Chapter 82
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Jack’s arrogance nearly killed them. The trail would have been brutal on a late spring day. In the middle of a driving snowstorm, weighted down as they were, with what they faced at the end, it was nearly too much.
They were nearing ten thousand five hundred feet. There was no cover of any kind. Sitting in the comfort of your home watching the weather channel talk about gusts over a hundred miles an hour on the mountain passes simply did not connect. How would you understand that ice crystals would sandpaper the exposed skin off your face?
When he stood, the wind made a sail of his pack. Gusts turned him at the hips, trying to rip his snowshoe-planted feet from the snow. When he walked hunched over, lactic acid turned the muscles in his lower back to fire and then jelly.
Jack took the lead, forced to use a rest step to save lungs and aching back. They built a sled with the cross-country skis as the frame and base. It was easier to pull than to carry. So it was step, pause for one second, then step with the other leg and pause for one full second again. The pattern was walk ten feet, wait for Lee to close the gap by the same ten to take tension off the rope connecting them and then repeat, over and over and over again. They had covered less than a quarter mile of trail in the last hour, the fifteen hundred feet to the top of the pass seeming like fifteen hundred miles. He stooped into the wind and slogged another five feet, thinking for the thousandth time that this was too hard, when the tension on the rope stopped him.
He stopped and turned. Lee was on all fours in the snow, swinging her head back and forth. He tried to hurry, stubbed a foot, and slid the last five feet to stop in a heap next to her.
Lee reached up to her mouth, pulled something out and threw it into the snow. The wind caught the thing and carried it to him, nearly landing on his hand. It was a tongue depressor from the first aid kit. It was covered in freezing saliva and teeth marks. She had used it as a gag, biting down hard so she wouldn’t cry out in pain.
He pushed her onto her side. He reached to pull up her powder pants and look at her knee. He didn’t have to. The fabric was taut over her swollen knee. She looked up, eyes glazed with pain. A jet flew low over their heads, much lower than the five thousand feet above the park that flight rules called for. He tried to spot the fighter jock nuts enough to be out in this, much less at low altitude. The ground shook. A sea of snow carried them down the ridge toward the rocks below. He grabbed Lee and clipped his carabineer directly to hers as he tried to hold her head up.
The avalanche wasn’t much as avalanches go, but they go far. He kept them oriented with their heads up. Even if they were buried he couldn’t let it be head-down. Most skiers who die in avalanches suffocate suspended head down in the snow, unable to get out of their bindings to dig their way out.
Dying of suffocation was near the bottom of his wish list. He felt a thump on his left hip like a berserk linebacker’s helmet and then another thump on his back. As it occurred to him that he probably wouldn’t survive a thump like that on his head, his head kissed a rock.
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LEE RELIED ON her tiger-man’s strength, tried to keep her head up, confident that if anyone could keep them alive it was Jack. She hung on, fighting the panic, knowing that they were riding a white wave of death. She had surfed the big waves off South Africa, where the danger from the great white shark was real. She knew that panic was as big a danger as the waves and made sure she was not guilty of that self-destructive sin. The wave of white terror seemed to slow and then she watched his head spray blood.
“No!” she shouted. They came to a stop among rocks and broken trees stabbing up through the snow like giant punji sticks. She knelt over her man thinking the worst. She ripped off her gloves and checked for a pulse. He had one, strong, steady and slow. She turned his head to look at the wound. There was a flap of scalp hanging, over an inch square and much blood like most head wounds, but she felt no give in the bones. He was profoundly unconscious. Their sled, piled high with gear, had miraculously come to a stop as if neatly parked only fifty yards away-up hill.
Lee unhooked herself, tied the rope into Jack’s harness and looped a quick lasso over a rock splinter aiming sharply at the sky only twenty feet away. She dragged herself up the hill to the sled, climbed on it and used her good leg as a rudder to steer it well wide of him next to the downhill side of the largest rock. She brought the sled to a stop, rather proud of her steering and slid off.
She stepped back and fell through a thin layer of snow, falling far enough to knock the air out of her lungs when she landed on something. What? She grabbed the little flashlight out of her inside pocket and shone it around. She had fallen through the snow near the lip of an overhang that was buried in snow and protected from most of the force of the avalanche. The ledge formed a natural cave nearly fifteen feet deep and about as wide. The cave smelled musky and strong, but the smells weren’t fresh.
Hot damn, she thought. My luck is good. The bear that hibernated here decided to sleep somewhere else this year.
She climbed up out of the hole and crawled to Jack. He was still unconscious. She dragged him down the hill to the edge of the hole and stopped. Perhaps he was a bear and not a tiger. He was much too big for her to carry down into the hole and she could not risk simply dropping him.
Hong Lee, scion to one of the wealthiest trading families in Hong Kong, Stanford MBA and magician, unclipped a carabiner from the sled and went to work making a pulley. The snow fell like a blanket around her. As she worked she thanked the hours grandfather insisted she spend on the old boats, learning knots and currents and wind and hard, physical labor.
A frustrating hour later, missing most of a nail, having strained her left shoulder and more tired than she could ever remember being, she had her man safely in their cave. She wanted so badly just to sleep, to zip him up in his bag and just sleep, but she didn’t dare. She laid her man on the sleeping pad after she had inflated it as much as she could in the thin air and climbed back out. Their cave was so nice and warm compared to the storm outside.
Her knee had swollen so that she could barely bend it, but she climbed out of cave and used a branch to sweep their path away. Snow was falling so quickly their trail to the cave would be invisible in another hour.
She cried tears of pain as she tried to bend her knee. Jhew lun dou! she thought, and smiled. Swearing in English was so vanilla compared to Cantonese or even that heathen Mandarin. Eventually she bent the knee enough to slip the needle under the patella and drain out some of the bloody mess. So began the longest eighteen hours of her life.
JACK DREAMED. This was not the omen dream. This one was tops. He was warm and dry, bundled up in something soft, smelling of Lee’s special perfume. He was sore in places he hadn’t known he had. He smelled something wonderful and salivated. It smelled like gravy and carrots and onions and beef-like beef stew only more better. He didn’t want to wake up, but he had to so he could eat. There was a reason he needed to wake up, something important. He would much prefer to be asleep to the headache that made him groan when he woke.
He opened his eyes. There was something over them. When he tried to sit up the pain in his head split from one big pain to a hundred little ones. These little pains grew until they were bigger than the first one and then split again.
“Shit,” he croaked. Perhaps the horrible taste in his mouth had killed his ability to speak?
“Well, if that’s what you think of my cooking, I’ll throw your share out.” Lee told him the story as she fed him, one spoonful at a time.
“You kept us heads-up somehow. I thought you were conscious, but when I tried to talk to you, you couldn’t open your eyes. You wouldn’t let go of me until you passed out completely. I dragged you here.”
Here was an overhanging cave, near the edge of the cliff they nearly slid over.
“You’ve been out a long time.”
She looked away as she said the last. The circles under her eyes, the unshed tears, and the shaking hand as she spooned the stew, all painted the picture of her fear and courage.
“How long?”
“Eighteen hours,” she said. “I was so scared. I couldn’t wake you and I didn’t know what to do. I literally stumbled into this cave, falling backwards into it after I rode the sled down part of the hill. I had to climb out and lower you down here and my knee hurt so badly. At first I thought you were going to die, and then you started talking in your sleep, shouting really, things that scared me. You kept telling people you were sorry, yelling to the Stud Man, Charlie Tuna, Cool Breeze, Heat Wave… silly names.”
She stopped the story long enough to ask him, “Are they real people?”
“They were real people, in my A-team. My team was ambushed after I left the war to go back to the States, after Mom and Pop died in the car wreck, so I could take care of Meghan. Only three of them lived. One is a paraplegic, one is blind and the one that was okay died of cancer. And me.”
She held him, stroking his face, while she told the rest of her story.
“The cut on your scalp was clean. I used every kind of antiseptic we had. It took me a half hour to find the fucking sewing kit. I sewed you up while you were still unconscious. The pressure in my knee got worse and worse. I…I couldn’t stand it after a while,” she didn’t act embarrassed or weak when she said it. She knew pain was something to be managed.
“I took the big syringe from the medical kit and used it to drain the fluid out of my knee. By then my leg was so stiff, it was all I could do to bend it to get the needle under the patella.”
She laughed, “A cramp straightened my leg and the patella slid down against the needle and it bent. I can’t get the fluid to draw at all through the smaller needle.”
What must it have been like to be alone for 18 hours? What must it have been like to think about burying someone you loved in the snow?
“Do you think we can still make it? You kept muttering something about the schedule.” She wasn’t just asking for an answer about the schedule. She was asking for an explanation. She knew he hadn’t told her the whole plan. It wasn’t fair not to tell her. It was even less fair to tell her and ask her to be part of it.
“We can make it,” was all he said.