Dane's Storm(46)

I was lying on something hard and cold, sort of prickly, and I could hear the howling of wind all around. Wind or water? I moved, just a slight stretching of limbs, and my left thigh throbbed with pain, though not quite as badly as my head. Grimacing, I finally lifted my heavy lids all the way but was only met with more blackness. My heart careened in my chest and I sucked in a small breath. Was I blind? But no, as my eyes adjusted, shadows began to take shape. I wasn’t blind, I was just somewhere really, really dark.

Where was I? Vague visions of a huge flock of birds flying right at me prodded at my mind . . . the plane . . . birds had taken out both engines. I’d tried to find a place to land, anywhere . . . anywhere. I flinched as my brain worked to pull forth the information. There had only been massive rocks, cliffs, and trees. And I’d . . . I’d finally spotted an open area ahead and used every muscle in my body to guide the piece of useless machinery toward it. But we’d careened off the side of a cliff and I’d fought to stay conscious, just to put the plane down . . . the memories all blurred. I couldn’t recall anything else.

I tested my body again, wiggling my toes and moving my fingers to assess any other injuries. Were we still on the plane, buried under the snow somewhere? Trapped inside a twisted piece of metal? We. Audra. With a sharp intake of breath, I tried to sit up and grunted, something splitting my head open with the movement. I collapsed back on the prickly ground.

“Dane?” came a whisper in the dark. Thank God. I felt Audra turn her body toward mine.

Relief hit me so strong I began shaking, not with cold, but with overwhelming thankfulness she was okay. She was right beside me. Wherever we were, she was here. “Audra?” I tried to croak but only the Au sound made its way past my lips.

She let out a small sob and though it cost me, I moved my body toward her, reaching for her, gathering her body to mine. I felt her palm reach my cheek and for a moment she just ran her hand over my face, moving to the place on my head where the pain seemed to be centered. I groaned softly again, and this time, the reverberation didn’t hurt quite as much.

“Shh,” she said. And then she moved away for just a moment and when she came back, she held what felt like a bottle of water to my lips. Oh God, water. Water. I drank greedily, recognizing the depth of my thirst. But she pulled the water away, and though I tried to follow it with my mouth, she put her fingers to my lips. “I don’t have much left.” It sounded like she was crying and though a million questions were half-formed in my head, I was still so tired, so damn tired. And the pain.

Her fingers were back a moment later and she was putting something in my mouth. “Chew,” she instructed, and so I did. Peanuts. She was feeding me peanuts.

After she’d fed me a small handful, she turned away again and when she put her fingers back to my lips, she said, “This is the last Tylenol. I’m going to give you another drink of water and you need to swallow this, okay?”

“Okay,” I croaked, taking the pill she offered. A second later, I lay back down, and Audra did too, moving against me, her hand on my face once more.

“I didn’t know if you’d wake up,” she said, her voice teary. “I was so scared.”

I worked to organize my thoughts. I only had a limited amount of energy and I wanted to ask the right questions. “How long?” I finally managed.

“Two days,” she said.

Two days? I’d been unconscious for two days?

“Where?” I asked.

She sniffled softly and when she spoke, her voice sounded bleak. “We crashed. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

I felt her nod in the dark. “I pulled you off the plane and built a shelter nearby. I thought . . . I thought the rescue crew would have found us by now but it’s been storming for two days . . .”

Reality slammed into me and for a minute, I wrestled with the knowledge that we were on a mountain in some sort of makeshift shelter. A cave? No, something was flapping softly above us, as if the roof was made of something lighter than rock.

Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled, and then another. It made the hairs on the nape of my neck rise. There were monsters here, prowlers in the shadows.

My hands moved over her body. “You . . . are you injured?”

“No. I have a bruise from my seatbelt but that’s already better. It barely hurts.” She paused. “I ate a whole bag of pretzels the first morning,” she said, misery and what I thought might be guilt lacing her tone. I struggled to understand the change of topic, her point in telling me about pretzels, and finally grasped that she must have been rationing food once she realized our rescue wasn’t . . . Oh God. Two days. We’d been in the snowy wilderness alone for two days.

“Black box?” I rasped.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know what that is.”

“Back of . . . plane,” I said, the words fading.

“Oh,” she breathed. “The back of the plane isn’t there.”

“What?”

“It . . . it was torn off or something. It’s gone.”

Gone. I noted some faraway sense of alarm, but I felt warmer with Audra pressed against me like this, her peanut-laced breath ghosting across my skin, and the Tylenol beginning to help my head a little. I drifted . . . “We’ll . . . be okay,” I said, wanting to promise more, wanting to reassure her, wanting to soothe the hopelessness I heard in her voice, but so tired . . . so tired.