Chapter 21 Buried Road
Liza POV
I grabbed the radio and ran. The patrol base emptied in under a minute.
Someone had the avalanche kit open before I reached the gear wall and shoved a probe and a beacon into my hands without being asked.
The resort’s rescue protocol put a six-person team on the road in bad weather.
We had nine, plus Shane, who was already on his snowmobile and gone before the count was finished.
Dominic met us at the lower parking lot. He’d turned around on the north access when the rumble hit, and his truck was still running, exhaust clouding in the cold air. He looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us wasted time on words.
“East face,” I said, climbing into the passenger seat. “Above the highway, below the chute I flagged on my first assessment.”
He knew which chute. We’d talked about control work that never got done.
The resort road joined the river road at a switchback a mile below the base lodge. We came around the last curve. Dominic braked hard, and the truck slid.
The slide had crossed the road in a dirty gray tongue of broken snow, rock, and sheared pine.
It was maybe two hundred feet wide where it covered the highway, narrowing uphill toward the release zone, and the debris was ten feet deep at the center.
Broken branches jutted from the surface.
The air smelled like crushed pine and wet earth.
A sedan sat half-buried at the slide’s near edge, its windshield crazed and its driver’s door peeled open. A woman in a ski jacket was sitting in the snow beside it, holding her arm against her chest and crying. A man stood over her, blood on his forehead, trying to use his phone.
Ahead of the sedan, a second set of skid marks ran across the road and disappeared under the debris.
“Shit,” Dominic said.
I was already out of the truck.
The woman’s name was something I didn’t catch and didn’t need.
Her arm was broken above the wrist, a clean snap I could feel through her jacket sleeve.
The man had a scalp laceration that bled impressively but wasn’t deep.
They’d been driving through when the slide hit the road ahead of them and the blast of displaced air shoved their car sideways into the guardrail.
Dominic handled them. He had the voice for it, low and certain and impossible to argue with, and within two minutes he’d gotten them wrapped in emergency blankets from his truck, seated them against the guardrail on the uphill side, and started assessing the woman’s arm.
“There was another car,” the man kept saying. Blood ran into his left eye and he kept wiping it. “Ahead of us. A truck. It was right there when everything came down.”
I turned to the debris field.
Reading avalanche deposits is like reading a river after a flood.
The snow doesn’t settle evenly. It piles where the flow meets obstacles, thins where the terrain speeds it up, and follows the channels beneath it.
I’d studied this chute and mapped it in my head during Zeller’s assessment.
The runout zone followed the natural drainage toward the highway, which meant the densest debris would collect against the uphill bank where the road cut into the mountainside.
That was where the skid marks pointed.
“Shane,” I said into the radio. “Bring the digging crew to the uphill bank, west side of the deposit. And bring the probe line.”
His answer came back clipped and professional. “Copy. One minute.”
Kristen fell in beside me as I crossed the debris edge.
Two patrollers stayed below us as spotters, watching the slope while we searched.
The snow was hard-packed and chunky, nothing like powder, and it creaked under our boots.
Avalanche debris sets up fast. The longer someone stayed under it, the worse their chances got.
“How deep?” Kristen asked.
“Could be three feet. Could be eight. Depends on where the truck stopped.” I studied the surface, looking for the subtle depression that would indicate something large beneath.
I found it. A shallow trough in the debris about forty feet from the road’s uphill edge, where the snow had settled around something solid. I dropped to my knees and pressed my ear to the surface.
Nothing.
I pounded the snow with my fist. “Can you hear me?”
Silence. Then, barely there, a vibration like someone tapping against metal from very far away.
“He’s here,” I said. “Get the shovels.”
The digging crew spread across the depression in a line while I probed ahead of them, driving the thin aluminum rod into the packed snow and feeling for resistance. Shane had brought four shovelers on two snowmobiles and was already ferrying the backboard and oxygen from the patrol base.
That was when I noticed Everett.
He’d come down with the second group of resort workers, riding in the bed of Zeller’s truck in flannel and loose canvas pants, and now he was standing at the edge of the debris field with a shovel in his shaking hands.
He looked feverish and unsteady, but his eyes were focused and he was already reading the slope above us.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“I can dig,” he said.
There was no time to argue. I pointed him to the end of the shovel line and went back to probing.
The aluminum rod hit something solid at about four feet.
Metal. I marked the spot and the crew dug toward it while I kept probing outward, mapping the shape of whatever was down there.
A truck cab. Angled nose-down in the debris, driver’s side facing uphill.
The roof had partially collapsed under the weight, but there was space.
Maybe enough space for a person to survive if they’d been belted in and the airbag had fired.
I pounded the surface above the driver’s position. “We’re coming. Hold on.”
The faint tapping answered. Weaker now.
“Faster,” I told the crew.
They dug. Everett dug beside them, and every stroke made his arms tremble, but he kept going. I watched him from the corner of my eye while I directed the excavation. He was spending strength he didn’t have because someone was dying underneath us.
Shane’s snowmobile roared up with the backboard strapped to the rescue platform. He killed the engine and grabbed a second shovel and joined the line without asking where to stand. He just looked at the hole and the angle of the digging and put himself where he’d do the most good.
We were three feet down when I felt it.
It began as a deep vibration that came up through my boots and into my teeth, the same frequency I’d felt at the patrol base but closer, directly above us on the slope.
Everett’s head snapped up first. His gaze fixed above my shoulder.
“Move!” he shouted.
I followed his gaze. A fracture line raced across the loaded pocket beneath the chute’s secondary shoulder, maybe a hundred yards above us. The first release had destabilized the smaller accumulation zone. Snow slumped along the crack, and a plume of powder lifted as the slab began to separate.
“Fracture!” I shouted. “Everybody off the—”
Everett hit me from the side.
He didn’t grab me or pull me. He drove his right shoulder into me hard enough to send me stumbling sideways behind the rock outcrop that jutted from the uphill bank. I went down hard on my hip and rolled, and Everett came down on top of me with his arms over his head.
The secondary slide hit.
It wasn’t like the first one. This slab was maybe thirty feet wide, fast and dense and loud, a wall of broken snow that swept across the debris field where we’d been standing.
The rock outcrop split the slide in two.
Everett’s left side and legs were still past the sheltering edge when the snow caught him.
The force wrenched him sideways with a hard pop, then packed around his lower body while I remained in the clear pocket behind the rock.
I heard Shane’s voice somewhere to my left, shouting for the crew to move uphill. I heard Dominic’s roar from the road below, raw and furious.
Then quiet.
Everett lay half on top of me, his right arm still shielding my head.
His left arm hung at a wrong angle, the shoulder visibly displaced beneath the flannel, the joint pushed forward and down.
His lower body was buried from the waist down in packed debris that had flowed around the outcrop’s edge and set up hard.
His scent was in my face, pine resin and cold stone, and for one breath my wolf lifted toward it before I reined her in.
“Everett.”
His eyes opened. They were bloodshot and swimming with pain, but he focused on me.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
“Probably,” he said through his teeth.
I could hear the trapped driver tapping again, fainter now. The digging crew’s partial excavation had exposed part of the truck’s roof, and the secondary slide had added another foot of debris on top of it. If the driver’s air pocket was shrinking, every minute mattered.
Everett was hurt and pinned but alive. His breathing was shallow and his skin had gone bloodless, but he was conscious and his pulse was strong when I pressed two fingers to his throat.
The driver was dying.
I looked at Everett’s buried legs, then at the exposed truck roof. Dominic and Shane were already fighting through the fresh debris toward us, Dominic favoring his wounded left side while Shane dug, throwing snow over his shoulder.
“I have to get the driver out first,” I said.
“I know,” Everett said. “Go.”
I left him.
? ? ?
Shane cleared the debris from the passenger side and broke out the window with his rescue tool.
I leaned through the opening. A man in his fifties was slumped against the deployed airbag, conscious but barely.
His face was blue-gray and his breathing was the wet, labored sound of someone whose chest was being compressed.
The collapsed roof had pushed the headliner down onto his shoulders and trapped him in a pocket that was getting smaller as the weight settled. Blood from a broken nose and the angle of his neck against the steering column were partially obstructing his airway.