Chapter 1 #3
There wasn’t much left of the tent. It was just a mess of broken poles and ripped canvas. I riffled through what little I was able to reach but didn’t see any evidence of a body.
My relief was short lived.
Near the top of the fallen tree, a leg was just visible between the branches.
I cursed again and pulled the knife from my belt to start cutting away the smaller branches in order to see what I was working with.
Ordinarily, we’d trim more of the branches from the trunk of a tree we intended to cut, but we’d been rushing, and some of the preparation steps had been skipped. I wasn’t even sure who to blame.
The higher-ups for rushing us?
The person running the rig that had cut the tree?
Mostly, I blamed myself. I should have put up more of a fight against the impossible orders we were given. I should have insisted that we start on the south side of the area, where it would be safer to work, and double checked that all safety measures were being followed to the letter.
I wasn’t the manager. Assuring these things wasn’t my job, but that would be little comfort to the person who’d been hurt.
Or worse.
I’d seen dead bodies before. I’d even seen the bodies of people I’d killed with my own hands, but it never got easier.
I never let it get easier.
While in the military, I’d come across people who’d been fighting so long that death no longer bothered them. They could pull a trigger and take a life without blinking an eye. They treated the act of killing with the same casual indifference as sharpening a pencil.
I would never be the same.
Even as I specialized as a sniper and racked up a kill counter higher than most, I remembered every face and regularly recited every name I knew.
That was all supposed to be done. I wasn’t supposed to add any more names to that list.
I managed to clear away enough of the branches to get a proper look at the victim. The man was lying on his front, so I couldn’t see his face, but his chest was moving.
He was breathing.
He was alive.
My first instinct was to immediately roll him over and pull him away from danger, but I stopped myself. The person had dodged out of the way in time to avoid the trunk of the tree, but he’d still been hit with the branches. He was probably injured, and suddenly moving him would just hurt him more.
Still, I couldn’t leave him face down in the mud.
I’d received some basic first-aid training during my time of service, and it came in handy now as I delicately rolled him over in a way that kept his head and spine supported.
There were no obvious signs of injury other than a cut on his scalp and even that wound didn’t bleed much.
Someone could easily be tricked into thinking that he was fine, and the sluggishly bleeding cut was harmless, but I knew from experience that unseen injuries could be the worst. The man had been hit by a falling tree. There was no way he was fine.
Shouting from above caught my attention. The others had managed to find some climbing gear and were making their way down the cliff. Emergency services had been called, and a rescue crew was being sent out to retrieve the injured man.
He was a complete stranger to me, but as I wiped the mud off his face and checked his breathing again, I was overwhelmed by a wave of protectiveness that I typically only felt for Magnus and Creed.
“You’re not alone,” I assured him. He was unconscious and probably couldn’t hear me, but I couldn’t help offering him comfort anyway. “Help is on its way. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Everything was not all right.
Emergency services had taken the man away in a rescue helicopter and transported him to the nearest hospital.
Emberwood wasn’t large enough to have a hospital, only a local clinic, but luckily our work site was relatively close to the town of Rynkirk, which did have a hospital.
To most of the world Rynkirk would probably seem like a small town, but compared to Emberwood, which only had a single stoplight, it was practically a city.
Once the unconscious man was taken away, the rest of my coworkers considered their role in the incident over, and everyone went back to work.
The area where the tree had crushed the man’s tent had been roped off to be investigated later, but otherwise everyone was happy to forget that the whole disaster ever happened.
I returned to work as well, but I couldn’t get thoughts of the injured man out of my mind. So, when my shift ended, I drove out to Rynkirk to visit the man in the hospital.
I didn’t even know who to ask for, since I didn’t know the man’s name, but as soon as I explained the situation to the nurse at the front desk, I was ushered through the doors with surprising urgency.
The man had been given a private room, and a doctor was standing over the bed scowling down at a clipboard. She greeted me when I stepped through the door, barely listening to my explanation about who I was before grilling me about the man in the bed.
“Anything you can tell us will be helpful. We’re having trouble identifying our John Doe here, which makes treating him harder.”
“Oh.” I twisted my hands together. Usually, I felt like the largest person in the room, but under the unforgiving florescent lights and the doctor’s scrutinizing eye, I felt unnaturally small.
“I was the one who reached him first, but I don’t know much more than that.
He had a tent set up, so he’d probably been out in the forest for a while, but there wasn’t anything indicating his identity. Is there a problem with his injuries?”
The doctor sighed, pushing her glasses up out of the way to rub at the bridge of her nose.
“No. He’s in surprisingly good condition after having a tree fall on him.
He must have dived out of the way in time to avoid a serious blow.
I want to say that he’ll be fine once he wakes up, but without knowing his medical history, we have no way to know for sure.
I’m hesitant to even prescribe basic painkillers.
For all we know, he could be allergic, or taking other medications that might have an adverse effect. ”
“I see.” My voice trailed off quietly as I glanced at the man in the bed.
He’d been cleaned up since I saw him last, so his features were easier to discern.
He seemed to be about my age, maybe a little younger, with curly brown hair and olive toned skin.
The structure of his face implied some Greek heritage, and at least a few days’ worth of dark stubble shaded his jaw.
The white bandage wrapped around his head stood out starkly against his hair and skin, but other than that, he looked like he was merely sleeping.
Looking at him, my mind raced at a million miles an hour. Nearly half a day had passed since I found him. If authorities still couldn’t identify him, it meant that no “Missing Persons” report had been filed. Even if he had people in his life who cared about him, they weren’t looking for him yet.
If I went missing for half a day, Magnus would be tearing the mountainside apart by now looking for me, and Creed would probably abandon his latest mission overseas to join the search. I didn’t have a lot in life, but I had people to miss me. It was easy to forget how precious it was to be missed.
I wanted to ask if I could stay with the man for a while, even though I wasn’t family.
The idea of him lying in a hospital bed completely alone didn’t sit right with me, and I figured my presence couldn’t hurt anything.
However, before I got the chance to ask, the machines around the room started to beep and the man on the bed woke up.
His eyes sprang open like they were attached to springs, but he continued to lie perfectly still. The hazel eyes behind his lids were dull and blurry, like he wasn’t fully awake, and it took several moments for his pupils to focus.
Neither the doctor nor I made a sound as we waited for his reaction.
His eyes moved first, his gaze darting around the room. Then he tried to sit up in a single sudden motion. He didn’t get more than a few inches off the bed before his injuries caught up with him and he grasped his bandaged head with a gasp of pain.
“Sir, please don’t get up yet,” the doctor spoke up, placing a hand on his shoulder to keep him still. “Just relax and I’ll raise the bed up. Now, can you tell me your name?”
The bed adjusted slowly with the hum of a struggling motor.
When the man was finally sitting up, he couldn’t seem to decide what to look at first. His head swiveled back and forth on his neck, trying to take in the entire room all at once.
It took two more attempts from the doctor to ask his name before he finally realized someone was speaking to him.
“Uh, Ellis. I’m Ellis.”
“Okay Mister… Ellis.” The doctor kept her tone light, but her brow was furrowed with worry. “You’re in Rynkirk General Hospital. You were brought here after you were injured while you were camping. Can you tell us anything about what happened?”
The man, Ellis, shook his head back and forth. “I don’t know.”
Something about his tone sent a rock sinking into the pit of my stomach.
The doctor took his pulse and listened to his breathing with her stethoscope, never letting her professional demeanor drop. “Okay, sir. I understand that you’re confused. Let’s start with something simpler. We didn’t find any ID on you. Can you give us your full name for our records?”
“I don’t know.”
His voice was sharp and panicked as he dropped his head into his hands, fingers digging into the pristine white bandages on his forehead.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”