Chapter Fourteen
Auralia
With her jacket pulled free and resting on Doli’s abandoned seat, Auralia’s next big effort was to get the ballistic vest off.
It wasn’t easy to pull apart the hook and loop closure without a significant jerk. If she were in the water, though, swimming through the current wouldn’t be possible with this added weight and movement constriction.
The image of an armadillo came to mind. “Yeah, they can swim, but their armor doesn’t include ceramic plates.”
She edged her fingers under the flap and crawled them forward.
Waste of time? Putting herself in danger when she could simply follow Doli’s performance?
Auralia’s intuition told her that she wasn’t going to make it out of the car while it was on the bridge. She could feel the frame straining to hold her in place. She was going to take a plunge.
Still, she’d act as if she still had a way to get out until the very last second.
As Auralia worked her fingers over the plates, she tried to be logical and methodical in her decision-making. Like, with her safety belt. She could crawl out with it attached, but if her car was to take flight, she’d want it to be holding her safely in place.
And then when she landed, if it jammed, that was a problem.
Auralia opened her console and pulled out a thick rubber band, a window punch, a seatbelt razor, and a high-lumen flashlight attached.
It was a gift from her mentor, Remi, who often handed out little items like this to her friends and colleagues as if they were door prizes.
Auralia always read that as a wish for their safety.
It was warm and loving, and in this instance, might well be life-saving.
The back window might end up being her egress.
While she pulled that onto her wrist, Auralia tried to imagine what would happen if she were crawling out the back window when her car plunged forward.
There was no help coming. The number of injured had to be mind-boggling.
The wailing. The screams. It tortured Auralia, and she had to focus on imagining herself as diaphanous, the way Creed had taught her to stay safe from nightmares when they were young.
She used that technique as a necessary tool in her toolbox when off on assignment, so the energy that filled the air and was buffeted around didn’t glue to her skin or seep into her psyche.
She needed to listen to her intuition to survive the day.
Iniquus was surely in the mix.
Emergency services had to be rushing to the scene.
She’d be low man on the totem pole, or in this case, high girl on the bridge.
“Here we go,” Auralia said as she unclasped the belt for a brief moment to lift the ballistic vest over her head.
Afraid to shift the dynamic of the teetering car, Auralia set the weight on the console right next to her thigh.
Still, the move made the car sway. And Auralia quickly pulled her seat belt back into place.
The movement was mere inches forward and back, so subtle compared to the grand sweep of sky and water when the car was shoved into this position. Still, scary.
“Okay, think. What are the options?”
The back seat of her car could be pulled down to access the trunk.
Auralia had practiced a few times after her sister WOMBAT, Kim, had been tied up and thrown into her trunk.
When the kidnapper stopped for gas and a pit stop, Kim kicked out the back seat and was able to get out through the passenger door.
Granted, she’d still been bound hand and foot, but as she lay there writhing and yelling for help, the people around her became her protectors. The assailant took off, abandoning his car.
She could be like Kim in reverse and escape from the car trunk instead of the side window. Her weight back there might press her into a better position.
Okay, it wasn’t her favorite, but it was on her list.
“Here’s the plan,” Auralia said aloud so that her brain was processing it in different parts, giving the plan a better chance of action, “If I’m going over, I’m popping the trunk.
It might make a sail, it might make getting out from the back seat easier, and it might give me access to my supply boxes in the back, including a life preserver from my boat trip last week. ”
Auralia reached her hand up and felt for the trunk latch button. She put her hand down, then did it again, leaving it there as the car tilted downward and the frame slipped a few more inches.
Her weight pressing her into the safety belt, Auralia could see the water again. It looked damned far down there.
But now, quite obviously, she wouldn’t be slinking over the back seat and out the window.
She was going to dangle there until help arrived or she was going in.
Wouldn’t it be miraculous if Gator’s team suddenly arrived at the scene and worked their magic, stabilizing the car and pulling her free, so she could walk away with only an abraded face?
The “if only” game came in handy sometimes when things were bad and there was no clear escape.
She and those she loved worked in dangerous settings, yet they seemed to emerge unscathed each time. That was fallacious thinking.
Which one would apply?
Maybe ‘Appeal to Tradition’?
“Traditionally, I have survived life-threatening circumstances; therefore, I will do the same today.”
It seemed a dangerous mindset for Auralia to call her survival a logical fallacy.
“I pull those thoughts from the wind, and I send them down into the water as fish food,” she muttered as she pulled the safety belt back tight over her hips and tried to press back so her lungs had room to expand.
The rubber band around her wrist was cutting off circulation, and Auralia was glad because the burning sensation reminded her that she had useful tools at her disposal. “If the safety belt won’t release, there’s a sharp blade on the window breaker to slice through. Don’t wrestle, slice.”
The mental pictures were lining up. Auralia always found a plan of action helpful. If A happens, I’ll do this. If B happens, I’ll do that.
Unfortunately, there had been many a time when it was so far down the list of possibilities that a G was happening, even P. And for that, she probably had no plan.
Still, plotting an escape helped to steady her nerves.
She considered her clothes.
If the ballistic vest could drag her down, so could her steel-toed boots. Letting her hands dangle straight down, she was able to remove them. It would be good if she could keep hold of the boots somehow because the only way out of the jungle of bent vehicles would be to hike to help.
She tied the boots together and shoved her socks into the toes.
Pulling her phone from her thigh pocket, Auralia inserted it in the waterproof bag she had had dangling at the ready since she heard about the possibility of rain.
She’d keep the cord around her neck as her get-out-of-jail-free card.
If everything else were lost, she could reach Iniquus.
She pulled her shirt and fleece out to make space, then thrust the plastic bag inside against her skin.
Auralia reached under her top to position her phone in her bra under her boob, pulling the cord tight and putting the slack in her cup as well, hoping that it wouldn’t get caught on anything and trap her.
Whew. It was hard to breathe.
In her mind, she tried to block out what she expected—the impact, the re-orientation, her escape from inside the vehicle, then the churning white water that would wrestle to drag her under.
Her goal was to stay conscious as she hit the water.
Get out. Get to shore. And there, her battle would be with the wind and cold.
Hypothermia was terrifying because the body’s best survival tool, the brain, slowed and dulled.
Auralia felt for one of the large black leaf bags she kept in the console for emergencies and dropped her boots inside. Followed by her fleece, then her thermal shirt.
She needed to get out of her pants—windproof and fleece-lined, with her identification and credit cards in the zipped pocket. Yeah, she’d need her pants too.
Popping the snap, pulling the zipper, she had space to slide them over her hips because of the angle of her dangle. She let the rhyming words loop around as she edged her pants down by an inch on one side and an inch on the other.
Soon she’d be out of tasks, and that wasn’t good.
Action was Auralia’s counterbalance to fear.
Her pants slid to her ankles, and she scooped them up and put them into the bag. Auralia had to think through this next step. Before she tied off the clothes bag, should there be air or no air in the bag?
No air would make it easier to get it through the open window in the back.
Air could help the bag stay afloat.
Too little air in the clothes bag wouldn’t be helpful.
Too much air, and she could rip the bag as she exited.
She needed Goldilocks air; it needed to be just right.
Auralia scooped the top through the air to trap a little more gas inside, then rolled the top again before tying it to ensure no water got in.
Water was weight, and the boots were heavy enough to drag through that current.
“You will float, you will hold me up, and you will stay with me,” she told the bag.
She put that bag in the back seat by the window.
What would she do if she broke a bone or was injured?
Release the clothes.
Hypothermia?
She had another bag that she could use to make a flotation device, and once she was on the shore, she could crawl inside, just as they had taught her in the Hug-a-Tree Program at Sunday School.
All that rain from up in the mountains was rushing toward the ocean, ice-cold.
As she worked on the second bag, which would serve as her flotation device, the “Why me?” question was growing louder in her mind. A little voice that wanted to make her small and pitiful.
And then she remembered the story of how Creed’s fellow Team Charlie operator, Halo St. John, had met his wife, Mary.
They were strangers working together to save a family.
His wife had shown up in that city for a singular reason: Mary’s horoscope said it was her responsibility to be there for the greater good.
Talk about leaning into the woo-woo.
That story didn’t quite fit Auralia’s present reality.
Fact: Auralia was in no position to be helpful to anyone, except perhaps herself.
Another small, selfish part of her brain was voicing astonishment that Creed and Gator weren’t calling out to her that they’d have her down in a minute, hang tight.
But she also wasn’t in dire need. Maybe Gator and Creed checked in the ether and saw she was okay, and trusted her to save herself, so they could focus on the truly vulnerable.
Auralia decided to go with that story.
They checked on her.
She was okay.
This was all going to be fine.
Now, to make herself believe it.