She looked down and gasped. “Oh hell, Mike. You fell across a branch. It’s under your back.”
Mike was quiet for a moment, then he looked up at her. “You need to pull me out in case the plane rolls back on top of me.”
“But what if your back is broken?”
“If this plane rolls back, it won’t matter what’s broken. I’ll die from crush injuries.”
She jumped up and lifted his shoulders off the ground so she could link her arms under his. Then she dragged him clear of the plane.
5
LISA
Lisa lay by Mike’s side for a moment, coming to terms with their situation. Then she sat up. ‘Try again to move your legs.’
He strained, but his legs remained still. “They’re not responding.”
She prodded his right shin with her finger. “Can you feel that?”
He shook his head. She prodded his left leg. “What about that?”
“Nothing.”
She prodded his arms, one at a time. “And that?”
“I felt something, but only slight, and I can just move my arms but only if I drag them. I can’t lift them up high.”
Lisa gave out a deep sigh. “How long do you think it will take them to find us?”
“If I’m right about Carlos and his little sideline, I doubt he registered the flight, which means the authorities don’t even know we took off, so no one will be looking for us. And even if he did, they’ll be searching a hundred miles to the west.”
“So we are on our own?”
Mike nodded. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
She just looked at him.
“You’ll have to hike out of here and find help.”
“I can’t leave you on your own.”
“Well, you can’t carry me.”
“I could try.”
“Even if you could pick me up, how far do you think you could get? It’s not like I have a busted leg where we could make a splint and a crutch for me to limp on. I’d be a dead weight.”
Lisa gasped. “My phone. I need to find my phone. I could call for help.”
“If we are in the middle of the Maine wilderness, I doubt you’ll get a signal.”
“I need to try, and at least the plane’s on the ground now.” She jumped up and headed into the cabin, where she found her phone under the pilot’s seat. The screen had a crack across its width, but it was still switched on. She climbed back out, held it in front of her, and stared at the top of the screen. No signal showing. She held it higher and waited. Still nothing.
She stamped her foot and sat back down next to Mike. “You’re right. Not even one bar of signal strength and no network displayed on the top of the screen. Where’s your phone?”
“In my back pocket.”
Lisa fished under him, pulled out his mobile phone, then sighed as she showed it to Mike. “It’s smashed.”
The screen was black and cracked in several places, but worse than that, the phone was bent like a banana.
Mike nodded. “I guess they haven’t built a crash-proof phone yet.”
Lisa remained quiet for several minutes while she tried to think of a solution, but nothing came to mind, other than waiting it out in the hope that someone might be looking for them and might find them soon.
She looked down at Mike. “Maybe someone saw the plane go down.”
“I doubt it.”
“But we were gliding for a few minutes and steadily loosing height. How can you be so sure?”
Mike twitched the side of his mouth, a sign she was asking too many questions, and was usually followed by dry humor. But this time he resisted and just said, “I’m not sure, but I’m not optimistic either.”
She scanned all around. They were surrounded by trees, with only small glimpses of the sky through the green canopy above. “We are sheltered here, but I need to get you more comfortable.”
She climbed back into the plane’s cabin and returned with a seat cushion. Then she lifted his head and placed the cushion under him.
He nodded. “That’s better, thank you.”
She went back to the plane and under the front co-pilot’s seat she found a bottle of water. Then she searched around the cabin for anything else that could be useful, and in a small compartment below the dashboard, she found some things that supported Mike’s suspicions about Carlos. She returned to Mike with a dagger in a sheath and a small semi-automatic pistol. “I think you might be right about Carlos.” She showed him the weapons.
“Well, if we are going to be stuck out here for a while, they could be useful.”
“Why?”
He twitched his mouth again. “I forgot you’re a city girl. I don’t want to scare you, but if this is the Maine forest, and I’m pretty sure it is, there will be bears in these woods.”
Lisa drew a quick breath. “What about wolves?”
“No wolves in Maine for a couple of hundred years or more. There are coyotes but they shouldn’t bother us.”
“Just the bears then?”
Mike grunted. “They shouldn’t be a problem unless we intrude into their space or threaten their young.”
Lisa raised an eyebrow. “Well, I have no intention of doing either.” Then she cocked her head to one side as she looked at him. “How do you know all this?”
Mike smirked. “They kept me waiting a long time at the dentists.”
“Well, I hope whoever wrote that article knew what the hell they were talking about.”
She went back to the plane and returned with another seat cushion, which she placed on the ground and then laid down next to Mike. “Let’s stay quiet and listen for any sounds of life, and by the way, I haven’t been a city girl since I was nine years old.”
Mike just turned his head towards her and winked. Whenever he wanted to tease her, he would call her a city girl because he knew it mildly irritated her. Not that she didn’t love New York City because she did, to visit, but not to live there. Sure, she liked to have life’s essentials close to hand, like shops, restaurants, and cafes to meet friends for their weekly catch-ups, but she disliked the immediacy and chaos of The Big City. So she was content with her life in the not too small—but quieter than New York—Albany, with its architecture, more relaxed culture, and much, much smaller population.
After an hour or so of nothing remotely like a sound created by another human, Lisa sat up and asked Mike to try and move his legs again. “Maybe you just bruised your spine.”
Mike agreed to try, but the result was the same. He let out a frustrated sigh and dragged his left arm up across his chest and studied his watch. “It’s nearly three-thirty. If you are going to find help, you need to leave now. You could have a long trek before you come across anyone.”
“How long?”
“Hard to say. The forest will slow you down. Depending on how deep we are, you might have to walk for four or five hours.”
“Just five hours through twenty-four billion trees?”
Mike gave her a muted smile. “Of course not. If we are in the middle of the forest, there will only be six billion in each direction.”
“Oh, that’s okay then, you had me worried there for a minute.”
Mike grinned. “You don’t have to walk out of the forest. You only need to find a house, or a town, or a logging site.” He paused. “Even a road or logging track will do. Then you wait for someone to come by.”
“I’m not happy about leaving you alone in your condition.”
If you don’t get help, all they will find is a couple of dead bodies out here.”
“What about Carlos? He may have found help by now and be on his way back.”
Mike nodded. “Maybe, but if that bag he has with him is stuffed full of drugs, he’ll be more concerned with that than us. If he fails to make the drop, he’ll have the cartel on his back, and they are not very understanding or forgiving. So we can’t rely on him. We need to help ourselves, otherwise we are at a real risk of dying out here.”<
br />
Lisa nibbled her bottom lip. Mike was right, but she didn’t like the thought of their safety resting on her shoulders. It was a responsibility she would happily have passed on if she could. But she had to face facts. She could walk and he couldn’t.
She jumped up. “Okay, no more talk about dying. Neither of us are dying here or anywhere else for many years yet. So, if I’m leaving you here, I need to get you back inside the plane before I go. It’ll be safer there.”
“Now you’re making sense.”
She lifted Mike’s shoulders and dragged him to the plane, then rested for a moment. It took all of her strength to lift him up and pull him into the cabin and then into the middle seats, which were now upright again since the back of the plane was no longer suspended off the ground at an angle.
She sat down next to him to get her breath back and tried one more time to wriggle out of her lone mission. ‘I still think we should wait for them to find us.’
Mike raised an eyebrow. “I told you. If we wait for the rescue services, they’ll be finding nothing but skeletons.” He gave an encouraging nod of his head. “You can do it, Lisa. I believe in you.”
She sighed in surrender. “Okay, what do you need before I go?”
“Just give me a drink of that water and I’ll be fine.”
“I’m leaving the bottle with you.”
“No, Lisa, you need to take it.”
“You said I should find help in four or five hours?”
“That was a rough guess. It could be longer.”
“Well, if it is five hours, it will take another five to get back here. That’s at least ten hours. You need the water more than me.”
“Okay, but take the gun.”
“Same issue. You are stuck here, unable to move. If a bear comes sniffing around, you’ll need the gun to scare it away.”
“Damn it, Lisa, I don’t want you wandering around out there with no protection.”
Lisa went back to the cushions on the ground, picked up the gun, and gave it to Mike. Then she held up the hunting knife, still in its scabbard. ‘I’ll have this.’
Mike gave a nod of resignation. “Okay, but just keep your wits about you.”
“On that, I can assure you.”
“One more thing. You need to pull my carryall bag out from under the back seat.”
“Why?”
“I have a compass in my survival kit.”
“Survival kit?”
“It’s just a small green canvas bag with a flashlight, needle and thread, a small pair of scissors, a few bandaids, and a compass. You need to take the compass with you to chart your route away from here so you can find your way back.”
“Good thinking.” Lisa got down on her hands and knees and tried to drag out Mike’s leather carryall bag. After wrestling with it for a while, she looked back up at him. “It’s wedged in tight. I can’t budge it.”
“Use the knife to cut it open.”
“You love that bag.”
“It’s no good to me if I’m dead. Without that compass you could end up going in circles and even if you reach help, you’d never be able to find me again.”
Lisa grabbed the knife and went to work, and a couple of minutes later, came up with the green canvas bag. She unzipped it and took out the compass.
“How do I know which way to go from here?”
“Before we crashed, we should have been heading north.”
Lisa took a moment to study the compass in her palm. “We are pointing north east. Which way did Carlos go?”
“He staggered that way.” Mike nodded his head diagonally left from the front of the plane. “So he must have headed north. You should go the same way.”
Lisa climbed out of the plane and stood at the door. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Don’t worry about me. Just make sure you stay safe out there.”
“And you do the same. I still want to watch you squirm when you try to explain your actions last month.”
Mike gave her a tight-lipped smile. “Can’t wait.”
She leaned in and kissed him, then turned and put the knife into the green canvas bag and slipped the shoulder strap over her head so that the bag rested on her hip. She held the compass in front of her and set off north, the same direction as Carlos.
6
LISA
She walked for just a few seconds and looked back. The plane had already disappeared from view. Mike was right. No one was going to find them in this terrain. His life depended upon her ability to find help and bring them back to the crash site.
She weaved her way between the trees for about an hour, careful to keep the compass needle pointing ahead and north. She couldn’t know if this would be the most direct route to finding another human being, or a town, or even a logging track that Mike had mentioned, but it was the only way to ensure she could bring rescuers back to him. So she resisted the temptation to deviate, even when the terrain looked easier off to the east or the west.
She glanced down at her wrist for the time, but there was just a long scratch where her watch had been. It must have been ripped off in the crash. She was just glad that, apart from her top button, it was the only thing that had been ripped away.
She was well aware of the forces at work in serious crashes and the damage that can result from metal and glass impacting human flesh. Her father was a surgeon at their local hospital and had told her about a couple of occasions when he had stitched limbs back on to accident victims after they had been severed during violent collisions. She guessed the gruesome tales were his way of scaring her into driving carefully.
She had witnessed the devastation firsthand when he had arranged for her to go on a few ride-alongs with the paramedics during the first summer after her graduation. He had hoped to persuade her to take up medicine in one form or another and that she would get the calling after shadowing the professionals for a few days.
But it only went to confirm that she couldn’t face the long hours of dealing with injury, death, and destruction. She knew her strengths and weaknesses, and her ability to deal with adversity was definitely a weakness. She liked everything to be peaceful and harmonious. So dealing with patients and their heartbroken families would be her worst nightmare. She needed to make people happy and considered herself a follower rather than a leader or trail blazer. So the irony of her present situation was not lost on her, because she was certainly trail blazing now.
She put the laniard of the compass over her head, allowing it to hang down her chest, then sat down on a fallen tree trunk and glanced down at her lower legs. Thin streaks of blood had trickled down from small scratches. She will have to be more careful where she’s walking, or by the time she finds help, her skin will be ripped to shreds. Then she gritted her teeth and scolded herself for worrying about such minor matters when Mike was back there, unable to walk and barely able to move his arms.
For the first time in her life, someone was depending on her, and although that scared the hell out of her, she was determined not to let him down.
She closed her eyes and listened for any evidence of civilization, but the only sounds were the shrieking of birds above, the occasional scurrying of small furry animals in nearby bushes, and the pounding of her own heart.
She got back to her feet and set off again, checking the compass every few strides.
Over the next two hours, the forest thinned in parts, and she took advantage by speeding up to make more progress. Because time was not on her side. The sun was lower in the sky as evening drew close, meaning it would be dark soon.
But as she left the density of the trees and entered another clearing, she glanced up at the sky and froze. A gray plume of smoke spiraled up from the treetops to the east. Maybe it was a logging site, or campers getting away from it all, or even a house. It didn’t matter. Any human would be a welcome sight. And if her estimation was right, help could be just a mile away.
There was just one dilemma. The smoke was to the east, w
hich meant she would have to deviate from her route north. Finding the source of the smoke should be easy enough because as long as she had a view of the sky she could follow her eyes, but she would need to get back to this exact spot so she would know when to turn south to get back to the plane. She took a few paces east and looked back. The trees all looked so similar. She needed to mark one, but with what? She scanned all around. Just greenery everywhere and nothing fit for purpose. She glanced down at herself. All she had on was her summer dress, her flat canvas sneakers, and her underwear. She cursed under her breath for not having tied back her hair with her white cotton head band. But she did that mainly when exercising or carrying out chores, not when traveling.
She slipped the canvas bag off her shoulder, held it up, and sighed. Why put a survival kit in a green bag? Surely it should be orange or yellow or red for this exact situation. And it wasn’t just a similar shade of green to the leaves on the trees, it was identical. She reached up and hooked it over a low branch, walked a few paces to the east, and looked back. The bag was visible, but only because she knew which tree it was on. She would never find it on the way back.
So she had to decide which piece of underwear to remove and leave in a prominent place on the tree. With the top button on her v-neck dress missing, her white lace bra was visible. Removing it would reveal a little more cleavage than she would be comfortable with. But her yellow dress was mid-thigh length and loose, meaning if she were to remove her panties, any gust of wind could be extremely embarrassing when she finally found help. So it was an easy decision. She unbuttoned the front of her dress, slid it off her shoulders, and removed her bra. She walked back to the tree, where she had turned right, and hooked the lacy garment over a branch just above her head, ensuring it would be visible to anyone approaching from the east. Then she turned and walked towards the smoke.
THE CRUEL SEVEN Page 3