Dane's Storm

“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.

All was silent for a moment before I heard her say very softly, “I guess we’ve already survived worse than this, right?”

I swayed between reality and sleep, her words repeating in my mind. I knew what she meant. The grief of losing our son. With the last of my energy, I took her hand in mine under whatever was on top of us, keeping us somewhat warm. “I don’t . . . think we . . . survived that time, Audra. I don’t think we survived at all.” And then sleep pulled me under and I didn’t resist.

**********

Light hit me and I blinked my eyes open slowly, lying still as I took in the details around me. I was lying on the ground between two boulders and there was something above me. Is that carpet? I frowned in confusion.

I stayed still for a few moments, allowing my mind to clear, the memory of what I thought was probably the night before coming back to me. My head still hurt, but not quite as badly as it had, and my leg seemed to feel a little bit better too. I had to take a piss so badly my bladder was aching. When I realized the space next to me was empty, I called Audra’s name, the sound a soft croak. With effort, I pulled myself to a sitting position, grimacing at the onslaught of pain. Christ. Help.

I sat still for a minute as I got my bearings, squinting at what appeared to be garbage bags hung in front of an opening where light streamed in around gaps at both sides. Pushing it aside, I crawled out into the open space of a snowy forest, my hands hitting the icy ground. Hissing in a breath, I gripped the side of one boulder and pulled myself slowly to my feet, being careful of the sharp ache in my leg. Once my head had stopped spinning, I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, my breath pluming in the frigid air.

Shafts of sunlight streamed through gaps in the trees, bouncing off the snow, causing it to glitter and sparkle. Leaves rustled, I heard a few birdsongs high above, but mostly it was silent. Silent and still. “Audra?” I called out again, my voice clearing slightly.