Getting out was a bitch.
The buckle to the seat belt was slippery and wet, but I got it undone, then needed to get my breath. Which was ridiculous, of course, but…my jeans were soaked. My jacket, too. And beneath the jacket my shirt stuck to me, warm and wet.
An awful lot of my blood was outside of me instead of inside.
That scared me. I reached for the door handle. My first tug didn’t do a damned thing.
Fear hit, sweeping everything else out of the way. Pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting out. I jerked on the handle as hard as I could, throwing my weight against it.
Metal shrieked. The door swung open and I fell out. I managed to thrust one leg out to catch myself, but the jolt as my foot hit the ground set off a charge in my shoulder that toppled my whole system.
I didn’t black out. Quite. But for a while there was nothing but a red, roaring monster eating my thoughts before they could form. Eventually I noticed how cold and wet the ground was. It was a lot colder out here than in the truck. Wetter, too. Maybe getting out hadn’t been such a great move, but I was here now. What came next?
The road. I had to get to the road. Not much traffic this time of night, but sooner or later that downed power line would attract attention.
Dragging myself to a sitting position left me clammy, but I made it and looked up the way the truck and I had come. Only I couldn’t see the road. Too dark, and the rain didn’t help. How far had I fallen?
I fought back a wave of despair. I knew where the road was—up. So that’s where I would go.
First I used my left hand to tuck my right one into the pocket of my jacket. There were trees, mostly pines. Not much in the way of underbrush, and the truck’s passage had cleared a path through what did exist. Good. In a battle between me and a clump of weeds right then, the weeds would win.
Standing was out, so hand-and-knees it was. I started moving.
Gwen had once told me that women forget how much childbirth hurts. She made a joke of it, saying that was how nature tricked them into a repeat performance. I didn’t understand then. I’d heard women swapping war stories, and it seemed to me they remembered labor pretty well.
Now I know what she meant. I remember that I hurt. Every inch up that slope equaled a yard or two of pain. But the pain itself isn’t there anymore, just the imprint it left behind.
When you hurt enough, you lose hold of past and future. Like a baby or a beast, all you have is right now. I lost the knack of connecting all those nows in the usual way, like beads on a string. So some beads got lost. Others stayed stuck inside me, like a splinter the flesh has grown up around.
One of the beads that got stuck was the moment my truck finished falling.
I hadn’t thought about what halted the truck’s fall. Maybe that knowledge had squirmed around underneath, and that’s why the creaking sound had alarmed me, why I’d been so frantic to get out. The second I heard that sharp, wooden crack, I knew what it meant. I craned my head to look behind me.
Branches snapped. Glass broke, and the headlights went out at last. A tangled mass of truck and tree, their shapes merged by darkness and disaster, toppled slowly, then crashed its way down the mountain. I blinked, swaying on my knees and one good hand like a suspension bridge in the wind.
That had been a damned fine truck.
I didn’t mourn for long, though. I wasn’t holding on to thoughts too well by then—they blew through my mind like smoke. But I had a good grip on purpose.
Up. I had to keep going up.
I remember being racked with shudders as the cold worked its way inside. At some point the shuddering stopped, but by then I was too far gone to realize what a bad sign that was. I remember thinking about Zach, but that isn’t tied to any one moment. Thoughts of my son are woven through all the memory bits, like the rocks. They were everywhere, too.
I remember the angel.
That part has a beginning, a middle and an end, beads lined up neatly in order. It was the warmth that called me back. It wormed its way deep inside and tugged at me, made me notice it. And with that noticing came a thought, sluggish but complete: the warmth was real. I knew that because I started shivering again, and shivering—any movement—hurt.
I blinked open my eyes.
It wasn’t her face that gave me the idea she was an angel. She was beautiful, but more exotic than angelic with her flat, wide cheekbones and tilty eyes. Her mouth was downright lush. But she had to be an angel. She was glowing.
Deeply disappointed, I croaked, “I’m dead, then.”
Those full lips twitched. “No, not at all.” She had a smooth sort of voice, sweet and thick like honey. And a Southern accent, which struck me as odd for an angel. “You’re going to be fine.”
That seemed unlikely, but even less likely things were happening right before my eyes. “You’re glowing.”
“I have a flashlight.”
“No, it’s you.”
“You’re imagining things. In fact, I suspect you imagined this whole conversation.” She touched my forehead. The delicate bracelet on her wrist brushed my skin, its tiny jewels winking at me. “Now, don’t be wasting all I’ve spent on you. Go back to sleep.”
I wanted to argue, but my eyes obeyed her instead of me and drifted shut. I floated away on a warm tide.
“Color’s bad. Rapid respiration.”
Male voices. Hands messing with me. Where was my angel?
“Nail beds are white, but it’s damned cold and he’s been here awhile.”
“Distal pulse?”
“Can’t find it.”
I knew that voice. “Pete,” I said, or thought I did. It came out a groan. I made a huge effort and opened my eyes. Pete Aguilar’s face hovered over mine. Pete used to raise hell with my brother Charlie, but that was a long time ago. High school stuff. These days he…I blinked, trying to think of why Pete would be holding my hand.
“You with us?” He squeezed my shoulder—the left one, thank God. “Hang in there, buddy.”
Oh, yeah. “Paramedic.”
“That’s right. Me and Joe are going to take care of you. Where do you hurt?”
Everywhere. I felt sick, dizzy, scared. “Where is she?”
“I need to know where you hurt, Ben.”
“Shoulder. Head. I want…” I tried to sit up, but didn’t accomplish much.
“Whoa. Stay still, or you’ll open up that shoulder again.”
“Dammit, I want to know—”
“I’m right here.” That was her voice—close, but not as close as she had been. “Lie still and let them help you.”
It’s not as if I had a choice. Pete or the other man tipped me on my side. I would have belted him if I’d been able to move. As it was, I barely had the breath to curse them once they settled me on my back again.
There was something between me and the mud now. A stretcher, I guess.
“You’re a lucky man,” Pete told me cheerfully.
Damned idiot always had been too happy for good sense. Just like Charlie. “Not lucky…fall off mountain.”
“But if you’re going to fall off one, it’s nice to do it just before someone with paramedic training happens along. She kept you going until we got here.”
Not an angel. A paramedic. No, wait—paramedics don’t glow.
A