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Kate
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Kate’s first thought was that she had died. Everything was white and still and so peaceful.
Then, her brain came back online and, with it, her ability to feel.
“Ow.”
A sharp blade of pain sliced through her skull. Her entire body ached, and when she tried to breathe, it felt as if someone were plunging knives into her side.
She was also extremely cold.
The last thing she remembered was rolling sideways down the mountain after the jerk who had been riding her bumper clipped her back end. What the hell had that been about? Road rage because she was doing forty in a forty-five zone?
“Well, fuck him,” she said into the empty space. If there was ever a time to let the F-bomb fly, this was it.
She wiggled her fingers and toes, just to be sure she could. Everything worked, except for her left arm. When she tried to move it, so much pain washed through her that she had to swallow the urge to vomit.
The good news: she was alive and relatively coherent, and none of her injuries seemed to be life-threatening.
The bad news: she hurt all over and was going to freeze to death if she didn’t do something soon.
She didn’t know how long she’d been out, though it must have been some time. The windows were covered in snow, but there was enough backlight making it through that it had to be daytime. She did a quick calculation, subtracting the time she’d left from the approximate sunrise, coming up with a hell of a lot of hours.
She also didn’t know exactly where she was or how precarious her current position was. She knew only that the right side of the Jeep was lower than the left side, as if it were propped against something. Was the vehicle hovering at the edge of a drop-off? Would the slightest movement send her careening over?
She stretched her right arm and felt around in search of her phone, but apparently, her good luck only extended so far. Her phone, wherever it was, must have been dislodged from the holder during the impromptu loop-the-loop and was out of immediate reach.
Next, she called out a few times and laid on the horn, expecting no answer and receiving none.
She had no choice. She had to move.
With some difficulty and more use of the F-bomb, she managed to release the safety belt and then very carefully reached down and pushed her seat back to give her more room to maneuver, adding a banged-up knee to her list of injuries when her leg protested. Thankfully, the Jeep remained solidly in place.
So far, so good.
She braced herself against the pain and tried unsuccessfully to open her door, awkwardly reaching across her body with her right arm. It wouldn’t budge. Given the angle, she didn’t try the passenger side, just in case she was hanging over a precipice.
Holding her broken arm tightly against her body, she crawled into the back inch by inch, crying the whole time because it hurt so bad. An eternity later, she reached the back window and it swung open without issue. She peered out and took in the situation.
More good news: she appeared to be firmly wedged between two massive trees on a medium-grade downslope and didn’t have to worry about upsetting the balance and plunging to her death.
More bad news: she was stuck on the side of the mountain in the middle of nowhere, and it was snowing like hell.
She forced herself to calm down and think rationally. She wasn’t helpless. She was an outdoorsy girl with skills. Also, she kept a winter kit in the back of her Jeep for emergencies.
First things first. She had to get warm. She extracted the extra hat and scarf from her emergency kit and put those on. She’d already been wearing fleece-lined driving gloves, so she had that covered, which she counted as another positive because there was no way she’d be able to get anything over her left hand now.
Then, she popped a few over-the-counter pain tablets, made creative use of the ACE bandage to fashion a makeshift sling of sorts, and draped the heat-retaining, foil space blanket around her shoulders like a cape.
Next, she opened the back door and climbed out, wincing when she put weight on her left leg, and then she limped around the vehicle to further assess the situation. Her Jeep was dented on both sides, but the front and back were untouched, and she didn’t detect any damage to the fuel tank.
She cleared the snow away from the tailpipe, vomited when another wave of nausea hit, and then climbed back inside. After engaging the emergency brake, she gritted her teeth, depressed the clutch, popped the manual shifter into neutral, and murmured a prayer as she turned the key once and then twice. The third time was the charm. The engine turned over, and she made a solemn promise to only buy Jeeps again for the rest of her life.
While waiting for the defroster to heat up, she searched around the interior for her phone again. After an hour, she finally found it wedged under the passenger seat. Getting it out was one of the most excruciatingly painful things she’d ever done. She was glad her power windows still worked, so she could vomit out the side twice more before the deed was done.
The upchucking did nothing to improve her headache, which had now progressed from switchblade to ax-blade level. Nor did it relieve the throbbing pain from bruised/cracked ribs.
Nevertheless, she triumphantly held the phone in her hand as she sagged against the seat, happy to be in an upright and static position once again. She exhaled—slowly—and tried to wake up the screen, only to see a flashing, empty battery symbol in response.
There would be no calling for help. Not today.
She made a mental note to add a portable, battery-operated phone charger to her emergency kit along with something more powerful than OTC painkillers.
Instead of focusing on the negatives, she chose to think of the positives. She had enough fuel to provide hours of warmth and plenty of food—not just the high-protein snack bars in her emergency kit, but also the steak and shrimp dinner she’d made to surprise Chris. She also had several bottles of water, and if those ran out, she was surrounded by plenty of snow that would work just as well.
Though she wasn’t hungry, she forced herself to eat something and then downed a few more tablets since she’d thrown the others up. Then, she sat back, closed her eyes, and waited for her stomach to calm and the painkillers to do their thing before she attempted additional heroics.
When she opened her eyes again, the clock on her dash told her it was mid-morning. Surely, someone must have noticed she was missing by that point.
Right?
Though the more she thought about it, the more she realized that might not be the case.
She hadn’t been around to open the store, but folks might assume she’d taken the day off to take her dad home from the hospital.
Luther was unreliable at best. If he was still upset with her, he wouldn’t think twice about showing up late or not at all, just for spite.
Kylie and her mother wouldn’t notice, not unless they needed her, and even then, they would assume she’d just gotten involved in something.
But Chris ...
The last time she hadn’t returned his texts or calls, he had come looking for her. Hopefully, he’d do so again. But ... he’d have no idea where to look. She hadn’t texted him, wanting to do something unexpected and spontaneous.
Her spirits took a sudden and decided downturn.
Kate turned off the motor to conserve fuel and considered her options. As there were only two, it didn’t take long. She could stay right where she was and wait, or she could try to go for help. Common sense suggested she stay where she was—at least for the time being. Hiking the mountain could be challenging under the best of circumstances. Attempting to do so with injuries during a snowstorm, even more so.
Please come looking for me, Chris.
She must have fallen asleep again because when she woke up, the Jeep was covered in snow, and her feet were numb. She knew she had to clear the area around the tailpipe before she could restart the engine again. After all this, she sure as hell wasn’t going to give herself carbon-monoxide poisoning, though the thought of climbing over the seats again filled her with dread.
Summoning her courage, she worked her way through the back, glad she had when she saw that the snow was really coming down, twice as fast and hard as it had been earlier. Several more inches had accumulated. She supposed that outlier model had been right after all.
She was brushing away the area around the exhaust when she heard it—the distant whine of a snowmobile—and knew in her heart that it was Chris.
Adrenalin and a sense of urgency coursed through her. She scrambled back into the Jeep as quickly as her injuries would allow and started the engine. Then, she flicked the lights off and on and laid on the horn in a repeated SOS pattern—short, short, short, long, long, long, short, short, short.
Every now and then, she’d stop long enough to listen, her heart pounding increasingly hard and fast when she heard the vehicle getting closer.
She’d never, ever in a million years forget the joy she felt when she heard that first snowmobile stop beside her.
“KATE!”
She couldn’t see who it was; the windows were covered in snow again. It wasn’t Chris’s voice, but she recognized it as one of the guys from Sanctuary.
“YES!” she yelled back, laying twice on the horn in quick succession as well for good measure.
“I got her,” she heard him say, and then he rattled off a set of coordinates. A gloved hand wiped the snow away from the driver’s-side window, and she looked into the face of a shadow with goggles. “Are you hurt?”
“Minor injuries,” she said. “The door’s jammed. Wait, I can crawl out the back.”
In her haste, she wasn’t as careful with her movements as she had been in her earlier ventures. She paid for it in the form of pain and nausea.
“Move!” she yelled as she exited out the back, stumbled to the side, and promptly threw up.
When she straightened and turned around again, her rescuer had removed his goggles. Enough of his face was revealed through the high-tech-looking balaclava for her to recognize Matt Winston.
“Sorry about that,” she apologized.
He guided her toward the bumper and had her lean against it, his eyes creasing in concern when he focused on the side of her face. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I hit my head,” she said, starting with the obvious. “My left side took the brunt of it. I think I might have bruised some ribs and my knee, and I know I broke my arm. Otherwise, I’m good.”
“Good, huh?”
She nodded. He shook his head. She had the impression he was smiling, but since she couldn’t see his mouth, she couldn’t be sure.
“I’m pretty tough.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
Within minutes, a second snowmobile came racing down the slope at breakneck speed. Chris was off the snowmobile and pulling her into his arms a moment later. It hurt like hell, but it was worth every ounce of pain.
“Ow.”
He took a step back and gently cradled her face. “Jesus, Kate. Are you okay?”
“Super now that you’re here.” She tried to smile. She thought she had.
“She admitted to head trauma, bruised ribs and knee, and a broken arm before you got here,” Matt told him.
“Fuck, baby.”
“I like when you call me baby.”
Chris’s eyes narrowed, and he turned to Matt. “I think she’s going into shock. Where the fuck is Doc?”
“Right here.”
Two more snowmobiles had joined the party. She squinted and made out Doc and Sandy’s guy ... she couldn’t remember his name. Something that started with an H maybe. Her thoughts were fuzzy, and it was getting harder to focus as the pain escalated to new levels.
A kind face filled her field of vision. “Hey, Kate. Remember me?”
“Yeah. Doc, right?”
“Right. How are you feeling?” Doc’s face intently peered into hers.
“A little woozy,” she answered honestly. “I think I moved too fast, getting out of the truck. Sorry about the bad breath. Do you have a mint?”
Someone off to the side said something as Doc gently lifted her eyelid.
“You have a broken arm, and your ribs hurt?”
She nodded. Her vision blurred. “And my knee. And my head.”
“Anything else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
His eyes crinkled, just like Matt’s had. “Yeah, that’s plenty. What do you say we get you out of here and do something about that?”
“I say, what are we waiting for? Let’s blow this Popsicle stand. Uh-oh. Clear the deck, boys.” She leaned over, threw up again, and passed out.