forty:
thursday morning

He was clinging hard to the non-dust version of himself, but Allison couldn’t be sure.

Every minute was precious. He’d lost a lot of blood.

Each breath came with a gasp and shudder. He was unconscious or deep in shock. His forehead sprouted beads of sweat.

Allison made sure the blanket stayed loosely tucked around him. If he was about to go to his grave with the big questions unanswered, maybe he was getting close to the details now.

They hadn’t really decided who would go. Colin was up on his horse without discussion. Colin would climb high as fast as possible, get a cell signal, call for a rescue and call the state division of wildlife, National Forest, county sheriff and anyone else interested in a case of attempted murder and illegal hunting with dogs. There was a helicopter based out of Aspen and if she remembered right Rio Blanco County Search and Rescue had access to one, too.

They would need some luck, starting with a quick cell signal.

Ninety minutes since Colin left. Maybe right about now he would be talking to someone, maybe the help was already on the way.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Too many maybes.

Waiting sucked.

Allison left her patient for mini scouting missions. Two minutes, three minutes. The longest was five. She was looking for a small clearing and found one that would work.

The spot was flat, round and clogged with blown-down trees. On her second reconnaissance, this time with matches and a starter stick, she had a fire going in a safe spot.

Locator smoke.

She shuttled between her patient and the fire, building the fire on each trip until it was in bonfire category, about chest high and as wide as a dinner table for eight.

She rushed armloads of old pine needles, still damp from last night’s rain, to the fire to generate thick white smoke.

Check on her patient, chop some branches, jog to fire.

Build it up.

Repeat.

She fell into a rhythm, took a break every other trip for water and something to munch.

On one round-trip, her eye spotting a head-high branch thick with dead stuff and looking bone dry and fire-ready, she found elk scat and, nearby, a whole bedding area where elk had taken siesta. The scat was fresh, most likely from that morning and no earlier.

“Just fine,” she said to the scattering of poop. “Be that way.”

It wouldn’t be good if the nurse collapsed. She wasn’t consciously hungry or thirsty, but knew that her own system was cranked up and not necessarily taking care of its own basic needs.

Every trip back, she expected to find he had taken his last breath. On each circuit, she approached with that idea, that the rescue would become recovery and that her patient had taken that last step off the stairs and was gone.

But he was stubborn. He was a fighter. Shock was a fascinating feature of the human system, the ability to shut down every other sensory intake and focus relentlessly on righting the ship.

If he recovered, this time between attack and waking up in a brightly lit hospital bed would be relegated to a fuzzy, near-mystical storyline that would take shape over time, the result of bits and pieces of what he truly remembered melded together with fragments and details from the perspective of others.

She knew that score.

Her patient’s brain was now hibernating. It was doing itself a favor. It might be deleting files from before the attack. Some survivors of spectacular crashes and collisions recalled nothing of the moments that led up to impact, even though they watched it all happen.

That was another reason Kerry London could go fuck off. For him to think that she would be a reliable narrator of her own story, after years of processing, was ludicrous. And for her to pretend to recount those events as if they were crisp photographs or HD video, when in fact they were now a set of feelings combined with the fuzzy flash frames of memory, was absurd.

But now Allison chided herself. All she had to do was tell Kerry London “no thanks” a dozen times, smiling the whole while, until he got the message. The result would have been the same as letting him witness her meltdown. And tantrum.

Her punishment, of course, was to relive the accident. The turmoil she had added to the conversation with Kerry London transformed the sleepy, distant memories into vivid colors and smells. The images had climbed down off the high, dusty shelf and come down for a party on the living room floor, as if the accident had happened yesterday, without the shock or the salt water or the hospital stay. Her uncontrolled thoughts—who was in charge here anyway?—didn’t run to the aftermath, those odd minutes after the crash when they were suddenly back on earth and the fuselage belly-flopped oddly and ripped apart, jettisoning its contents and cargo and passengers in a wicked game of seat-assignment fate. The thirty-one who died were concentrated in a section just ahead of Allison’s row. Allison didn’t know precisely what had happened other than she was one of eighty-eight survivors suddenly swimming and bobbing and she understood instantly that her attachment and connection to this earth dangled by one brittle hair. And she simultaneously knew, given that she wasn’t one of the ones screaming or floating upside down, that she’d never be that fortunate again.

All these thoughts, of course, benefitted from years of retrospection. She was now able to layer into the scene in her head the thoughts she hoped she had in the moment. Because the moment didn’t contain thoughts or decision-making or anything that would truly bolster Kerry London’s book. The moment only contained a dark whirl of numbness and bewilderment where logic was an outcast.

Allison’s uncontrolled thoughts focused mostly on the few airborne seconds when they all knew in their guts that something wasn’t right. The moment was pure, utter uncertainty. The moment was a collective gulp, coated in dread. They were all so utterly trapped. Optimism had been sucked from the cabin. The laws of physics dictated what was next. And the savvy, perhaps, of a couple unknown pilots up front.

Allison stood, took a deep breath—stared at one particular towering spruce to make it more real. She had no idea how long she’d been gone. Now, she was the unknown pilot and her patient depended on her talents. Allison banished the accident from her thoughts, concentrated on the moment, her current mission.

Two hours.

Three.

Her routines settled in. The fire was now a hungry beast, pumping up flurries of white smoke in a shaft so straight and thick it would have worked fine as a column for the ancient Greeks. Smoke shot from the roaring blast furnace like it was on a mission.

There was half a chance the dog runners would see it and she hoped they might be having a what-the-fuck moment. If they were anywhere in the main valley, they likely would have spotted it, but perhaps they were also long gone, racing their injured dog or dogs for help.

It was at least a mile or more from the fire to their camp, most of it open tundra west and northwest. Their camp was closer to the edge of the forest. She was in much deeper, although once or twice she pondered leaving her patient for an extended scouting mission straight north, to see how close. But it was too risky and unnecessary.

Her own what-the-fuck meter spiked past the red zone. The mountain lion scenario hadn’t made sense, but this?

Her patient had been the prey.

The dogs were the weapon.

A million what ifs might be out there to fill in the background, but Allison didn’t care. Around the world, hell had more names than there were for good but she would march deep into each one in order to track down Mr. Muttonchops and his oversized buddy. Maybe the dogs had died and the men were digging their graves.

No matter.

As soon as the helicopter came or as soon as whatever was going to happen next happened, they were first on her ever-broadening, fast-changing list.