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WHEW, I FINALLY FOUND it.” Drake picked up a rock the size of a softball, turned it over and showed Allie the tube that was inserted into the rock.
“Good job,” Allie said as she dropped the two rocks she was holding. “I really hate rock pile hides.”
“Me too, but we didn’t have a choice here. Hand me the stamp, will you?”
Allie tossed him the stamp, and as Drake handled the log, she looked around. “There’s another team coming this way. Better make sure the pile is back to the way it was.”
Allie started tossing the rocks she’d checked back into the pile they extracted the cache from, and when Drake finished with the log, he helped. Soon, there was an obvious pile of rocks clustered around a small boulder, just like they’d found when they got there.
They got into their UTV and headed off to the next geocache, and stopped when the blue team approached them. Both drivers shut off the engines so they wouldn’t have to shout at each other over the din.
“How’s it going?” Zach asked.
“Not as good as I expected we’d be doing when we started out this morning,” Allie answered. She took off her helmet and ran her fingers through her hair to pull out the snags. “How many finds are you at?”
Zach looked over at his partner, and Jodi checked the sheet and gave him the answer.
“Forty-four,” Zach said. “Not that great, considering we’ve been out here for almost nine hours.”
“I can understand that,” Drake said. “When we got the sheet this morning, I thought we’d get all hundred of them, but once we found our first five, I knew it was impossible. I guess that’s the point of the points.”
“How many points do you have?” Jodi asked.
Drake held up the cache sheet. “I don’t know. I forgot to capture the points for two caches early on, and after that I didn’t bother anymore since we weren’t going back to get them. We won’t find out until the official tally is done.”
“Well, no point in comparing our scores,” Jodi said. “Looks like you’re headed back to town?”
Allie nodded. “Yep. There’s a bunch of caches to the south we haven’t grabbed yet, so we’re planning on hitting those on the way back.”
Jodi turned to Zach. “I told you we should have planned this out better.”
Zach smirked and shrugged. “We started in town and worked our way out to here. I figure we’ll be fine as long as we head back by eight. “
Allie nodded. “Well, we better get it at it. Good luck and catch you later.”
Zach and Jodi both waved and drove off.
“They seem nice,” Allie said as she put her helmet back on. “How far away is the next one?”
“A little under a mile.”
“Which means a mile and a half or more after accounting for all the wonderful natural terrain we’ve seen.”
“Hey, look at it this way. At least we’ll know what to expect for the rest of the week.”
Allie didn’t respond, and instead kept her eye on her driving. They’d discovered early on that it was ten times easier to take one of the many dirt trails that crisscrossed the property. But they’d also discovered plenty of places where they needed to venture off the trail to get to the cache. And off-trail meant having to slow down to make sure they didn’t run straight into a wash or bounce out of their seats when going over the rocky ground. At one point, Allie had tried to go over a dead creosote bush but had misjudged the height and caught the undercarriage of the UTV on the plant. Another time, she’d veered off the dirt path and ran the two wheels on the right side into a sandpit. In each instance, Drake and Allie got lucky. Between the two of them, they got the vehicle unstuck and back on the road without calling in for help, but they lost valuable time by making the mistakes they did.
Drake glanced over at Allie, and even with the helmet’s chinstrap obscuring most of her features, he observed the frown on her face.
“Are you having fun?” he asked.
Allie’s frown turned upside down. “Actually, yes. Despite how tired I am. It’s been an adventure already, and to think it’s only the first day! Only one thing though, you’re driving this beast tomorrow and I’ll take over your simple job.”
“Okay. We can do that, but I remind you I offered to drive like three hours ago.”
Allie shrugged as she jerked the steering wheel to avoid a ditch. “I wonder how everyone else is doing. You think they’re all having the same luck we are?”
Drake considered for just a second before answering. “I’m not sure, since there’s nothing we could have done today to make things easier for us, except picking a different route. That was my mistake. Tomorrow we should spend more time first thing and work to come up with a more efficient plan.”
“Sounds good to me, although the plan wasn’t that bad today. Today, the problem was not knowing what was out here in the back forty. Tomorrow will be a totally different story.”
“Hey, watch out for that —” Drake yelled as he put his arms out in front to brace for impact.
Allie interrupted Drake’s warning as she slammed on the brakes and pulled the wheel hard to the left to avoid a rock outcropping. When the dust settled, Allie smiled. “Sorry. Wasn’t paying attention for a second there. Looks like that’s the rise we want. We should veer off a little to the east to get over it.”
Drake settled back into his seat. “Okay, if you say so, captain.”
Allie did a ninety-degree turn and tracked off in the new direction. After three hundred yards, they came to a large boulder field. Allie stopped the UTV and peered out at the river of large rocks that ranged in size from baseballs to basketballs.
“How wide do you think that is?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Quarter mile? Can we drive over that?”
“We probably could, but I don’t want to. If we got stuck in there, we’d get stuck for good. So, Duck-man, find me another way around.”
Drake studied the map and compared it to the GPS. “Give me a minute, okay?”
“Sure. Take all the time you need.”
While she waited for Drake to finish his route planning, she took off her helmet and got out of the UTV. “You want an orange?”
“No, thanks.”
Allie dug out an orange, peeled it, and broke it into sections. As she ate it, she leaned against the vehicle and looked out to the west, where the sun was beginning its lazy drop across the sky.
“Hey, Drake, we probably have only three hours of sun left. You think it’s safe to be out here night caching?”
Drake didn’t look up from his research to respond. “There’s no way I want to be out this far at night, but there are some caches closer to town I think we can get, assuming the lights on the UTV work. I can’t imagine how dark it will get out here once the sun sets. I have the plan, so I’m ready to go whenever you are.”
Allie finished her orange and settled back into the driver’s seat.
“The good news is, I think I found a way around. The bad news is we’ll have to backtrack almost all the way to the last cache we were at.”
Allie exhaled. “You sure? Is there another cache in this direction we can go for instead?”
“Not really. Everything else would take us way off to the west.”
“Okay, all right.”
Allie turned the wheel and headed back, following the tire tracks they’d made on the way there. Eventually, they came to the place where they’d met Zach and Jodi.
“Is this where I turn off?”
“Yeah, I...wait a minute. Is that smoke?” Drake asked.
Allie stopped the UTV and looked off in the distance. “It looks like it.”
“We should go check it out.”
“You sure? We’d lose time.”
“Yes. Go. Drive.”
Allie pointed the UTV at the smoke plume and headed right toward it. Within a few minutes, they found the source. Allie parked twenty yards from the overturned UTV and had not even shut off the engine before Drake jumped out and ran over to the burning vehicle.
“Get the radio, call for help,” he screamed back at Allie.
The blue team’s UTV was lying on its passenger side, immersed in flames. Drake ran around the heap and discovered it was empty. Then he heard someone calling for help. He turned and saw Jodi ten feet away and reaching out to him.
“Help me, please,” Jodi begged.
Drake ran over and kneeled down beside her. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“I think I have a broken leg. I can’t feel it. Where’s Zachary?”
Jodi was lying on her left side, and Drake winced at the amount of red blood that had discolored her light tan cargo pants.
“Allie! Grab the first-aid kit!” Drake yelled.
In a few seconds, Allie was by his side with the case.
“Help is on the way. Should be here within fifteen minutes,” she said.
“See if there’s a pair of scissors in the box. She’s bleeding. We need to cut away her pants to find where it’s coming from.”
Allie opened the kit and found a small pair of scissors. As directed, she cut away Jodi’s pants, just above the saturated area. Once she pulled away the fabric from Jodi’s leg, Drake and Allie noticed the point of a broken bone piercing the skin.
“Are there any bandages in there?” Drake asked.
Allie found a few gauze bandages, unwrapped them, and handed them to Drake.
“Jodi? Listen to me. You’re bleeding pretty badly, so I need to apply pressure. It’s going to hurt. You understand?”
Jodi nodded. “Do what you need to. Just find Zach, okay?”
“We will. Okay, here we go.”
Drake placed the bandages over the fracture and applied pressure. Jodi’s scream was immediate and piercing.
“You’re doing great, Jodi. Just try to relax. Help will be here soon. Allie, I’ve got to keep pressure on this leg, or she’ll lose too much blood. Go find Zach. He’s got to be around here somewhere.”
Allie nodded and stood. She walked back toward the UTV and made a short loop but couldn’t find him. She widened the circle and then spotted his blue vest. Somehow, he’d ended up face down in a small gully that was just deep enough to obscure his body from a passing glance.
Allie rushed to his side. “Zach? Zach? Can you hear me?”
She got no answer, so she pressed her fingertips against his neck and checked for a pulse and, to her relief, found one. Next, she knew she needed to see if he was bleeding, but to do that, she needed to turn him over. Before she did, she lightly ran her hands over his limbs and neck to see if she could feel anything awry. Praying he didn’t have a spinal injury, Allie grabbed Zach’s arms, and although he shifted a bit, he didn’t roll over. She stepped across his body, then reached over and grabbed his shoulder and rolled him toward her, then laid him flat on his back.
Allie put her hand lightly on Zach’s chest and determined immediately he wasn’t breathing. She tilted his head back and checked his airway and found it clear. She rechecked his pulse, and when she found it was gone, she started performing CPR without hesitation. Her training quickly took over as she alternated between rescue breaths and chest compressions.
“Come on, Zach. Wake up, buddy,” she pleaded as she switched from breaths to compressions.
Her training told her it was unlikely he’d wake up and jump to his feet like in the movies. As she worked, she hoped to at least keep enough oxygen headed to his brain to keep him alive until help arrived.
She stopped for a moment to see if Zach started breathing on his own and to recheck his pulse, and as she did that, she heard Drake calling her name.
“I found him,” she yelled. “He’s not breathing. Can you come help me?”
“No,” Drake yelled back. “I think Jodi’s going into shock.”
Together, but separately, Drake and Allie continued to render aid. An eternity later, an ambulance pulled up with an ancient pickup truck trailing right behind it.
Two men from the truck jumped out, grabbed fire extinguishers from the back of the pickup and went to work dousing the fire. Of more interest to the injured, a young woman in blue jeans and a white t-shirt exited the ambulance and ran over to Drake. The driver retrieved a medical kit from the ambulance and followed the woman.
“I’m Dr. Liz. What do you have here?” she asked, as she took a pair of rubber gloves from her pocket and snapped them on.
“Jodi’s got a broken leg,” Drake explained. “Allie is giving CPR to Zach over that way somewhere.”
The doctor gave Jodi a quick check. “She’s breathing and has a pulse, although it’s getting weak. I’ll be right back.”
Dr. Liz found Allie, who was still giving CPR to Zach. “I’m a doctor. How long has he been down?”
Allie stopped CPR and let the doctor move in to do a quick assessment. “I don’t know how long. I found him with a pulse that stopped, and not breathing, so I’ve been doing CPR for about ten minutes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Alyssa. People call me Allie, though.”
“Okay, Allie. I’ll take over here. Go up to the ambulance and find Joe. Tell him to bring the oxygen and the med kit. Then get on your radio, call the base, and tell them to call in a medical helicopter. Got it?”
Allie did as she was told, then went back to find Drake. He was standing over Jodi, holding a bag of fluid connected to Jodi’s arm via an IV, as the two men from the truck gently placed Jodi on a stretcher. Once they strapped Jodi down, the group moved as one to the ambulance and slid her in. Once Jodi was secure, the men grabbed a second stretcher and trotted off to help the doctor.
A few minutes later, the men returned with Zach on the stretcher, who had an IV matching Jodi’s, along with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. They placed him into the ambulance next to his wife, and then Joe and Dr. Liz drove off.
“Hey, kid, come over here.”
Drake turned around and saw the man from the pickup was talking to him. Without question, Drake approached the man standing near the truck’s tailgate.
“Let’s get you washed up a bit,” the man said, gesturing to Drake’s hands. Drake looked and saw his hands up to his wrists were red from Jodi’s blood.
“Hold your hands out.” Drake did as he was told, and the man squirted a soap-like liquid into Drake’s palms and Drake rubbed them together and lathered them up. As he did, he checked out the kind man. He was about Drake’s height but was at least fifty pounds heavier than Drake. The man had bright blue eyes, and salt-and-pepper hair with a matching scraggly beard.
“Thanks. What’s your name?”
“I’m Nick. Here, rinse off your hands.”
Drake moved over to a five-gallon water jug attached to the rear of the pickup with a series of bungee cords, and Nick held open the stopper while Drake rinsed.
“What happened here?” Nick asked.
“I don’t know. We were on our way to a cache when we spotted the smoke from the fire, so we came over here to investigate. They must have had an accident.”
“It wasn’t no accident,” Nick’s partner said as he approached. He set the fire extinguishers in the truck bed, then opened a compartment, pulled out a blue shop towel, and handed it to Drake.
“This is Randy,” Nick said.
“Thanks,” Drake said as he dried his hands. They still had a pink tinge to them, but he realized he’d have to wait until he got back to town to do anything about it. “I’m Drake. That’s Allie.”
“What were you saying about it not being an accident?” Allie asked.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” Randy said.
The three followed Randy to the wreckage site. “Now, I could see something like this happening if they were trying to drive up a steep incline, or if they caught a ridge. Or if they were going too fast and hit a big rock and flipped over, but that didn’t happen.”
“How can you tell?” Drake asked.
“Look at the tire tracks in the dirt there. They run smooth, straight, and steady, then suddenly they stop where the UTV tipped on its side.”
Drake followed the story. He wasn’t a trained accident investigator, but Randy’s version made sense to him. “So what happened?”
“I think they got T-boned. Someone came and ran directly into them. Can tell by the denting on the driver’s side.”
Drake took a couple of steps closer to the UTV, but he could still sense the heat radiating from the vehicle, so he didn’t want to get too close. From where he stood, he could see a large dent in the driver’s door. “Could it have rolled?”
Randy shook his head. “Nope. It would be away from the tire tracks, and there’s nothing on the ground to cause that impression.”
“Then I guess you’ve got a mystery on your hands, fellas,” Drake said. “Do you need us around for anything else?”
“Nah,” Nick said. “You can go. Taylor Rae might have some questions for you, though.”
“Who’s he?”
Nick laughed. “He’s a woman, and she’s the head of security. You can go on ahead. We’re going to wait here. Travis is coming out with a flatbed.”
Drake and Allie said their goodbyes and got back to their UTV.
“You want to keep caching?” Drake asked.
Allie looked at him. “To tell you the truth, no. I’m mentally stressed and my arms feel like noodles from doing CPR for so long. Would it bother you if we just headed back to town and called it a day?”
“Not at all. I’m emotionally drained myself, and I’d really like to take a nice hot shower for about an hour.”
It took almost thirty minutes to get back to town, and as they got closer, they saw a helicopter descend. A few minutes later, it took off and flew in the direction from where it came. Neither Drake nor Allie spoke over the return journey, and when they arrived at the UTV barn, Allie parked the UTV. They placed their helmets and the used first-aid kit on the seat and Drake collected their gear and trash.
Together, they walked from the barn toward the hotel. Drake stopped in front of the restaurant.
“You hungry?”
Allie considered the question for a moment. “My head says no, but my growling stomach says otherwise.”
Drake smiled and continued walking. “Great. Let’s take a rest and get cleaned up. I’ll meet you back at the restaurant in an hour.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me, but after I eat, I’m headed right to bed. I’ve had enough of this day.”
“Me too, Allie. Me too.”
