2. Banks
BANKS
The beacon pinged six times before it died.
Six clean GPS pulses, each one further off-trail than the last, drawing a line northeast into the Chugach backcountry like a breadcrumb trail laid by someone who had no idea which direction they were walking.
Then nothing. Dead air. Battery failure or submersion or both.
That was four hours ago.
I've been moving since.
The storm rolled in ahead of schedule. Dispatch called it a Class III, upgraded to Class IV twenty minutes later when the wind readings from the summit stations came back. Extraction team grounded at base camp. Helicopter grounded at Palmer. Every asset pulled back to shelter.
Every asset except me.
I push through trees at 3,400 feet with the wind hammering the left side of my body hard enough to shift my center of gravity.
Visibility fluctuates between fifteen feet and nothing.
Snow drives horizontal, ice crystals peppering the ballistic lens of my goggles until I have to wipe them every thirty seconds.
The rifle rides across my body on a two-point sling. Standard kit for Chugach SAR. Grizzlies don't hibernate on schedule, and a wounded one denning in weather like this would be irritable. The rounds are 180-grain bonded soft points. Enough to stop a charge at ten meters.
I don't expect to use them. But I don't expect anything up here. Expectation gets people killed. Preparation keeps them breathing.
The terrain has been talking to me for the last mile.
Boot prints, shallow and erratic, filled halfway by accumulation but still readable if you know the compression patterns.
Whoever made them weighs maybe 120 pounds.
Short stride. No snowshoes, no crampons, no trekking poles.
The prints weave and stagger. Hypothermia already setting in when they passed through here.
The prints end at a granite shelf where the wind scoured the snow down to bare rock.
I lose the trail for ninety seconds. Drop to a knee.
Scan with the headlamp on its lowest setting, which is all my night vision can tolerate.
There. A scuff mark on the frost layer. Slight drag pattern from a smooth-soled boot sliding on ice.
Smooth-soled. In the Chugach. In October.
I follow the scuff marks along the shelf to where the granite face opens into a shallow erosion pocket. Standard geology for this elevation. Friable schist behind harder granodiorite, weathered out over millennia.
The headlamp finds the opening. I pause. Listen. The wind shrieks across the shelf, but underneath it, barely audible, rapid shallow breathing. Human. Alive.
I bring the rifle up out of habit, sweeping the cave mouth. Clear left. Clear right. No secondary tracks leading in or out. Single occupant.
I lower the rifle and let it hang on the sling.
Duck my head under the overhang and step inside.
The headlamp beam cuts through the gloom, bouncing off frost-rimed walls, and finds her.
She's curled next to the back wall in a fetal position.
Arms locked around her shins, face buried.
Trembling. The shaking is violent, whole-body, the kind that burns through the last glycogen reserves in a desperate bid to generate heat.
I've seen it before. Means she's still in the moderate stage.
Core temp probably sitting around 90, maybe 89.
Below 86, the shaking stops. That's when you lose them.
She hasn't lost the shaking yet. Good.
My eyes take inventory in the time it takes to draw one breath.
No pack. No bivvy. No emergency blanket, no hand warmers, no fire kit.
She's wearing a cream-colored puffer jacket that probably costs more than my monthly gear budget and provides about as much insulation as a paper bag.
The fabric is soaked through. Saturated down is worse than no insulation at all. Actively wicks heat away from the body.
Her boots catch the headlamp beam. Bright pink. Some kind of rubberized fashion boot with a smooth sole and what looks like decorative lacing. The material is cracked across both toe boxes where the cold has destroyed whatever synthetic leather they're made from.
No gaiters. No base layer visible at the collar. Bare skin at the wrists between the jacket cuffs and a pair of frozen cashmere gloves.
I assess all of this in three seconds. Run the numbers.
Ambient temperature outside is negative fourteen and dropping.
Wind chill pushes that to negative forty.
She's been exposed for at minimum four hours based on when the beacon died.
Wet clothing. No caloric reserves evident.
No shelter beyond this rock pocket, which blocks wind but holds cold air like a basin.
She has maybe ninety minutes. Less if the shaking stops.
I unclip my pack's sternum strap and reach for the emergency bivvy rolled tight against the left compression panel.
Her head lifts.
Enormous brown eyes in a bone-white face. Lips cracked and blue. Frost on her eyelashes. She blinks into the headlamp beam, pupils blown wide, and for one long beat she doesn't move.
Then she launches off the wall.
Staggers forward on legs that barely function, closes the steps between us in two lurching steps, and throws her arms around my neck.
Her face buries into me. Fingers lock behind my collar with a grip that shouldn't be possible given the state of her hands.
She holds on like I'm the last solid thing in the world.
Small. She is so goddamn small against me.
Something shifts behind my sternum. Something I don't have a protocol for.
Her body shakes against mine. Violent, rhythmic convulsions that transfer through my base layers and rattle against my ribs.
She's burning the last of her fuel and she doesn't even know it.
The death tremors feel almost mechanical, like something inside her is running on a timer that's about to zero out.
I stand there for three seconds. Let her hold on. Count her respirations through the movement of her body against my stomach. Rapid. Shallow. Twenty-six, twenty-eight breaths per minute. Too fast. Her body is dumping CO2 trying to compensate for the metabolic demand of constant shivering.
Three seconds is all I give her.
"Let go."
She doesn't. Her fingers dig tighter into the fabric at the back of my neck.
A wet, broken sound comes out of her that might be a word or might just be air forced through a constricted throat.
Her face pushes harder against me, right into the sternum plate of my pack harness, and the trembling gets worse.
I've run over four hundred wilderness extractions.
Exposed subjects fall into predictable categories.
Fighters, who swing at you because the hypothermia has scrambled their threat assessment.
Screamers, who spend their remaining energy on panic.
The catatonic ones, who've stopped responding altogether and need to be carried out like cargo.
And then whatever this is.
She's not fighting me. Not screaming. Not catatonic.
She's holding onto me like I'm a fixed point on a mountain that's trying to shake her loose.
There's no panic in the grip. Just certainty.
Like she decided the moment she saw me that I was the answer to every bad decision that put her in this cave, and she committed to that decision with everything she had left.
"I need you to let go of my neck and stand still."
Another broken sound. Her head moves side to side against me. No.
I wrap one hand around both her wrists where they're clasped behind my collar. Her skin is ice. Not cold. Ice. The tissue has no give. Her fingers are locked in a grip that's half determination and half frozen tendon.
I pry them apart with more care than the situation warrants and lower her arms to her sides. She sways. I catch her shoulder with my free hand and hold her upright at arm's length.
"Look at me."
Her chin lifts. Those brown eyes again. Too big for her face, or maybe her face has just lost too much blood to the core to maintain its normal dimensions.
Hollowed cheeks. Jaw clenched so tight the masseter muscle jumps beneath the skin.
A streak of fading pink in her hair is matted to her forehead with ice.
She looks at me. Really looks. Not through me, not past me, not at some distance the way the hypothermic ones usually do when their cognition starts sliding.
"What's your name?"
Her mouth works. Nothing comes out on the first try. Then, through chattering teeth that click together hard enough to chip enamel, she manages it.
"H-Hadley."
"Hadley. I'm Banks. Search and rescue. Your beacon pinged at 1600 hours and I've been tracking you since. I need to check you for frostbite and get your core temperature stabilized before we can move. That means you stand still and do exactly what I tell you. Understand?"
"I c-can't f-feel my feet."
I know. I saw the boots.
"I need a yes or a no, Hadley."
"Yes." It comes out on a full-body shudder.
I pull my pack off one shoulder, swing it around, drop it against the cave wall.
The emergency bivvy comes out first. Reflective Mylar backed with ripstop nylon.
I shake it open and hang it from a granite lip above the cave entrance to block the wind channeling in from outside.
Cuts the airflow by maybe sixty percent. Not enough but better.
Headlamp aimed at her feet. I drop to one knee on the frozen rock and take her right ankle in my hand. She flinches but doesn't pull away.
The pink boot has a side zipper. Decorative. It takes me eight seconds to work the frozen metal pull free and get the boot off. Her sock underneath is thin. Some kind of ankle-length fashion sock with a pattern on it. Hearts. Soaked through and rigid with frost.
I peel the sock off. Her foot is white. Not pink, not red, not the angry mottled purple of advanced frostbite. White. Waxy. The toes are rigid. I push my thumb into the pad of her big toe. The tissue compresses but doesn't rebound.