This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

For a sick second the two of them floated free, and the current took her again.

Kicking out with one foot, Brand caught hold of a gnarled branch, using it as a lifeline to pull herself toward the shoreline. Heaving the Hammar’s lifeless body forward, she clawed out of the relentless flow, dragging herself and her burden through the cold slosh of the shallows onto solid ground. The still, icy air froze them in place.

They lay side by side for a long moment, two frozen corpses, one more dead than alive, one more alive than dead. Brand faded in and out, her body shaking involuntarily in survival mode. Her companion was unnaturally still. She felt unable to move with purpose. They would perish there together.

A few snowflakes fluttered in the air. Staring upward, Brand could see clouds splinter, revealing the stars in the sky. Far off, she heard the sound of a single gunshot from the direction of the chalet. The report came to her faint and muffled, but rang out in a way that seemed familiar.

Her Glock, Brand thought, fired off inside the chalet.

After a beat, another shot from the same gun, sharper this time, echoing across the flat river to the opposite shore. She concluded that the shooter had now brought the pistol outside, emerging from Mattias Rapp’s cottage.

They were coming. She had to move. Brand judged afterwards that it was the hardest thing she had ever done, hauling herself upright that night. She peeled herself off the winter ground with a slight ripping sound, because in the mere seconds she had lain there her sopping clothes had frozen to the earth.

Brand found strength she didn’t know she had, humping Hammar’s dead weight to the car, placing him upright in the front seat. With her cold-stiffened  hands, she eventually located the ignition keys to the car. Once the engine turned over she put up the heat to full blast. With great difficulty, she began guiding the car on the twenty-minute drive to the medical center in Sveg.

When the interior warmed she pulled to the side of the road and stripped off Hammar’s jacket. Shivering uncontrollably, she struggled to remove a sweater and underneath that a long sleeved undershirt, stripping him to his bare skin. She knew the cold water drill—remove wet and frozen clothing immediately. For herself, there was only time to take off her sodden jacket.

With that done, she drove on. Her lifeless passenger slumped in the seat beside her. The aurora flared green and purple off to her left.

She had no choice. The Voss Medical Center in Sveg was her only hope. She sped through the deserted downtown to the outskirts. The brick rockpile looked dark and empty. A lone blue-white sign shone like a beacon: Akutmottagning. Brand didn’t know what that meant (acute care?), but it looked promising.

She left the Saab running with Hammar still inside. She dashed to the front door. It slid open noiselessly. Incredibly, the place seemed vacant.

“Help!” she cried. “Someone!” She attempted to put Swedish spin on the word. “Hjälp!”

Her call echoed through an empty hallway. She had a frantic thought that the Voss family had somehow ordered care withdrawn for their enemy clan, the Dalgrens.

Then a trio of medical personnel spilled out of an inner doorway. Rattled and pushed beyond the limits of her endurance, Brand burst into tears upon seeing them. She couldn’t find words. Gesturing to the vehicle parked outside, she sank to her knees.

The night turned senseless. She later remembered only bits and pieces of the first few hours. The hospital personnel stretchered Hammar in. As he passed Brand was felt certain he was dead. His corpse-like pallor gave her little hope. The wheeled gurney disappeared into the bowels of the medical center.

Additional figures in scrubs appeared. They seemed to be concerned for her—for Brand herself, while the real worry had to be Hammar.

“No, no, not me,” she mumbled, as they ushered her into a curtained cubicle and began to take her vitals. “Help Krister,” she said weakly.

The doctor assigned to her care, a youngish woman with a brisk, no-nonsense manner, shocked Brand with a curt announcement.

“Your body temperature is low,” she said in English. “Thirty-two-point-two degrees.”

As far as Brand’s brain could tell, this meant she was essentially deceased. The blood in her body had been frozen. But the doctor clarified the situation by converting the number from Celsius into Fahrenheit, a calculation that at the moment Brand herself would have found impossible.

Even so, a core body temperature of ninety degrees was in the emergency range. She had presented at the medical center with ghost-white skin and enlarged pupils.

Treatment of hypothermia the staff could handle, having had a lot of experience in that particular area. Hammar’s case presented more difficulties. Apart from a head wound, where the battle axe had scalped off a section of skin, his time in the water had shut down brain function to a degree that was impossible to determine. He remained comatose and unresponsive. Brand was not allowed to see him.

As her mind swam into clearer focus, she kept anxiously asking about Hammar’s condition. The doctor—her name tag read “Annika Gedin, Läkare”—tried to calm her. Brand kept babbling.

“He was in the water…through the river ice…he drowned…”

“Yes, yes,” Annika said soothingly. “Your friend is in very serious condition. But he is still alive. I have read of such cases. All is not lost.”

The woman perched alongside Brand on the hospital bed. “Do you know about something called the Mammalian Dive Response? The Diving Reflex? Parasympathetic stimulus to the cardiac pacemaker increases in response to environmental conditions.”

Brand wondered if the doctor was speaking English after all.

“It happens when the human body is submerged, especially when the water is very cold. The circulatory system attempts to save itself. There’s bradycardia, or extreme slowing of the heart rate. Oxygen in the blood withdraws from the extremities and concentrates in the brain and vital organs.”

“So he’ll be all right?”

Annika reached out to pat Brand’s arm. “Krister is not