Even though Jack’s condition didn’t change for the rest of the day, that night Sophie found her sleep disturbed by dreams of being left alone on the ledge to die a slow death by starvation and exposure.
Her uneasiness must have seeped through her sleep as chatter, or perhaps she wasn’t keeping as serene an expression as she thought, for the next morning over their breakfast of coffee and dry cake, Jack said, “You’re worrying too much, Sophie. I haven’t keeled over yet and it’s been seventy-two hours, now.”
A little of her dread lifted after that.
Besides, it was such a beautiful day that just looking at it left her genuinely speechless with delight.
The sun was out in full, with a cloudless sky dancing attendance. No fog or low cloud cover inhibited her view of the mountains that guarded her nights. She studied them, trying to absorb their scale, the sheer size of them. They reached up high into the sky. The perfect light made them seem a lot closer, a wonderful illusion that kept drawing her eyes.
These mountains had stood so while time passed them by. The little drama playing out at their knees would have no impact on them.
She shivered. The study left her feeling small and insignificant.
“Jack, why are the mountains over there sheer and rocky? They’ve hardly got any trees until much lower down—it’s all vertical walls.” Walls that had been built at a crazy angle, the parallel lines of seamed rock that should have been horizontal were tilted anywhere between forty and fifty degrees, running down into the tree line below.
But the mountain they were on was a giant’s weedy playing field, grassed over and scattered with trees and tilted at an angle that would have had the giant’s marbles rolling furiously down to the valley floor.
Jack looked up from the rope he was braiding out of strips of foraged cloth. “You’ve never been in the mountains before, have you?”
“I kept meaning to go but just never got around to it. There was always something better to do.” Like working. The need to push ahead, score political points and maybe get herself noticed by the partners had always pushed the idea of clearing her vacation time far down the list of priorities. Besides, a trip to the mountains was out of her financial reach. “I saw the San Gabriels once, on a clear day.”
“Angelinos….” Jack muttered, shaking his head ruefully.
“What?” she demanded. “So I’m from Los Angeles. So sue me.”
But Jack was laughing. “And I suppose Colorado is a flyover state, so far as you’re concerned.”
The laugh got her. She grinned. “Until now,” she agreed. “Is that where we are? Colorado?”
“I’m pretty sure. North, though. North of Boulder, even Loveland.”
They had been flying from Las Vegas to St. Louis, the second hop of a three-leg journey that would have eventually got her into New York. It had been the only tickets she could get without going standby. As Donald, her stickler of a boss, wouldn’t have tolerated delay if she’d been forced to wait for another flight, she’d picked the sure thing. New York by Thursday, lunchtime.
Right.
“Northern Colorado…that’s pretty far north of where we should have passed over, right?”
“It’s off the direct line if you’re looking at a map but the pilots would have been flying the great curve. It’s definitely north of where we should be, though,” he agreed. “I think the pilots wanted to get out of commercial air space to start. Out of the corridor. Then they were too busy just trying to put her down as gently as possible.”
“Why get out of commercial air space? Surely that’s where they’d look?”
He was frowning, the inward stare she’d come to know. This was impinging on those areas he’d declared off-limits. But this time she got an answer of sorts and wished she hadn’t.
“I think the radio was one of the first victims of the…accident. They couldn’t send a mayday. Maybe they couldn’t hold altitude. No, I know they couldn’t, or we wouldn’t be here. You can’t allow yourself to drift into other lanes. You’d be putting other aircraft at risk. So if you can’t hold your lane, then you have to get out—way out. Which they did.”
His terse answer opened a small door of illumination upon the endless minutes of noise and fear she’d lived through that night, clutching the arms of her chair and waiting for the long fall to the ground. The pilots, whoever they were, must have fought the plane every foot of the way to its resting place.
“They deserve a medal,” she said.
Jack was quiet for a long minute. “More,” he said, his voice rough. “They deserve to have their life back. I wish I had the power to give it to them. I really do.” Abruptly he stood and thrust his hands into his pockets. “Gotta go.” He headed for the gully and the wire rope that let him climb to the top.
She listened to his ascent, turning over the puzzling note of distress in his voice.
Later, she got the answer to her first question. As they lunched on cookies and fruitcake softened with hot water to a thick lumpy gruel, Jack had pointed to the peaks in front of them. “They’re the same as this mountain, only you’re looking at the back of them. Or the front, depending on how you want to refer to them.” He waved behind him, indicating the slope. “That’s the front. The other side of this mountain looks just like they do,” and he nodded to Sophie’s guardians.
“Ohhh,” Sophie murmured, understanding flooding her.
Jack pointed to the long series of slopes and peaks that stood in ranks off to the south. “Think of these slopes as having once been flat ground—you can see how flat it would have been. Flat ground at the edge of the continental plate, which one day eons ago had a head-on collision with another plate heading in the opposite direction.” His flat hands moved together until his fingertips bumped into each other. The fingers pushed until the knuckles turned white, then the tips of one hand slipped over the other and lifted up.
Jack kept the titled hand in place and ran his finger down the long slope of the back of his hand. “Slope here, with topsoil, grass and trees just like it used to be.” He pointed to the other side, the tips of his fingers that stuck up toward the sky and the sharp drop down to where his other hand had been beneath. “Sheer walls.” He pointed to the guardians she had been studying all morning. “You’re looking at history, Sophie. Those layers running across their face are slices of time caught in stone, showing how the earth was formed.”
She took a breath. “Wow.” No adequate words occurred to her. It was mind-boggling. But it made perfect sense when you looked at the two sides of the mountains. Again, she was reminded of the giant’s playing field. Her instincts had been close, after all.
Jack shrugged and went back to his cup of gruel. “Up in Alberta they’re digging dinosaur fossils out of the backside of the mountains, twenty thousand feet up where no dinosaur should have been.”
She grinned. “Where did you learn that? More on-the-job training?”
He grinned back. “Discovery Channel.”
Then she noticed again the slight difference in his eyes and her good cheer evaporated.
* * * * *
It was the sun sinking down to meet the mountains that started the grizzly countdown to the end.
Sophie was spacing out on the latest painkiller, waiting for the numbness to set it. Her balloon fingers and runaway heart were a price she was willing to pay for dulling the pain in her leg and hips. Two days of solid sitting had their own penalties, she was discovering.
“I’ll get bed sores or something,” she complained, trying to move around on the chair without disturbing her leg. The slightest movement tended to reverberate down the shattered bone and set up echoes that came back to kick her in the temple with steel-toe boots.
“Let the Percodan kick in, then I’ll help you stand up for a while,” Jack said. “I’ll even walk you around the block. How does that sound?”
“Great.” She meant it. Trying to be patient, she threaded her fingers together and gritted her teeth.
Jack was almost laughing. “I just love a feisty woman.” He turned back to his ropes, his gaze sweeping across the guardians where the sun was dropping down between the peaks.
It was if he’d been shot…or like someone had looped a rope around his neck and yanked back hard. His whole body jerked and his hands shot up to his face, covering his eyes.
He gave a hoarse, inarticulate cry and staggered backward.
He’s going to run into the wall, Sophie thought. Help him. Stop him. But she would never get there in time and even as she was cursing her immobility and the damn stupid leg, she was trying to raise herself, while watching Jack stagger.
Then, thankfully, he tripped a little, enough to throw his balance as he was already effectively blind. One knee went down to the ground. In the slow motion tumble to his left, Sophie thought he’d be okay. Bruised dignity and little else. Then she saw it; he was too close to the wall.
He couldn’t see it.
Too late.
His head slammed into the rock…and literally bounced off. The force finished the job of knocking him off his feet. He fell forward and sideways, his left hand sprawled out to save him. It was the wrong hand. He needed the right hand out to prop him up but his right hand was holding his head, protecting the eye. He fell, his weight landing on his right shoulder. Sophie felt the reverberation through her good foot. The impact started a mini-landslide down the gully, pebbles and dust sliding a few inches.
“Jack! Jack!” Suddenly she was standing, with no idea how she’d got there. Her useless leg remained propped on the metal channel.
Jack was motionless.
“Ohmigod.” She was hyperventilating, almost panting. “Jack! Goddamn it, Jack! Move!”
She had to go over to him. No way around it. But first she had to breathe, slow and easy—she was dizzy. Can’t pass out. Not both of us. Got to hold it together and do this.
Jack’s voice, a memory and a mental snapshot of his brown eyes looking at her. This is going to hurt a little.
She swallowed, gripped the raw edges of denim that covered her leg and lifted the foot out of the metal tray. Let it down until it was lowered all the way. Then she paused for a moment and wiped at her eyes, which were wet with tears she wasn’t aware of shedding. She’d just taken the Percodan a while ago, so it was freshest and strongest just now—but the motion of her unsplinted leg created a new experience in pain. She thought she could even feel the ends of the bones grinding together and that sent a wave of revulsion through her strong enough to make her want to throw up.
She should have splinted it. Bent the metal closed and tied it off. But there were no ties….
She looked over to where Jack had been working quietly away on the thin braids of cloth. Of course, of course. He had been way ahead of her, as he had been all along.
Jack. Jack. She looked over toward him. She had to go over to him. She owed him that much. She owed him her life.
She picked up the strip of fuselage and propped it on its end, a very inadequate walking stick. Gripping the sharp edges, tucking it under her left arm, she took a breath, then a step, quickly, trying to transfer her weight back to her right leg instantaneously. But natural physical laws weren’t on vacation. The swing of weight was real and sent a wave of nausea through her.
She swallowed again. Why the hell aren’t you hopping, idiot?
She knew why she hadn’t tried that first but the idea of jarring her leg with that sort of energetic movement had seemed the worse alternative.
It seemed a better idea now.
She gave a little hop. That wasn’t so bad, she told herself, even though she was swallowing convulsively to keep back the sour sick taste in her mouth. There was a high-pitched squeal in her mind—mental static. Station closed for the night.
One more hop. She took the hop and knew she would never manage another. She dropped the metal crutch and bent and put her hands to the ground. Slowly she walked them out, up alongside Jack’s body, while she let her good knee bend. Finally she was on her knee. She shuffled forward, feeling her leg drag. That was another new experience she wasn’t in a hurry to repeat.
She turned herself around on her hands so she was looking back toward the chair with the bad leg pushed out in front of her. She sat down.
Finally, she was positioned so she could turn Jack over. He was heavy and uncooperative as only the truly unconscious—or dead, her mind whispered—can be. There was blood on the side of his head and a bad graze along his cheekbone, high up under the right eye. Blood oozed from the wound, a hundred tiny beads. It looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to his skin.
She leaned over, bringing her ear as close as she could to his face.
He was breathing.
She knew then that she had been expecting to find him dead. Her guts turned hot, loose and watery with relief. She took a minute to bring the reaction under control, while she considered her dilemma. How was she supposed to revive Jack? Was she even supposed to try?
She stared at mountain peaks—the sun had slipped behind them in the time it had taken her to drag her sorry butt over to Jack’s side—wishing mightily that she’d taken even one of the endless first aid courses and St. John’s Ambulance courses constantly offered by Cruickshanks. Then she wouldn’t be sitting here dithering.
Her dilemma was solved when Jack groaned and his head rolled to one side. His hand lifted up to his face again, even though his eyes were closed.
“Jack!”
“Jesus wept,” he murmured. His fingertips were tentatively exploring the patch of raw flesh on his cheekbone. The other hand wandered up to the side of his head, the point of impact with the rock.
“Jack, look at me,” she urged. “Can you look at me?”
He cracked open his left eye and rolled his head farther to the right to look at her with the good eye.
“Both eyes, Jack. Let me see.”
The right one opened slowly, a sliver of the eye beneath showing. Then, perhaps when the light that had dazzled him before didn’t impact on his sight again, he opened it farther. The eye was bloodshot, the iris huge. The eye of a blind man.
Sophie struggled to not let her dismay mirror on her face. “Can you see out of the right one?”
He blinked hard, then screwed his eyes shut and rubbed before trying again. “It’s blurry but I can see. Sort of.”
“You were out for minutes,” she said.
“Long enough for you to make your way over,” he agreed. “Dumb move, Soph. You could end up permanently maimed dragging a broken leg around like that.”
“Then stop running into walls,” she said, adding a brisk snap to her voice. If he liked feisty, she’d give him feisty, or die. Anything to keep him alert, keep him talking. “Can you sit up?”
He got his elbows underneath him then pushed up on his hands until finally he was sitting next to her. He pinched the skin over the bridge of his nose. “Ah, god, my head.”
“Serves you right.” But she was pleased. Surely, sitting up was a good sign? Oh, how she wished she had taken those courses….
He was sitting motionless. Abruptly, his face drained of color, leaving the skin gray and mottled and the gouge along his cheek bone a livid red. “I think….” he muttered, his voice rough.
Then he scrambled to his feet, pushing away from her, toward the edge of the shelf. He hung over the edge and Sophie heard the unmistakable sound. Vomiting…oh, God. She didn’t need a course to know that was bad.
She could only sit and wait, so she waited. Finally, Jack turned away from the edge and sat down on the dirt next to her. For a long time he was silent.
“I could have done without that,” he said casually.
He had some color back and he actually seemed to be focusing on her with the bad eye. Sophie felt a cautious hope. Perhaps it would be okay, after all.
“Food and coffee,” he declared. “My soul for a coffee. Come on, let’s get you back on your perch.” He stood up slowly and dusted himself off, then reached down and picked her up like one would a child, both hands around her middle. She hadn’t suspected he was that strong. He certainly didn’t bulge with muscle. After what he’d just gone through, to start tossing her around on top of it….
I think he’s okay.
He placed her back on her chair and she was more than happy to sit down again now. She’d had enough exercise to last a week, at least.
Jack crouched by her hip, gently easing the channel back under her leg. This time the pain seemed minor compared to that she’d felt as she’d walked across the shelf toward him.
“Can we splint the leg somehow?” she asked. “Bend the metal around it and tie it down?”
He considered the matter, his head down, before looking up at her. His gaze was steady. The enlarged pupil was disturbing. “I think that’s probably a good idea,” he said quietly. “But, food first. We both need it.”
“Sure,” Sophie agreed.
He built up the fire again, growing a good pile of red coals to cook on. While the fire burned down a little, he started sorting through the pack, which held all the food supplies. “I’d give my eye teeth for a turkey breast sandwich right now. Or to have flown with an airline that served actual hot food, not little snacks like this.”
“If you had flown with another airline, you wouldn’t be here to grumble about the food,” Sophie pointed out.
“No, I’d probably be—” He stopped, keeping his head down. “I’d probably be home,” he finished but Sophie knew that was not what he had been about to say. He was laying out the packets and counting. “There’s enough here for, say, another three or four days, if we’re careful. Not exactly the diet recommended by the Food and Drug Administration, but what the hay.”
He put the packets away, keeping out enough for this meal and slid the backpack under Sophie’s chair. “Let’s leave it there, within your reach,” he suggested.
Then he wandered about the ledge, rearranging packs. As far as she could tell he was just keeping it all organized, although she’d already learned that there was a reason for everything Jack did, often one she hadn’t anticipated. So she kept her questions to herself. He’d tell her soon enough.
But he didn’t tell her that night. He was preoccupied and conversation stuttered to a halt a dozen times over. Jack insisted she take another Percodan after eating. He also set about splinting her leg. The metal wasn’t as flexible as she’d thought. Jack struggled to bend it around to hug her leg tightly, persisting long after she would have given up. The pressure on the injured leg was uncomfortable and tiring. Finally, the leg was splinted and tied off with the neat braids Jack had spent the day making.
Sophie was more than glad to push the chair back and snuggle down under the blankets and plastic to sleep. Jack settled next to her but didn’t recline his chair back straight away. Instead, he sat looking at the flames.
She knew he wanted to be left alone but gave into the momentary impulse that pushed her into reaching for his hand where it rested on his thigh and holding it. “Thanks for saving my life. I should have said that two days ago and I’m sorry. But thanks, Jack. I’m glad it’s you I have to depend upon. I’m not sure I could let anyone else in the world do it.”
His hand clamped almost painfully around her fingers. For a minute the pressure persisted, then he exhaled. Hard. His breath was unsteady. “You have nothing to thank me for.”
“So you say. I think more of you than that,” she retorted. She left her hand in his, liking the contact. Sleep came fast. It had been a busy day.
She came awake abruptly, sometime later.
Jack was muttering in his sleep. The words were indistinct. She listened but made nothing of the sounds. Then he gave a shout. The fear in that inarticulate shout was enough to bring invisible hackles on the back of her neck erect, prickling tightly.
She grabbed his shoulder and shook. “Jack, wake up!” No one should have to live through that sort of nightmare. “Jack!”
It took several moments of vigorous shaking before he roused. He shook himself like a dog fresh out of water.
“You were dreaming, Jack. Bad dreams.”
He was lying back against the chair. In the milky illumination radiating from the mountains she could see him swallow.
“Dreams,” he muttered.
She patted his arm and went back to sleep.
She didn’t know what roused her the second time. Perhaps the crackle of the fire. Jack had built the fire up again. He was no longer sitting next to her. She glanced around, groggy with sleep and saw him standing on the other side of the fire staring at the ghostly faces of the guardians, his hands in his pockets. Feeling protected and safe, she drifted back to sleep.
Jack was awake before her the next morning. By the time she yawned and stretched a little, he was returning down the gully, holding the wire rope with a grim expression on his face.
The grimness disappeared when he looked up from his feet and saw her watching him. He was carrying another pack over his shoulder—what once had been someone’s cabin bag with the extending handle and built-in wheels. He dumped it next to the fire. “I went for another scavenge.”
“A successful one, I see. Don’t you think we’ve got enough here, Jack?”
He pursed his lips, considering. “Better safe than sorry,” he said and turned away. He started putting breakfast together.
When the meal was over, he opened the cabin bag and searched through all the pockets. He grunted with satisfaction as he dug into a deep one. He pulled out a lady’s powder compact—not hers. There had been one other woman on the flight.
Sophie bit her lip, fighting back the swell of horror and pity. It was the first time she’d allowed herself to fully consider that most of their salvaged goods, including the clothes she wore, had been someone else’s a few days ago. Someone now dead.
Jack came and crouched next to her chair. “Here.” He held out the compact. “You need to keep this on you. You know what to do with it, right?”
She stared at him, feeling stupid. Beyond powdering her nose, what on earth would she want with it? What was so important about a compact that Jack had gone out at first light to find it?
Her confusion must have shown. Jack took the compact back and opened it. He threw the foam applicator into the fire, then knocked the compact on the edge of the chair’s leg frame. The compacted powder shattered and fell to the ground, leaving the dusty silvery lining bare. On the other side was the small round mirror.
Jack held the compact out, propped on his knees, moving it experimentally. “It’ll only work when the sun isn’t behind clouds but it’s easy enough to figure out. You just keep flashing it until you catch their attention. This sort of signal can be seen for miles. They’ll come running to investigate.”
The meaning, the implication behind his explanation slammed through her brain. The impact left her winded and very scared.
She sat up, careless of her leg. “You are not going to die!” It was a screamed protest. “Don’t you even dare think it. You can use the damn mirror to bring them closer. You, Jack.”
He was looking at her and now she could see his sadness and understood his preoccupation with chilling clarity.
“Sophie.…” he began, softly.
“No!” The fear was in her throat, choking her voice, hurting her head with the vicious pressure of it. “No, I won’t have it. I won’t have it, you hear? You are not going to die on me.”
He reached out and gripped her hand. It was the same tight pressure as last night. “Sophie, you have to listen. This is important. You’ve got to know this stuff—”
She shook her head and the motion sent tears spinning away. “They could arrive today. This morning. You don’t know, dammit, you don’t know when they’ll get here.”
He shook her hand. “That’s right. I don’t know. It’s a gamble. We can hope for the best but we have to prepare for the worst.”
She sat there then, her protest evaporating. Helpless, she let the tears spill unchecked as he went through the dry, practical arrangements he’d made for her.
“The food is under your chair. You can reach it by bending forward. We’ve collected enough drinking water for about four days. If it rains again, you’ve got to collect what you can. That’s the most important thing to remember. I’ll work to build up the woodpile for you but once it runs out, stay under the plastic. Keep warm. You won’t die from cold, not in October, even up here. But you’ve got to have water.” His hand squeezed hers. “Sophie, are you listening?”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“I wasn’t sleeping last night, Sophie. I was…I don’t know. Passed out. In a delirium. Whatever. And the headache is getting worse. This morning while I was up top I lost…I don’t know how much time. I just grayed out. I came around and found myself lying on the ground with a squirrel giving me shit from the closest tree.”
“But you don’t know for sure!”
His voice was gentle. “I know it’s coming. I just don’t know when.”
In the face of his cold logic, the only thing she had left was to abase herself. She pleaded, careless of her pride. “Please, Jack. Please. You’ve got to hang on.”
“You’ll be okay. They’ll find you. You’re a fighter, I knew that the moment I met you. You’ll hang in there and you’ll go on.”
She offered the bare, cold truth. “I don’t want to, not if it’s without you.”
His hand was crushing hers but she welcomed the pain. Finally, she felt his other hand on her cheek. Gentle. “Oh, god, Sophie, don’t do this to me. I thought I had it settled last night but not this.”
She turned her head in his hand and kissed the big palm.
“You don’t know me,” he grated.
“I know enough. I don’t care about the rest.”
He knelt next to her and took her in his arms. She let her head rest against his chest, hearing his heart hurry along beneath her ear.
“You have to stay, Jack.”
His answer was a long time coming. “I’ll do the best I can, my love.”