled with adrenaline and another with a powerful pain med. “She’s busted up pretty bad but still alive.”

“Understood. Do what you can for her. We are using your signal to triangulate and locate you,” the Patch commander indicated. “Once we have you, we can give you top down intel, but no physical assistance for at least four hours, which is needed for us to prep and launch a rescue package out of Soto Cano in Honduras.”

“Understood,” Marcus said. Then, muttering: “Hope this works!”

In went the pain meds first, to start doing what they could to compensate for the horrible agony the water primal was likely feeling, and would definitely feel when he brought her back to consciousness with the adrenaline shot. Which went in next.

Val, who’s breathing was shallow and faint, gasped as the adrenaline hit her body. Then her one remaining eye flickered open.

“Marcus?” she burbled through a mouth filled with blood.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Marcus replied, his heart pounding. How the hell was he going to help her? His first aid kit just had basic supplies, and he doubted that if the big kit in the plane had survived the crash, it would have something that could bring the battered young woman back from the edge.

Then she was talking through the blood in her mouth, recapturing his attention from his spasmodically surging thoughts.

“Is there water nearby?” she husked.
“If you need something to drink, I have my flask …” he began to say.

“No. Not to drink. For you to dunk me in so I can activate my water form and heal,” she managed to say before coughing and spitting up blood everywhere.

“Oh. I’ll go look,” he said after carefully avoiding getting caught in the geyser of blood that erupted from her mouth. Then he rushed back to his feet to turn and frantically ran away from the burning.

‘It’s a jungle, right? A tropical rainforest!’ he thought as he fumbled through the bush, trying to spot something bigger than a puddle. ‘There has to be water in large amounts here! You can feel it in the …’

‘Splash!’ Without warning he dropped into a pool deep enough that it went over his head before he touched the bottom. Desperately kicking out, he swam back to the surface. And looked at the ten foot cliff he had just ran off of to drop into the stream-fed pool.