Then he said, “We crashed.” She nodded. “How long ago?”
“I’m not sure.” Her teeth were chattering. It wasn’t that cold, so it must have been from fear. Of him? Why? “An hour, maybe.”
Grunting with pain, he covered the lump on the side of his head with one hand and levered himself up, using the other hand as a prop. She moved aside so he could sit up straight. “What about everybody else?”
“They’re all dead.”
He tried to come up on one knee and swayed dizzily. She reflexively extended a helping hand, but he shrugged it off. “Are you sure?”
“Sure they’re dead? Yes. I mean, I think so.”
He turned his head and stared at her balefully. “Did you check their pulses?”
She changed her mind about his eyes. They weren’t like the sky at all. They were colder and much more foreboding. “No, I didn’t check,” she admitted contritely.
He nailed her with that judgmental stare for several seconds, then, with a great deal of difficulty, pulled himself to his feet. Using the tree behind him for support, he struggled to stand up and regain his equilibrium.
“How.. .how do you feel?”
“Like I’m going to puke.”
One thing about him, he didn’t mince words. “Maybe you should lie back down.”
“No doubt I should.”
“Well?”
Still holding his head in one hand, he raised it and looked at her. “Are you volunteering to go in there and check their pulses?” He watched the faint color in her cheeks fade and gave her a twisted smile of ridicule. “That’s what I thought.”
“I got you out, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” he said dryly, “you got me out.”
She didn’t expect him to kiss her hands for saving his life, but a simple thank-you would have been nice. “You’re an ungrateful—”
“Save it,” he said.
She watched him lever himself away from the tree and stagger toward the demolished aircraft, pushing aside the branches of the tree with much more strength than she could have garnered in a month.
Sinking down onto the marshy ground, she rested her head on her raised knees, tempted to cry. She could hear him moving about in the cabin. When she raised her head and looked, she saw him through the missing windshield of the detached cockpit. He was emotionlessly moving his hands over the bodies of the pilots.
Minutes later, he thrashed his way through the fallen tree. “You were right. They’re all dead.”
How did he expect her to respond? Nah-nah-nah? He dropped a white first-aid box onto the ground and knelt beside it. He took out a bottle of aspirin and tossed three of them down his throat, swallowing them dry. “Come here,” he ordered her rudely. She scooted forward and he handed her a flashlight. “Shine that directly into my eyes, one at a time, and tell me what happens.”
She switched on the flashlight. The glass over the bulb was cracked, but it still worked. She shone the light directly into his right eye, then the left. “The pupils contract.”
He took the flashlight away from her and clicked it off. “Good. No concussion. Just a rotten headache. You okay?”
“I think so.”
He looked at her skeptically, but nodded.
“My name’s Rusty Carlson,” she said politely.
He barked a short laugh. His eyes moved up to take in her hair. “Rusty, huh?”
“Yes, Rusty,” she replied testily.