Page 45 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 4

Five hours later,Will said, “There’s no easy way to say this.”

No shit. “I know.” She was exhausted, hungry, lightheaded from working nonstop, but there’d been little choice. Time was not their friend. The sun had long since passed overhead and now hovered above peaks to the west, coloring the sky pink and blush orange as it began its slide toward sunset. She checked her watch. The day before the light had lasted about eight hours, before dusk around 5:00 p.m. Two more hours of daylight, and that’s it. The sky, too, had remained quiet, with not even a faraway jetliner sketching a white trail across a blisteringly blue sky.

Where was everyone? Why were there no planes, no helicopters? The answers were unknowable, even rhetorical.

She glanced at the bright orange flames of the fire she’d gotten going. She wondered when the animals might come back. Maybe, with the fire, they wouldn’t.

Their predicament at the moment was a Catch-22 if you were into Heller. Trekkies called it a Kobayashi Maru, that proverbial no-win scenario; Ben always said that the Kobayashi Maru of marriage was if your wife asked whether that dress made her look fat. There was no real right answer for that, was there? If your wife was asking, it was because she thought it did, and if a guy said it didn’t, well, he was a liar, which meant the dress made her look fat and therefore, she was fat…like that.

Most folks in the military said C-F, but only when there were civilians around and everyone was being politically correct.

Seriously, their situation right this very moment, given what she and Will had found at this second crash site? Total Kobayashi Maru, no-win cluster-fuck.

“I’m sorry,” Will said in an undertone. “I really am, but we’re going to have to divide and conquer here. I can’t be in two places at once. I need to get back to check on Rachel, but by the time I make it there with Scott...”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I get it.” There hadn’t been any way to speed things up either. They’d spent the better part of an hour traversing the two hundred-plus feet to the wreck, scrambling over snow-covered rocks and stepping carefully along that narrow, icy animal trail. Since then, they’d worked nonstop, checking out Scott, tending to Hunter and Mattie’s grandfather, building up a fire, stacking rocks in a low wall which Will had covered with a large rectangle of aluminum foil he carried in his pack and buttressed with slabs of metal from the plane to reflect the heat back toward the cockpit while she worked at gathering enough wood to last the night. Will also had checked in with Mattie at intervals, to be on the safe side and make sure he didn’t have to hustle to get back to Rachel. “I get you have to go, but I’d be lying if I said I was overjoyed.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can to spell you…wait, why not?” he asked when she shook her head.

“Are you kidding? I get you’re Mr. Wilderness, but you are not indestructible, and unless I’m missing something, I’m pretty sure you can’t see in the dark. Because that’s what you’ll be doing, trying to get back here at night.” She’d watched him like a hawk as they worked their way down to the wreck. He’d done all right, though he’d had to take that right arm out of its sling or risk being pulled off-balance on the narrow trail, part of which had been more of a rock scramble than anything they could really walk. That meant he had to use the arm. From his expression, she knew that had hurt. “There are too many variables, and most of them are bad. First off, you will never make it down, even with a headlamp and especially with a bum arm. Second, it means that I would have to climb back up in the dark. Again, even with a headlamp, I slip and that’s bad.” She held up a third finger. “And there’s still the little problem of a bunch of really hungry animals out there one of us would have to deal with without a weapon because we have only the one rifle.”

“They haven’t come back.”

“Oh, please.” She gave him a withering look. “You saw the tracks out there.”

There had been many, in fact. Once they were down, they realized that the cockpit hadn’t really landed on a ledge at all but a very wide, very long table of snow-covered rock that reminded her a lot of Mount Dundas. The western slope was more gradual and gentle than the eastern edge and, from all the trammeled snow and spoor on that side, the wreck had had a lot of company. Advance scouts, probably checking things out.

They had also found a few, very faint boot prints, mostly filled in with snow, that petered out after fifty yards. Scott had said he hadn’t wandered out that way and that Burke had been gone when he regained consciousness. So, had Burke walked off to find help? Will had doubted it. There was frozen blood smeared on the pilot’s side of the console, and the window on that side had shattered. Whether Burke had bulleted through and then awakened to wander off, dazed and disoriented, or he’d crawled out was almost of no consequence. What mattered was the man was missing. Chances were good Burke was either out there, buried under fresh snow, or dinner.

“Those animals aren’t going to leave all this good meat lying here.” She imagined she could feel the press of their eyes even now. As soon as darkness closed in, those animals would be back. From her bubbe, she knew that the movie notion of wolves gathering around for a kill, as had happened in The Gray, was fiction. (Although it had still been a fine movie, and she totally wanted Liam Neeson on her side in a zombie apocalypse.) A pack would chase down a moose or deer, though, and while she’d never heard of a pack doing the same to a person, a) that person certainly wouldn’t have lived to talk about it and b) Jack London couldn’t have gotten it all wrong either. It was like his story about a guy trying to build a fire. The pack picked off the guy’s dogs until there was only one left and then waited around until the man had nothing to protect him: no weapons and no way to start a fire. A wounded animal was a wounded animal and potential prey, even if that animal was human. “It’s not safe to be out alone in the woods after dark, and I’m not really eager for either of us to end up as a Happy Meal.”

“Scott managed to make it this far, and without a fire.”

And more’s the pity. Fine, call her spiteful. True, Scott was a jerk, but he didn’t deserve to wind up as kibble either. Huddled near the ruined cockpit under one of Will’s space blankets, Scott was on his fourth or maybe fifth mug of hot broth, which he cradled in cupped hands. Other than the same pattern of mottled bruises they all sported, Scot also had a nasty cut over his left ear that had dried to a rust-colored crust and a huge knot where the side of his head had smashed into his window. He’d wrapped himself in the curtains that had separated the cockpit from the cabin and also stripped the cover from both his seat and Rachel’s grandfather to stay warm. She wondered if he’d thought of stripping Rachel’s grandfather out of his snorkel jacket, for spite. On the other hand, while the old man’s legs were paralyzed, there was nothing wrong with his arms, and she bet he’d give Scott a couple black eyes before surrendering that parka. Scott probably could have overpowered the old man, but maybe even he wasn’t that bloodthirsty. Besides, she had the suspicion that Scott had done the math. Snuggling up to a warm, living body gave him a better shot at survival than getting cozy with a really cold corpse.

“Are you sure?” Will asked. “You can handle this? I’m not talking only the animals now.”

She knew what he wasn’t saying. “They’ve made it this long.” Which also didn’t translate into either Rachel’s grandfather or Hunter making it through another night, and it was a toss-up who’d exit first unless help got here, like, yesterday.

And where was everybody? There hadn’t been a search plane of any kind all day. Not even a distant brrr of an engine. God, and to think she’d been freaked by the idea of Rachel going into labor. That would be a cakewalk compared to this.

“In the immortal words of Scotty and language you can understand, Cap’n, I canna change the laws of physics,” she said. “I got this. Leave the rifle and the walkie-talkie and don’t ask me again if I’m sure because there’s really no choice, is there? Sure, I can go back, but hell if I’ll know if Rachel’s better or worse. Grampa and Hunter really only have one way to go, right?” A brutal way to put it but the sentiment also had the virtue of being true. “What are you going to tell Mattie?”

He’d been in touch with the girl only twice to tell her that they found survivors and ask after Rachel. “I don’t know. Let’s see if he makes it through the night first. I could be wrong, you know. People are stronger than you think, and they sometimes recover. It might not be a complete break…” He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m operating in the dark here.”

He looked so haggard, she put her arms around him in a fierce hug. “Stop. We keep putting everything on you and it’s not fair.”

“No, it’s all right.” He’d stiffened at first and she almost let go, but then he slid his good arm around her waist and buried his face in her neck. “Thanks. Feels good. You forget how nice…”

He let the rest go, though he held onto her and he was warm and solid and, for the first time, she felt not only her need but his. Which was strange, wasn’t it? He was married. His wife’s name was Becca and they’d wanted children. Except he’s not wearing a ring. Many men didn’t, though she imagined a man like Will would wear that ring with pride. So, divorce? She left him? No, that wasn’t it. Something else happened. Because Will had said it: he knew grief when he touched it. She ached to ask the question but instead let her body relax and mold to his. “We’re all scared,” she said. “It’s all right to be scared, Will.”

She felt his mouth move in a smile against her skin. “Isn’t that my line?”

“Yes.” She held on for another few seconds then let go even though she didn’t want to. “I know you’ll do your best. All anyone can ask.” She could tell he had something else on his mind. “What?”

“How much experience have youhad with death?” His eyes searched hers. “I’m talking worst-case scenario.”

More than you can imagine. “I helped take care of my grandmother. Kidney failure. She’d been on dialysis for a long time and then she got tired of going in four times a week and not eating what she liked.” Bubbe Sarah thought she’d go fast, too, but she was a sturdy woman and lingered for almost a month. By the last week, so many toxins had built up in her grandmother’s body she’d become delirious and combative, paranoid to the point of lashing out with fists when Emma tried giving her a sponge bath. After that, they’d put her bubbe on morphine. This was almost as bad because while she lived three more days, there was only her body lying there. A mannequin would have more personality.

“I can handle it,” she said. “As long as I keep the fire going, the animals ought to stay away. Leave me some food and bouillon and tea, and I’ll be golden.”

It was all bravado. But she couldn’t decide which was worse: being alone with a comatose woman and her slimy second husband who hated her guts or out here, in the wild, with two dying men and any animals who might happen by hoping for a midnight snack.

There was no other logical course of action, though. They all needed Will.

And the rest is commentary.

“Go,” she said, “before you lose the light.”

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