Stillness and silence reigned. Then, slowly, María began to groan and I opened my eyes.
“It’s stopped,” I said.
María nodded. Blood poured out of a gash on her forehead, blinding one eye, and an enormous bruise darkened the side of her otherwise ashen face. She looked to be in shock.
“Are you alright?” I asked stupidly.
“Pain here, in my side,” she replied, holding her hand over it.
I smelled aviation fuel and began to panic. “We have to get out of here,’ I said. I twisted in the narrow space and undid her seatbelt. My door was stiff and wouldn’t open until I threw my whole weight against it.
I tumbled out of the plane and found myself up to my knees in snow. All around me were glaring white snowdrifts and gray-white mountains on three sides. The plane had come to rest with a forward tilt, facing down a valley filled with murky clouds. It was bitterly cold, subzero for sure, and I was wearing a light jacket over a short-sleeved shirt. The scene was utterly desolate but I had no time to think about it. I hurried around to the other side of the plane.
The tiny trip exhausted me and I wondered where all my strength had gone. Then I realised that, even without pain in my chest and elsewhere, the thin air of the mountains made every physical task double the normal energy and effort.
María seemed even more tightly jammed than I had been. I pried her out carefully, dragged her over the snow away from the plane and laid her down gently. Using a clean tissue, I wiped the blood out of her eye so that she could see and then ran back to the plane. Inside it I found our two bags and the first aid box and hauled them over to María. From somewhere deep inside, she mustered up the beginnings of a smile.
I rucked up her blouse and felt her ribs. Immediately her smile vanished and she moaned as my hands moved. I couldn’t find any protrusions or dents.
“Not broken, just bruised,” I said as confidently as I could.
I rooted around at the bottom of my travel case where I’d put a big plastic bag for laundry. Not ideal but it would do. I took it out and filled it with handfuls of snow then laid it on her ribcage.
“Keep this pressed tight and refill with fresh snow when you need to,” I instructed her, though I barely knew what I was doing. “Where else are you hurt?” I said.
“My left leg,” she replied, “It’s burning.”
“What happened to it?”
“The seat broke up under me, trapped my legs tight, pinned me against the front.”
I eased her pants leg up to her knee and took a look. Her left calf seemed oddly out of place, twisted to one side. Without giving her any warning, I took hold of it and pushed it around to its proper position.
María screamed.
I bound up the leg with a bandage from the first aid box and tugged her pants leg back down over it.
“That’s as much as I can do,” I said, aware that I had yet to radio for help. And if help couldn’t come until tomorrow, I’d need to get us some shelter before nightfall. With all the clouds around, the sky was already overcast and gloomy.
Back at the plane I sniffed the air and couldn’t smell fuel anymore and, with the doors wide open since we’d crashed, I was pretty sure it was safe to go back inside. I squeezed into the pilot seat and tried to get the radio going.
Nothing doing; the transmitter was completely dead. The nose of the plane had concertinaed into the snow bank and none of the electronics remained functional. I made my way slowly back to María.
She summoned another smile from somewhere when she saw me.
“Rescue is coming?” she asked.
I stopped and looked down at my feet. “Radio won’t work.”
“Our cell phones. We have cell phones.”
“No signal up here,” I replied, nearly laughing though there was nothing funny about it.
She refused to accept it. “But help will still come. They will. I will still see my father before he dies.”
I looked into her eyes and shook my head sadly.
“No, María. No-one knows we’re here, remember?”