Chapter 21 Buried Road #2
“Don’t move,” I told him. I reached through the window, supported his jaw without bending his neck, and cleared blood from his mouth and nose with a wad of gauze. His breathing eased fractionally. I held his airway open and shouted for the cervical collar from the backboard kit.
Kristen appeared at the passenger window and passed it through. She stabilized his head while I fitted the collar, and Shane and two other workers pried the crumpled driver’s door open enough to reach his seat belt.
Behind me, Dominic was already digging Everett out.
I could hear him working, steady shovel strokes and the occasional low word that I couldn’t make out.
Shane glanced back once, saw Dominic had it, and kept cutting the seat belt with his rescue knife.
We eased the driver out through the widened door and onto the backboard, and Kristen strapped him down while I checked his ribs and chest for the crackling feel of broken bones.
Three ribs on the left side, maybe four. No obvious penetration. With his airway clear, his breathing improved and his color came back from blue-gray to something closer to living.
“He needs the clinic,” I said. “Oxygen, monitoring, and careful transport.”
Kristen took over. She was good at the methodical work, the wrapping and taping and rechecking that kept patients alive between rescue and hospital.
I turned back to Everett.
Dominic had him free. Everett sat against the rock outcrop with his legs stretched in front of him and his left arm cradled against his stomach, and Dominic crouched beside him with snow in his dark beard and a look on his face suspended somewhere between kindness and hatred.
“Shoulder’s out,” Dominic said when I reached them.
“I can see that.”
“He pushed you behind the rock.”
“I know.”
Dominic looked at me, let it go, and stood up, brushing snow from his knees with his right hand. His left side was stiff, and I could tell from the way he held himself that the digging had cost him.
Everett hadn’t said anything. His borrowed clothes were soaked through. He watched the rescue crew working on the driver and didn’t look at me.
? ? ?
We got everyone to the remote patrol hut before the light failed.
The hut sat above the slide zone on a shelf of rock and pine, small and ugly and warm once Shane got the stove going.
I’d been here once before, during my first week on West patrol, checking the emergency supplies.
A narrow cot, a woodstove, a pile of blankets, and no power.
It stood far below the upper warming cabin, on the face that dropped to the river road.
The tourists from the sedan went in first. The woman’s broken arm needed proper setting that the hut couldn’t provide, but I splinted it clean and gave her ibuprofen from the kit and told her the snowcat would take her down the far side of the mountain within the hour.
Her husband’s scalp laceration had stopped bleeding.
He sat beside her and held her good hand and stared at the wall.
The buried driver was stable enough to move. His color had improved, he was on oxygen, and the collar held his neck steady. He thanked us, which I waved off, and then he closed his eyes and let himself be carried.
Then Everett.
Shane held him while I braced his left arm and Dominic gripped Everett’s opposite shoulder for leverage.
The reduction was ugly. I counted and pulled, and the joint slid home with a wet sound that made Shane wince and Everett make a noise through his clenched teeth that wasn’t quite a scream.
He went white and his eyes rolled, but he stayed conscious.
“Don’t move it,” I said, fashioning a sling from a triangular bandage. “Your wolf should start knitting the ligaments overnight.”
“It’ll be slow,” Dominic said, and I knew he was right. The open rejection bond had left Everett’s healing almost nothing to work with. A healthy shifter would have begun knitting the damage at once. Everett might need days.
The snowcat arrived from the resort side while I was tying off the sling. Zeller had radioed for it, and the driver was a West wolf named Rudy Esch who handled the big machine with ease. He loaded the tourists and the freed driver into the heated cab, and then he looked at Everett.
“Room for one more,” Rudy said.
Everett started to argue. I could see it forming behind his eyes, the refusal, the insistence that he could stay and be useful.
“Get on the snowcat,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Your shoulder needs rest and warmth and food you can keep down, and the infirmary has all three. You’re no good to anyone up here with one arm and your legs shaking.”
He held my gaze. Then he stood, slowly, and walked toward the snowcat without looking back. He climbed into the cab beside the man we’d freed from the truck, and Rudy closed the door and started the engine.
I watched the machine crawl down the far side of the service road, its lights yellow in the failing dusk, until it disappeared around the first switchback.
The rest of the crew had already started down ahead of it.
Behind me, Shane said something to Dominic about the road crew closing the route behind the snowcat, and Dominic answered, and their voices were just sound without meaning for a few seconds while I stood in the cold and thought about what had just happened.
Everett had taken the hit for me and then sat against the rock and kept his mouth shut.
His silence reached somewhere his promises never had.
I turned away from the empty road and went back inside.
Soon the hut was full of the smell of wet wool and woodsmoke. Dominic sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his injured side away from it, his dark eyes half-closed. Shane fed the stove and hung their soaked outer layers on a line above it, where they steamed and dripped.
“Road crew sealed the route,” Shane said. “We’re here until light.”
“Storm’s coming,” Dominic added without opening his eyes.
I looked out the hut’s single window. Over the western ridge, the sky had darkened to slate gray, and clouds were moving across the peaks toward us. A new system had come in on the heels of the last. It would close everything above the valley floor for hours, maybe longer.
“Then we hold the hut,” I said.
Shane put another log in the stove and closed the iron door.
Dominic shifted against the wall to make room.
I sat between them on the plank floor with the heat from the stove pressing against my shins and the cold from the window pressing against my back, and outside the wind picked up and the first snow began to fall.