Page 25 of Aviator
My stomach plummets. If she has the ELT and we haven’t had any sign of rescue, there must be something wrong with the transmitter. “It should.”
Kenna’s hopeful expression falls. “You say that like it’s not going to. I didn’t mess it up, did I?”
I do a quick inspection of the device, but I don’t detect any damages. They’re built to survive a crash. We’re not so far into the mountains that we’d be inaccessible, even with the snow we received. The only explanation is that the device malfunctioned somehow. Or the weather has made accessing our location near impossible.
“No, you didn’t, but they should have been here by now.”
She slumps on her butt, silently feeding the fire with pages from a beat-up paperback. “Well, there has to be something else we can do. I found a map. And I think there’s a ranger’s station a couple miles from here if I’m reading it right. I could see if I can find some help and bring them back here to get you.”
“I’d be dead before you got back,” I say bluntly. With my injuries, the cold, no food, and little water, I’m not lying.
Kenna bites her lip, frowning. “I could make it. I know I said I couldn’t do this alone, but I was kidding. Mostly. I’m not completely helpless. I’ve kept you alive this long, haven’t I?”
“Not a knock against you. Hell, maybe you should go without me. It’d be easier.”
Her eyes harden. “Like hell. I’ll drag you there if I have to. I did it before.”
“The only way we’re going anywhere is if we set my leg.”
She rocks back on her haunches, shaking her head. “What? No, I don’t think so. Your leg isbroken, Dean. You need a doctor. A professional. You can’t be serious. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s pure luck I managed to keep both of us alive.”
All I want to do is sleep, but I push my fingers into my eyes, trying to clear my thoughts. “You did great, princess. Now I need you to do this for me. Then we’ll figure out where that station is so we can get the hell out of here.”
She’s still shaking her head. “Are you sure there isn’t anything else we can do? I found a flare, too. Couldn’t we shoot that for help?”
“Not unless they’re looking for us already. They may not even know where we crashed. This is the only way. You can do it. I’ll walk you through it.”
“And you have so much experience setting bones, right?”
“I’ve done it a time or two.” Not an exaggeration, and they were nothing like this, but she didn’t need to know that.
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I wasn’t. Let’s get it over with. First, we need to figure out how bad the break is. Roll up my pant leg and stoke up the fire to get a good look at it.” Cold sweat rolls between my shoulders at the thought, but if we want any hope of getting out of here, this has to be done.
She adds a couple more logs to the fire and kneels with my leg positioned in the V of her thighs. With gentle movements, she carefully rolls up the pant leg to my knee, exposing the grotesquely discolored limb. A wave of dizziness assaults me at the sight, but I breathe through it as I instruct her on the next steps.
“It’s not an open fracture, thank fucking god. Take off my boot as carefully as you can so we can check for blood flow.” She does as I say with minimal movement, but it still hurts like a bitch. I instruct her to pinch the skin on the top of my foot and one of my toes. “This checks for capillary refill. We want to see the skin go from white back to pink to make sure there’s still blood flow.” When there is, we both sag with relief. “I need you to feel around the break.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You can do it.”
“Not without throwing up, I can’t,” she objects.
“As long as you don’t throw up on me, I don’t care. I need you to find where the break is so we know how to best stabilize it.”
“Fine. You asked for it.”
Her tentative fingers feel up my foot, over my heel and ankle, and then skate over a place that makes my vision go white. “There,” I choke out. She probes the area at my insistence. “We’re going to have to stabilize it. Do you have something we can use as a splint? A long piece of metal and something to wrap it with?”
Kenna searches around the shelter, finds a sturdy branch about the right size, and strips herself of a thin sweater layer. In any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have been able to help myself from drooling at the sight of her bare skin, but I’m quickly distracted when she redresses and poses over my injured leg.
“Now what?”
“Gonna need you to wrap the shirt as tightly as you can around the branch. We don’t want that bone to move at all.” She does as I ask, and I try to keep from passing out again. “You don’t have any painkillers, do you?”
She scoots around the shelter and digs through a bag when she finishes. “I have some ibuprofen. Would that help?”
