Light. Bright beam, right in my eyes.
I sucked in a breath. Light was dangerous. Light made things burn.
I forced my eyes open despite the lashes sticking together, clotted with ice and tears, and tried to lift my head. Had to keep moving. It was too cold – I had to find –
A rough voice with a deep mountain accent reached me through panic and deep burn of frigid air. “We got you, Ada. We been lookin’ for you for days. Just hold on – we’re gettin’ the stretcher.”
More faces moved around me as voices came and went; someone jostled my leg and I hollered, and instead of admonishing me about making noise, relief crossed the woman’s face looming over me. My teeth started chattering and wouldn’t stop, even after they wrapped me up in emergency blankets and tried to thaw me out.
The sky lightened with dawn as they hoisted the stretcher and I floated down the mountain.
One of the men next to the stretcher kept his fingers on my wrist. “Just a few minutes and we’ll be there, Ada; they’ve got a helicopter on the way to take you to Knoxville. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Broke my fucking leg,” I muttered. My head tilted back and I ground my teeth. Every jounce and bounce of the stretcher rattled my bones together and sent stars and dark blotches across my vision. “Probably the other one. Maybe my arm.”
The beard hid what could have been a smile. “We see that. But how did it happen?”
“Crazy guy,” I said. Dragomir and I hadn’t agreed on the how of me breaking all my bones and then surviving so long in the woods alone, so I called an audible and went with something closer to the truth. “Jumped at me. Wild hair and t-terrible breath, tried to bite me. Don’t know if he did. He ch-chased me…”
Shaking set in, along with my teeth chattering hard enough to knock out my good sense, though part of me knew it wasn’t just the cold. It wasn’t just the snow that kept falling and the wind that whistled through a clearing as a helicopter hovered far above that set ice crystalizing my blood. A sudden flash of memory brought the crazy man, the panic of fleeing, gravity disappearing as I fell… all of it came back in a rush and it was like I still stood on that trail and fought to save myself from the mad man’s assault.
My bones danced in full-body shudders and a garbled yell escaped despite that I tried to clench my jaw. Whatever inner strength kept me going under Dragomir’s thumb deserted me and left a scared and hurt kid, fleeing from the boogeyman. Alone. In the dark.
Radios squawked and the same voice spoke with professional distance. “Get the trackers out here. Something attacked her; might have been a bear or… something else.”
Machines roared and wind howled loud enough to drive away every conscious thought. The stretcher bounced along and then heaved up and stopped with a jerk. Someone squeezed my hand and shouted, “We’ll see you soon, Ada; don’t worry about your truck,” and I had half a second be relieved before someone pulled at the splint and I screamed louder than the helicopter itself.