6. Banks #2
West window. The cross-bar here has pulled free of its upper bracket.
The iron bolt hangs at an angle, useless, and the shutter itself is cracked down the center where frost has split the grain.
I scan the cabin for material. The table.
I grab it, flip it on its side, and jam it against the damaged shutter.
Wedge the table legs against the floor planks.
It's crude. It'll hold long enough to matter.
Door. The leather latch is destroyed. I pull my pack to me, working one-handed, and fish out four feet of paracord.
Thread it through the iron hinge loop and lash the door to the frame post in a series of half-hitches that I can tie in my sleep and have, on seven different mountains, in conditions worse than this.
I test the door with a sharp pull. Holds firm.
The cabin is sealed.
I turn. She's standing in the room, her bloody gloves hanging at her sides, her mouth half open.
My knees buckle.
I catch myself on the cot frame. The wood groans under my grip but holds. The floor is very interested in meeting my face again and I refuse to let it. I lock my elbow. Brace my weight. Breathe through the grinding pulse in my side that's gone from a burn to a deep, wet throb.
"Banks."
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding through the bandage."
I look down. She's right. The compression wrap around my torso is saturated, the black fabric turned slick and shining. A thin line of red traces down my hip and drips off my belt onto the cabin floor. One drop. Two. Steady as a rhythm.
"Sit down."
"Sit. Down. Now."
The chair is three feet away. An old pine thing, hand-built, one leg shorter than the others. I make it there on pure refusal to fall again. The impact of sitting sends a bolt of white-hot pain from my hip to my collarbone and I clamp my jaw shut against the sound that wants out.
She's already on her knees in front of my pack.
Ripping open the main compartment. Gear spills across the plank floor.
She shoves aside the bivouac tarp, the fire kit, the water purification tabs, and finds the red nylon pouch with the white cross stitched into the fabric.
The SAR medkit. She tears the zipper open and dumps the contents between us.
QuikClot gauze. Hemostatic granules. Irrigation syringe. Surgical tape. Nitrile gloves. Ibuprofen packets. Two ampoules of injectable lidocaine with individually sealed hypodermic needles. Suture kit.
She peers at the spread for exactly two seconds. Then she picks up the nitrile gloves and snaps them on over her bloody fingers.
"Tell me what to do."
"The wound needs packing. Take the QuikClot gauze. The brown packet."
She rips it open. The hemostatic gauze unrolls in her hands, stiff and treated with kaolin.
"My shirt has to come off."
She reaches for the hem. I lift my arms as far as the pain allows, which is about six inches, and she works the fabric up over my body and head with a careful ferocity that pulls the saturated bandage loose.
It peels away from the wound with a wet sound that makes her breath hitch.
She doesn't stop. She drops the ruined bandage and the base layer on the floor and her eyes track across my bare torso to the wound.
The graze is ugly. Six inches long, curving along the lower margin of my tenth rib on the right side.
The fragment tore a channel through the external oblique muscle, deep enough to expose the fascia beneath.
The cold slowed the bleeding but the exertion of securing the cabin opened it back up.
Fresh blood wells in a slow, steady sheet across my flank.
"Irrigation syringe. The big one. Fill it from your water bottle."
She fills the syringe with trembling hands that steady the moment she brings it to the wound. She flushes the channel with a stream of cold water. Blood and debris wash down my hip. The cold is nothing. I've had worse.
"Now the QuikClot. You need to pack it into the wound. Push the gauze in. Deep as it goes."
She looks at me. She understands what she's about to do to me.
"It's going to hurt you."
"Yes."
"A lot."
"Yes. Do it anyway."
She takes the gauze between her gloved fingers. Positions it at the deepest end of the channel, near my hip. Her jaw sets. I can see the muscles in her neck go taut.
She packs it in.
Every nerve ending in my right flank fires at once.
My vision whites out. My hands grip the chair seat so hard the wood cracks under my fingers.
Something is roaring in my ears and I realize it's my own breathing, harsh and ragged through my clenched teeth.
I don't scream. I won't. But the grunt that escapes is low and animal and I can't stop it.
She doesn't stop either.
Her fingers work the gauze deeper into the wound, packing it tight against the torn muscle, filling every millimeter of the channel.
Her face is inches from my side. Tears stream down her cheeks and drip onto my bloody skin but her hands don't shake.
Not once. She feeds more gauze in with a methodical precision that has no business existing in someone who's never touched a wound before tonight.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm almost done, I'm sorry."
She's apologizing to me while she saves my life.
This woman who two hours ago was freezing to death in an ice cave because she walked off a trail to film a waterfall.
This woman in her pink boots and her designer jacket with its useless faux-fur trim.
She's knuckle-deep in my blood, packing a bullet graze by flashlight in an abandoned trapper's cabin, and she hasn't flinched.
Not once. Not once since I told her to start.
She finishes the packing and tears open a fresh compression bandage with her teeth.
She leans in close, reaching around my torso to pass the wrap from hand to hand.
Her breath is warm against my bare skin.
She smells like frozen pine and copper and something underneath both that's just her.
The bandage circles my ribs once. Twice.
She pulls it tight and I feel the hemostatic gauze compress into the wound.
The bleeding slows to a stop. I can feel it.
The kaolin doing its work, the clotting cascade finally winning.
She's wrapping the third pass when her glove catches on the adhesive tab and pulls free. Her bare hand lands flat against my stomach. Her palm. Against my skin. Just below my navel.
Warm. Soft. Alive.
Everything stops.
The pain stops. The tactical assessment stops. The professional detachment I've maintained through every rescue, every crisis, every single moment of controlled, calculated distance I've put between myself and every person I've ever pulled off a mountain stops.
She looks up. Her hand still flat against my stomach. Her lips parted. Six inches from mine.
I grab her wrists.
Both of them. One in each hand. My fingers wrap all the way around and overlap.
I'm on my feet before I register standing, the chair clattering backward across the floor, and I drive her back until the rough log wall catches her between the shoulder blades.
Her spine hits the timber and she gasps.
I pin her wrists against the wall on either side of her head.
She's staring up at me. Not afraid. That's what breaks me open.
She should be afraid. I'm twice her weight and I just slammed her against a wall in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and my hands are locked around her wrists hard enough to feel her pulse hammering against my thumbs. She should be terrified.
Her lips part. Her chin lifts. Her pulse doesn't spike with fear.
It spikes with something else entirely.