Page 49 of Damned
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Oh, no, no, no. You’re not going to die on me, Kruze Sinclair. Don’t you dare.” Filled with conviction, Bree ran her hands over his sweaty head, searching for something to explain why he’d passed out. He’d been in his harness. No bleeding. No bumps. But one minute he’d been his normal cocky self, and the next he was out cold. They were in trouble.
Bree lay beneath his dead weight, her arms wrapped tightly around him while she took stock of their surroundings. She brushed his hair off his face. There wasn’t much daylight left. It was late afternoon. They’d landed in a narrow canyon, shadowed by the dense forests lining both sides of the stream, which turned out to be a very noisy river. She’d never seen trees so tall nor so jam-packed together as the pines in this forest. The blue sky overhead was clear, but it was cold and growing dark. She needed to get Kruze far enough from the plane before it exploded.
Oh, that was rich. There was no place dry or warm within sight, except maybe in the forest, and he surely wasn’t going there under his own steam. Okay then. He’d saved her in Turkey. She’d save him now.
Bree didn’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish that, but they couldn’t stay where they were. Grunting like a pig, she rolled Kruze onto his side, cushioning one hand under his hard head, so she didn’t hurt him while helping him. Once on her feet, she dropped her hands to her knees and took a few seconds to suck in a couple deep, cleansing breaths. Moving Kruze anywhere would be one heck of a hard job. But she’d survived that damned hole, hadn’t she? She could do this.
Inch by inch, she wrestled him back into his leather jacket, then zipped it up, and dragged him by the jacket’s sturdy shoulders from the stony shoreline into the trees. That took a while, but at last, panting and sweating, they were under the trees and it was dry there. Good enough.
She settled Kruze onto the hard-packed ground beneath one huge pine. The forest was comprised of nothing but pine trees, but this one had a wider trunk than the others, and for some reason, that made Bree feel better. She’d battled claustrophobia for months, yet there seemed to be more air beneath these giants. She could breathe, and, since these lower trunks were devoid of branches, she could see quite a ways. Whatever.
Dropping to her knees at her unconscious companion’s side, she gently peeled Kruze’s jacket and shirt up far enough to determine what she needed to do next. That meant his holster, too. She handled it extra-carefully, not sure if jostling it might fire one of his pistols. That was the last thing they needed, for her to accidentally shoot herself—or him.
Damn. The screwdriver had made a deep, bloody hole in Kruze’s left side right above his hip bone. It was a puncture, not a tear. That could be good once she got it to stop bleeding. Smaller wounds tended to clot quicker, didn’t they? Bree honestly didn’t know.
When something loud popped from the direction of the plane, she lifted her chin and stared at the wreck. Great. The left engine had just fallen to the shore in a flaming heap. Flames were spreading to the outer skin of the plane’s left side. The right engine and most of that wing had been sheared off when they’d landed. She wasn’t sure where the fuel tanks were located, certainly not on the wings. But fuel lines burned, too. Why the whole thing hadn’t exploded by now was beyond her.
She’d been rushed getting out of the plane, but she was sure she’d seen a fire extinguisher and a compartment marked First-Aid. Somewhere. Bree hadn’t really cared before, but she did now. Lord, she had to go back.
Hurriedly, she ripped her sweatshirt over her head, then removed the t-shirt she’d layered beneath it. Folding that into a tight, compact square, she pressed it over the wound. Kruze was lucky the screwdriver hadn’t stabbed any deeper, but it might have punctured his intestines. She had no way to know. When he grimaced, Bree knew she was hurting him, but she persevered. Going back inside the plane was her next challenge. It’d sure be good if she found antibiotics.
Before she dashed away, Bree needed something to hold the homemade compress in place. Kruze’s leather belt would do. Fumbling the buckle open, she struggled until, finally, she pulled the belt from beneath his wide, heavy body. Worried she’d wasted too much time, she was now faced with sliding the belt back under Kruze. Not as a tourniquet, just to keep pressure on the bandage.
Bree swiped a weary forearm over her sweaty forehead before she began. On her elbows, with one cheek pressed flat against his chest, she ordered, “You have got to…”Grunt. Groan.“…lift…”Growl. Snort.“…your ass… up.”
At last, with her knuckles abraded and bleeding from dragging against the rocks beneath him, Bree forced the belt through the narrow space between the small of his back and the ground. With shaky fingers, she resituated the fairly clean bandage over his wound and fastened his belt, keeping the buckle on his belly and the bandage tight on his side.
Whew. Her first emergency treatment of a plane crash victim was complete, and she was running on empty. Sweating profusely, with every aching muscle in her body screaming for relief, Bree reached for him and smoother his hair out of his eyes again. Lord, even out cold he was sexy.
Summoning her second wind, Bree left Kruze beneath the tree with his shirt pulled down and his jacket once again zipped up. She had to get that first-aid kit.
Breathing hard, short puffs of over-heated air that was quickly turning to frosty vapor, Bree slipped back into her sweatshirt and ran for the plane. Flames were now creeping over the top of the fuselage while others flickered around the passenger windows. She hurried.
Up onto the fuselage she climbed, using the huge boulder the fuselage still balanced on as a ladder. Gripping the top of the windshield frame, she slid feet first into the cabin and slipped between the pilot and co-pilot seats, assessing what was salvageable and what wasn’t as she went. The cabin was full of smoke, but Bree wouldn’t let it stop her. She could do this. She just had to be quick. Really quick.
Avoiding the left interior walls because of the heat emanating from them, she pulled the neck of her sweatshirt up and covered her mouth and nose. Feeling her way forward, she opened every compartment that she came to, searching for the first-aid kit. Where had she seen it?
The first compartments yielded supplies she hadn’t thought of. A coiled nylon rope, a small plastic case that, when opened, revealed some kind of pistol with—oh, flares.She’d found a flare gun and six flares. Great. That would come in handy.
Bree tucked the case and rope under one arm. The next compartment held two folded blankets. The next, a case of bottled water, still in its plastic carrier/holder. Two packaged tarps came next, at least, she thought that was what those stiff, floppy packages contained. She’d know for sure later.
For now, it was search by touch. Quickly, she unfolded one blanket over the co-pilot seat and dumped the smaller items there. Running out of time, she shoved the flare gun and bottled water out the windshield onto the fuselage. She still hadn’t located the first-aid kit.
Worried, she backtracked in a hurry, trying to recall where she’d seen it, palming what plane’s walls she could. The smoke seemed thicker. Her eyes stung and her lungs burned. At last. Of course. She found the first-aid kit built into the narrow strip of wall behind the co-pilot’s seat. Working against time and her rising tide of panic, Bree jerked the compartment open and found what she’d been looking for, but they were loose. Darn. It would’ve been easier if they’d been in a case. Oh, well. She turned the front of her shirt into a sling and scooped everything out of the cabinet. She had nothing to cover her mouth with now, but it didn’t matter. She was out of time.
Panic began a steady drumbeat in her already pounding head.Hurry!
Stumbling forward, trying not to gasp for air, she dumped the first-aid supplies onto the blanket, twisted the corners together, and shoved the bulky bundle through the window to the fuselage.
Hurry! Hurry!
Her turn. Frightened now, and trembling at the audacious thing she was doing, Bree climbed onto the fuselage. The damned thing was hot to the touch, and again, she wondered what was under the hood of this plane.Please, don’t let it be gallons of airplane fuel that will blow me to kingdom come.Yet that made sense. Where else would a plane’s gas tank be? In its skinny tail?
Blinking furiously to clear her teary vision, with her nose running and her poor heart coming apart, she shoved all she’d salvaged to the ground, then slipped on her backside off the plane to the rocky shoreline.
Landing on her feet, she blinked at the extraordinary thing she’d accomplished all by herself. She’d done it. But she still needed to get everything away from the plane, as quickly as possible. She brushed her hands on her pants, sure she could do that, too.
