Up Close and Dangerous

  The door creaked open, her hand slipped off the seat, and she fell backward from the momentum. Quickly she scrambled up, her heart pounding with elation. Yes! Untwisting her sock from the handle, she pulled it back on, then braced her feet against the door and pushed some more, gaining an opening about a foot wide. She could get through that, she thought in triumph, leaning forward to see if there was anything in the way, like a tree or a boulder. She didn’t see any obstructions, so she maneuvered until she was lying on her stomach, then slithered past Justice and, turning on her side, worked her way out the door. Metal scraped her back, her hips, but she made it through and onto the snow-covered ground.

  The freezing cold bit through her thin socks. She needed to put on shoes and dry socks, almost immediately, to stave off the danger of frostbite. Her feet would have to wait, though, until she’d seen to Justice.

  Examining the opening, she considered Justice’s size. He wouldn’t fit; his chest was probably too deep. She’d have to open the door wider. Taking hold of the edge, she tugged until she’d gained another few inches from the crumpled, protesting metal. That would have to do, she thought, her breathing faster than she liked. At this altitude, she had to be careful and not overexert herself, or she would be asking for a killer case of altitude sickness. She was already sweating a little, and that was dangerous in the cold. She was wearing only a pair of thin, fluid trousers and a silk tank, plus her underwear and the socks, none of which was doing much to keep her warm. She had plenty of clothing in her suitcases, but getting them out would be an effort, and she had to get Justice out first.

  Justice groaned again. Remembering how slowly she’d regained her senses, how difficult even the smallest response had been, she began talking to him as she crouched in the open door and reached in, seizing him under the arms. “Justice, try to wake up. I’m going to pull you out of the plane now. I don’t know if you have any broken bones or anything, so you’ll have to let me know if I’m hurting you, okay?”

  No response.

  Bailey tightened her leg muscles and pushed backward. From her crouched position she couldn’t gain much leverage, but she was pulling him downhill, so gravity helped. When his head and shoulders were through the opening she shifted position until she was more fully under him; he was deadweight, completely limp and unable to help himself, so she’d have to protect his head. She paused a minute to catch her breath, then pulled her knees up, dug her heels into the ground, and pushed herself backward once more, dragging him with her. His weight slid forward and he flopped out of the plane, landing on top of her and pinning her to the icy earth.

  Oh, God. She could see his face now, see the horrific cut that began about three inches back in his scalp, angled all the way across his forehead, and ended just above his right eyebrow. She didn’t know much about first aid, but she did know a bad cut on the scalp could result in severe blood loss. The proof of it obscured his features, saturated his shirt and pants.

  He weighed a ton. Panting, she wiggled from beneath him and wrestled him onto his back. Her energy was fading fast, and she sat for a moment, her head down as she tried once more to catch her breath. Her feet were in agony, they were so cold, and now her clothes were caked with snow and rapidly becoming wet. The crash itself hadn’t killed her, but the altitude and hypothermia might well do the job pretty soon.

  Justice began breathing more heavily, his throat working. Bailey said, “Justice?”

  He swallowed, and thickly mumbled, “What th’ fuck?”

  She gave a quick, breathless, laugh. Their situation wasn’t any less dire, but at least he was regaining consciousness. “The plane crashed. We’re both alive, but you have a bad cut on your head and I need to stop the bleeding.” Slowly she got to her knees and reached into the cockpit, fumbling for her one shoe and her jacket. She was freezing, but even though the jacket was thin it was better than nothing. She started to put it on, then stopped, and drew her arm out. Instead she turned one sleeve so she could attack the seam, and began tugging at it. She needed something she could use as a pad to place over the cut and apply pressure, and this was all she had.

  He coughed, and said something else. She paused. She hadn’t understood everything he’d said, but part of it had sounded like “first-aid kit.”

  She leaned over him. “What? I didn’t understand. Is there a first-aid kit?”

  He swallowed again. He hadn’t yet opened his eyes, but he was winning the war against unconsciousness. “Glove box,” he mumbled.

  Thank God! A first-aid kit would be a lifesaver—if she could open the glove box—she thought. She crouched down and wriggled her way back inside the open door. The glove box was in front of the copilot’s seat. Slipping her fingers under the latch, she tugged on it, but the glove box wasn’t as cooperative as the door latch had been. She banged it with her cold fist, and tugged some more. Nothing.

  She needed something sturdy, with a sharp edge, to pry the box open. She looked around for what felt like the thirtieth time. There should be something in the wreckage she could use, like…like that crowbar held to the lower front edge of the copilot’s seat by a pair of brackets. She stared at it in disbelief. Was she already hallucinating? She blinked, but the crowbar was still there. She touched it, and felt the cold, rough metal. The bar was a short one, just about a foot long, but it was real, and it was just what she needed.

  Removing the crowbar from the brackets, she jammed the sharp end in at the middle, where the lock mechanism was, and pushed up. The lid buckled a little, then sprang open.

  She grabbed the olive-drab box with the red cross on it, and once more worked her way out. Going down on her knees beside him in the snow, she fumbled with the latches on the box. Why did everything have to have a damn latch? Why couldn’t things just open?

  His eyes opened, just a slit, and he managed to lift his hand toward his head. Bailey grabbed his wrist. “No, don’t touch it. You’re bleeding a lot, so I have to put pressure on it.”

  “Suture,” he rasped, closing his eyes against the blood that seeped into them.

  “What?”

  He took a few breaths; talking was still difficult. “In the box. Sutures.”

  She stared at him, aghast. She could put pressure on the wound. She could clean the cut, she could fashion butterfly bandages from tape to hold the edges of the cut together. She could put salve on it. But he wanted her to sew him up?

  “Oh, shit!” she blurted.

  6

  ARGUING WITH A SEMICONSCIOUS MAN MADE NO SENSE, but Bailey couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I don’t have any medical training, unless you count watching ER. No one in his right mind would want me sewing on him, but, hey, you aren’t in your right mind, are you? You have a head injury. On the theory that it isn’t smart to let someone with possible brain damage make the decisions, I’m going to ignore that suggestion. Besides, I don’t sew.”

  “Learn,” he muttered. “Make yourself useful.”

  She ground her teeth together. Useful? What did he think she’d been doing while he lolled about unconscious? Did he think he’d made it out of the plane under his own steam? She was wet and freezing because she’d been lying in the snow, pulling him out of the plane. Her hands were turning blue, and she was shaking so hard it would serve him right if she did try to sew him up.

  The cold made her think: the jacket. She’d forgotten about the jacket, which was even more evidence that shock, or cold, or both, had slowed down her mental processes. She pulled it on, grateful for even that thin protection from the cold, but she was so wet she wasn’t certain anything could get her warm unless she first got dry.

  Silently she tore open a pack of sterile pads and placed two of them over the cut on Justice’s head, using her hands to hold them in place and apply pressure. A rough sound of pain rattled in his throat, then he bit it off and lay perfectly still.

  She should probably talk to him, she thought, help keep him conscious and focused. “I don’t know what to do first,” she
confessed. A fit of convulsive shaking seized her and she stopped talking, her teeth chattering so hard she couldn’t have said a word anyway. When the shaking passed, she concentrated fiercely on holding the sterile pads in place. “I have to stop this bleeding. But we’re in the snow”—another episode of shaking interrupted her—“and I’m so cold and wet I can barely move. You’ll go into shock—”

  He took a few breaths, as if gearing himself up for the ordeal of speaking. “Kit,” he finally managed. “Blanket…in bottom of kit.”

  The only kit at hand was the first-aid kit. Leaving the pads in place on his head, she began taking things out of the kit and setting them in the open lid. Under everything, neatly folded in a sealed pouch, was one of those thin silver space blankets. Opening the pouch, she shook the blanket open. How much good it would do she didn’t know, having never used one before, but she wasn’t about to question anything she could use as a barrier between them and the cold. She was tempted to wrap it around herself and curl into the tightest ball possible until she felt a little less miserably cold, but he’d lost a lot of blood and needed it more than she did.

  Which should she do, put the blanket under him for protection from the snow, or over him to help hold in what body heat he had? Could he warm up at all, lying in the snow? Damn it, she couldn’t think! She’d have to go on instinct. “I’m spreading the blanket beside you,” she said, suiting action to words. “Now I’m going to help you shift onto it, so you won’t be in the snow. You’ll have to help me. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah,” he said with effort.

  “Okay, here we go.” Kneeling on the blanket, she slid her right arm under his neck, seized the front of his belt with her left hand, and lifted. He helped as much as he could, using his feet and his right arm; the biggest help was that he wasn’t deadweight any longer. Straining every muscle, she shifted him so that most of his torso, at least, was lying on the blanket, and decided that was good enough. Quickly she folded the rest of the blanket over him, tucking it in where she could.

  Suddenly dizzy and nauseated, she sank to the ground beside him. Altitude sickness, she thought. She was almost at the end of her rope. If she pushed herself much harder, she’d find herself lying in the snow, unable to get up, and she’d die before the next morning—probably even before sunset today.

  Still, she had to get to their suitcases, put on dry clothing, and lots of it—now. She had to function, or both of them would die.

  She schooled herself to take slow, deep breaths to feed her oxygen-hungry body. Slow—that was the key. She should move slowly, when she could, and not let panic lure her into rushing around until she collapsed. That meant she had to plan every move, think through what she was going to do so no effort was wasted.

  The luggage was loaded into the plane through the baggage compartment door, and secured by a cargo net that kept the bags from flying around the cockpit during rough weather, though she thought her suitcases would probably be too thick to fit in the space between the roof and the high seat backs. The problem was, though most of the roof was now gone and the suitcases would fit through the gaping hole, they would have to be lifted almost straight up, and they were very heavy, and she was so weak and cold and exhausted she didn’t think she could manage the task. She’d have to open them while they were still in the baggage compartment, and get out what she needed.

  She’d have to unclip the cargo net. She was sure she could reach the clips, but she wasn’t sure she could manage if the clip was a particularly strong one. If that was the case, then she would need some other way of getting through the net.

  “We have to get warm. I need to get more clothes out of my suitcase,” she told him. “If for any reason I can’t get the cargo net unclipped, do you have a knife I can use to cut it?”

  His eyes opened a little, then closed again. “Left pocket.”

  Getting to her knees, she untucked the blanket she’d just tucked around him and slipped her right hand into his pocket. The warmth was startling, and so delicious she almost moaned, but her fingers were so cold they were numb and she couldn’t tell if she was touching the knife or not. She grasped at whatever was there.

  “Careful,” he murmured. “Good Time Charlie’s down there, and he’s attached.”

  Bailey snorted. “Then keep him out of the way, or he might get unattached.” Men. Here they were on the verge of dying from hypothermia and, in his case, blood loss, but he was still protective of his penis. “Good Time Charlie, my ass,” she muttered, pulling her hand out of his pocket to see if she’d snagged the knife.

  A tiny smile curved his mouth for a moment, then faded.

  She paused, her gaze on his bloody face. That was the first hint of humor she’d ever seen him display, and it struck at her heart because, despite everything she could do, they might not make it out of this situation alive. He hadn’t given up, he’d gotten them down alive, and she couldn’t bear the thought that he might still die because she made the wrong decision or didn’t do enough. She owed him her life, and she would do everything she could to safeguard his—even sew him up if she had to, damn it.

  The pocketknife and a dollar or so in change lay in her palm. Picking up the knife, she slid the change back into his pocket, then put the blanket in place again. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said, giving him a comforting touch on the chest.

  The plane loomed in front of her, a crippled bird with the right wing crumpled and the left one completely gone. They were downslope of it, which wasn’t the safest place if the wreckage began sliding, she realized. She didn’t think it would, with the crumpled wing digging into the mountainside the way it was, plus the tree branch impaling the fuselage was another anchoring point, but she’d rather err on the side of safety and move out of its path, after she’d changed clothes and gotten warmer, and felt more capable of making the effort.

  She didn’t have any pockets, so she held the knife in her teeth as she climbed back into the cockpit, then clambered to the back. Kneeling on the bench seat, she stretched over the luggage compartment, reaching for the cargo net clips at the rear of the cabin. To her relief, the net easily released. Pushing it to the side, she tugged one of her suitcases around and unzipped it; the suitcases were identical, so she didn’t know what was in which case, but she didn’t really care. She wanted to be dry, she wanted to be warm, and the clothes she put on didn’t matter.

  Justice’s bag was there, too, but it was the typical pilot’s overnight bag, just big enough for a shaving kit and change of clothes. She dragged the bag up and over the seat, because there was no sense leaving it in the plane even though he likely wouldn’t need anything in there just yet. For now, she had plenty of clothes with which she could cover him; it wasn’t as if he needed to actually wear them, since he couldn’t even stand up. He would need clothes, yes, but she thought she’d save the clothes that actually fit him until later.

  She began pulling clothes out of the suitcase she’d opened. When she came to a flannel shirt, she stopped right there and peeled off the silk jacket and tank. Her bra was damp, too, so it came off. Shuddering from the cold, she put on the flannel shirt and buttoned it up before resuming systematically emptying the bag. As she came to warm items she could use right then, she stopped and put them on. Socks. Sweatpants. Another pair of socks. A thick down vest, with handwarmer pockets; she put Justice’s knife in one of the pockets. She needed something to cover her head, too, but the only thing she’d packed that had a hood was a cotton knit hoodie. Not wanting to wait until she came across it, she used the next long-sleeved shirt she came across, folding it and tying the sleeves under her chin as if it were a bandanna.

  Already she felt better, if simply not feeling quite as miserable qualified as “better.”

  She found the plastic trash bags she’d packed to use as dirty-clothes bags, and began stuffing clothes into them. After she emptied one suitcase, she pushed it to the side and hauled another one around so she could get to the zipper. In th
at bag she found the pair of insulated hiking boots she’d packed, and gratefully she stopped to pull them on. Getting her feet warm before she put on the boots would have been nice, but she didn’t have that luxury.

  She had enough clothes to cover him, now, so she stopped and left the second suitcase partially unpacked, and the other one unopened. Tossing his overnighter through the open door, she followed it with two trash bags full of clothes, then she followed the bags. As she crawled out, her gaze fell on the vinyl floor cover in front of both the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Taking Justice’s knife from the vest pocket, she opened it and went to work.

  He was lying deathly still, his eyes still closed. The pads covering his forehead were soaked through with blood.

  “I’m back,” she said, putting the piece of vinyl down beside him and kneeling on it; getting dry had been important, but staying dry ranked right up there with it. “I brought clothes to cover you with, as soon as I can get the bleeding stopped and get you out of these bloody clothes.”

  “Okay,” he murmured.

  Thank God, he hadn’t lost consciousness again, but his voice was weaker. Taking two more sterile pads from the first-aid kit’s supply, she placed them over the bloody ones, and pressed down. This time she stayed in position, talking to him the whole time, telling him everything she’d done and why she’d done it. If he disagreed with anything he could speak up, but he remained silent.

  She hadn’t thought to time how long she’d been maintaining pressure, but the third time she lifted the edge of the pads to check, the bleeding had slowed dramatically. She pressed down once more, held the pressure for about five minutes, then checked again. No new trickle of blood welled from the ugly gash.