Darkness(14)

For a moment after they stopped, Gina lay unmoving. The wind had been knocked out of her. Aching, slightly dazed, she gasped for air. After a moment, he levered himself off her. Free of his weight, she finally managed to suck in enough air to fill her lungs.

The world instantly came back into too-sharp and unpleasant focus.

Pushing away from the wheel, she coughed, wheezed, and coughed some more.

“Okay?” he asked. At least he sounded minimally concerned about her well-being, which she took as a good sign. He wouldn’t care if she was hurt if he meant to hurt her himself, would he?

Not that she intended to wait around to find out. Now that they were safely ashore, she was going to ditch him just as fast as she could. She’d saved his life, repaid a little of her karmic debt as it were, and at this point taking care of number one became the most important item on her agenda. He didn’t know it yet, but as soon as she could get off the boat they were going to go their separate ways.

“Yes.” Gina was still taking careful breaths and trying not to wince from what felt like the severe bruising of her chest. If it hadn’t been for the cushioning properties of the life vest and her parka, she thought the impact probably would have cracked a rib. There wasn’t time to sit around assessing any possible injuries she might have suffered, however. She needed to move.

The storm was already barreling into the bay. The breakwater rocks were no longer visible. The waves that had carried the boat in had increased in size until they were now towering walls of water thundering to shore. In the few minutes since the boat had skidded to a stop, the air around them had darkened and taken on a greenish tinge. The surf had risen to the point where frothy fingers slithered under the far side of the boat. The wind howled rather than moaned.

Slanting lines of snow obscured her vision. What once had been flakes now felt like hundreds of icy needles hitting her skin. The temperature had dropped so that each exhalation frosted the air. She could see individual bolts of lightning as they zapped to earth inside the clouds. The pounding of the waves against the no-longer-visible breakwater boomed like cannon fire.

What was immediately, abundantly clear was that there wasn’t going to be time to get anywhere that could actually be considered safe. They were lucky they’d made it off the water.

Pulse racing, Gina swung her legs around on the seat, stood up, and stepped quickly past him. In the process of laboriously getting to his feet, he made no move to stop her. She could feel his gaze on her as she ripped off the binoculars and stuck them in her pocket, then shucked the life jacket and crouched by the stern to free her backpack from its hidey-hole.

It was a big backpack, weighing in at a little over thirty pounds. A similar one had been issued to each of the scientists when they had arrived on Attu. All the expedition members were expected to take their backpacks with them whenever they left camp as a precaution against Attu’s unpredictable weather (her current situation provided clear proof of the advisability of that). The Eskimos who’d once made Attu their home had called the sudden, fierce storms that blew in without warning williwaws, which in Gina’s opinion was way too poetic a name for the violence of what was happening around them. At first she’d been skeptical of the need for so much stuff. Now she thanked God for the basic survival gear that the backpack was loaded with, including a small pop-up tent and a sleeping bag, in addition to food supplies and extra water. It should be enough to allow her to ride out the storm, provided she was able to find a spot relatively shielded from the wind where she could deploy the tent.

“We need to find shelter,” he said as she straightened with the backpack slung over one shoulder. His voice was a harsh rasp, and he was starting to slur his words. Standing to his full height, he was, indeed, as tall and athletically built as she’d thought, and as attractive. Under other, better, conditions, she might even have been slightly bowled over by him. As she watched, he bent a little to one side, grimacing, a hand pressed to his injury. His clothes clung to him like a second skin, and she was reminded of how wet he still was, and how deathly—and deathly was the word—cold he had to be. The color of the stain had deepened and brightened so that it was now clearly red, clearly blood.

As she looked at him, a particularly strong gust of wind hit. It caught them both, and he took a stumbling step backward before recovering. At what she calculated was about six-four and two hundred–plus pounds, he was way too big to be blown backward by the wind, especially when the same blast hadn’t moved her. He was also way too buff to be the kind of fat-cat businessman that his clothes seemed to indicate, or that she would have expected to find on a high-end private jet like the one he’d crashed in. Once again she wondered who and what he was, and could come up with nothing that she found even mildly reassuring. Ordinarily she didn’t think any wind short of hurricane force would have been enough to budge him. But his strength was clearly waning: even through the storm-created twilight and blowing snow, she could see that his eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull and his rugged features were pinched and drawn. Every bit of him that she could see that wasn’t pasty white was tinged with blue.

He was hurt and bleeding. Possibly suffering from other injuries that didn’t show. Probably in the throes of hypothermia. Certainly traumatized by the plane crash and perhaps on the verge of collapsing, of going into shock.

In desperate need of help.

Her help. Because she was all the help there was.