The Savage Wild

by Roxie Noir

I eat. He keeps pouring over the map, legs wide, his elbows on his knees as I try not to look at him.

  It’s not like I can see his body right now, under fifty layers and three parkas, even though I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it looks like. It’s not like the full force of those eyes is on me, not like we’re in the backseat of his dad’s car out in the national forest while my shirt comes off.

  But there’s something about Wilder, even just sitting there staring at a map, that’s alluring. He was always so cocksure about himself, always so smooth and calm and in control in a way that no other teenager ever was, and it turns out that years of flying in the military only made it worse.

  And he knows it, and I think he knows I know it.

  Only so many things to do while you’re trapped here, waiting around to be rescued, I think.

  Out of nowhere, panic sparks inside me. My stomach clenches and my head snaps up, and even though the anxiety doesn’t feel good it feels familiar, like maybe I’m getting back to myself at last.

  “What do you mean, in case we have to go somewhere?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.

  He turns his head, looks at me.

  “I mean in case we have to leave the plane behind,” Wilder tells me.

  I shake my head.

  “That’s the very first thing you always learn in wilderness survival,” I say. “Stay where you are so rescuers can find you, otherwise they’ll have far too large an area to search and you’ll never get found, ever.”

  “You took wilderness survival?” he asks, voice disbelieving. “What else did you learn, Squeaks? Want to make us a fire by scraping two rocks together near some tree bark?”

  “It’s required for anyone doing arctic research,” I say, as if everyone knows that. “Of course I took the wilderness survival seminar, I wasn’t about to—”

  He leans back on his hands, grinning, and my stomach tightens even more.

  “Your seminar cover what to do when you’re probably a hundred miles off course, your radio’s not working, and you’ve already been missing for most of a day?”

  I swallow.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” I point out, trying to stay calm even as panic blossoms in my chest, its ugly tentacles reaching through my ribcage. “We were only due in Yellowknife late yesterday afternoon, and I’m sure they’ve allowed for some extra time due to weather, so it’s unreasonable to expect anyone just yet.”

  “We didn’t make our fuel stops,” Wilder says quietly.

  The tentacles grab hold.

  “We were due in Fort Samson just about a day ago at this point,” he says. “We’ve been out of radio contact for a hair over twenty-five hours, and that’s more than enough time to sound the alarm. By now they’ll have confirmed with Coalstoke that we didn’t make our second fuel stop and haven’t been in contact there either, so the options are clearly either that we ran away to some lovely Pacific island together or we’ve gone down.”

  He pauses. It’s a long, long pause.

  “You hear any rescue planes, Squeaks?” he asks, his voice low but sharp.

  “We’ve got the black box transmitter,” I point out.

  Wilder just cocks his head, the corner of his mouth hitching up the barest little bit.

  “The what?”

  The tentacles that grabbed hold of my ribcage start pulling, the panic deepening as I look around the tiny plane, reality setting in at last.

  I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. I don’t even know if that’s what the black box is, I just know that planes have some sort of homing beacon. I’m not a pilot, I don’t know anything else about it.

  You should, I think. I can’t believe you just got onto this plane with Wilder of all people and didn’t at least google what they are, how they worked, just so you could be one percent prepared for something like this…

  “You know,” I say, hoping my voice isn’t shaking even though I feel like I can barely breathe. “The, um, homing beacon transmitter that sends out a signal via satellite wavelength and pinpoints our GPS location to the rescue crews looking for us.”

  That was total garbage nonsense and I know it, just big right-sounding words tumbling out of my mouth one after another. Satellite wavelength? The hell is that?

  “Of course,” Wilder says, letting the words drip from his lips. “The homing beacon transmitter. Well, I gotta say I haven’t heard those rescue planes either, Squeaks.”

  I think my concussion is healing, or at least it’s healed to a certain point because the sudden knowledge that he’s right about this brings the full gravity of the situation crashing down onto me in a way that hadn’t happened yet.

  We crashed a plane. In the wilderness. Just the two of us.

  And Wilder doesn’t think anyone’s going to come rescue us.

  “Oh my God,” I say, and my vision starts to swim in front of me, blurring and narrowing. “Oh my God,” I whisper.

  I can’t breathe enough. There’s not enough air, because we’re at altitude and in some tiny plane that’s probably sealed tight and we’ve been breathing so much oxygen and also my ankle is broken, and I’m not smart any more, I’m dumb now because I hit my head so hard when we finally landed—

  “Imogen,” Wilder says.

  My vision starts narrowing. I drop the ration brick I’m holding and tug the neck of my parka apart, the zipper grinding. Somewhere deep down I know that I’m only having a panic attack, but that knowledge never helps when you’re having one.

  “Hey,” he says, his voice suddenly tinged with concern.

  “I can’t breathe,” I whisper, even though I’m breathing faster than a frightened rabbit, the air whooshing uselessly in and out of my lungs.

  I watch him heave the door open through a gray mist, and the fresh air feels good on my face even though it’s freezing. I shut my eyes, lean back against the plane’s metal skin, and I try to remember how I deal with these but all I can think is we’re going to die here we’re going to die here.

  “Imogen,” Wilder’s voice says, and he’s right in front of me.

  He’s got my hands in his, and he’s squeezing them. He’s warm.

  going to die here going to die here

  “Open your eyes and look at me,” he says.

  I don’t. He squeezes my hands harder.

  “Look at me!” he shouts, and my eyelids fly open.

  Wilder is right there, his face a foot from mine, his hard eyes sky-blue and locked onto mine.

  “You’re gonna breathe with me, okay?” he says. “Ready? In.”

  He sucks a breath in, long and slow. I watch him, but I can’t stop panting, Wilder’s words barely registering over the roar in my brain.

  “Imogen,” he says, and for some reason my name gets through the static and suddenly, I’m listening to him.

  “You’re not breathing with me,” he says, stating the fucking obvious.

  My vision keeps narrowing, the black closing in, and now all I can see is him: blue eyes, tan face, cold-bitten red lips, a face I’ve literally seen in nightmares and anxiety dreams. When I wake up the sheets are always soaked through with my sweat.

  I shake my head. I can’t. I can’t do this right now, still gasping shallowly for air like I’m drowning.

  “Yes, you can,” he says. “All you need is one second. Get control of yourself for one second. Breathe with me.”

  I want to scream I can’t, you don’t understand, I can’t because we’re going to die here but then Wilder squeezes my hands again and it’s exactly enough.

  I get one second.

  My breath hitches, my lungs jerking, but then I get past that spot and breathe deep, along with Wilder, both of us together like we’re one creature. Like he’s my lifeline.

  Instantly, the black fades. The sparkles zagging across my vision fade. I’m still shaking like a leaf as Wilder breathes out, still leading me, and then we breathe again.

  And again.

  Wilder stays there, just breathing with me
. I don’t know how long he does but I eventually stop shaking. The pain in my chest leaves, and even though it still feels like something ugly is wrapped around my ribcage, trying to get my heart to stop beating, I don’t think I’m going to pass out any more.

  When he lets go, he doesn’t say anything. He just hands me the rest of the nutrition brick I dropped along with the half-full water bottle, and I take them from him.

  I gnaw the block, I drink the water. Wilder gets up, closes the door until it’s just barely cracked, sits on the floor opposite the plane from me with his ankles crossed.

  “You gonna be okay?” he asks finally, his voice rumbling through the total, snowy silence.

  I chew the last of the nutrition brick and nod, swallow the rest of the water behind it. I’m still rattled, still feel awful and nauseous and pretty sure we’re going to die, but at least I can breathe, and I didn’t pass out.

  “Thanks for not attempting CPR,” I tell him, because I guess we’re being nice to each other right now. Not biting his head off is probably the least I can do. “Someone did that to me once because they thought I was having a heart attack. Nearly broke a rib.”

  “That’s not what you’re supposed to do for a heart attack, either,” Wilder points out.

  I crumple the wrapper in my mittened hand, wondering if the plane’s got a trash can. Though I guess the plane is the trash can, since it’s not like it’s ever leaving this mountain again.

  We’re probably not ever leaving this mountain again, either—

  “My dad has panic attacks,” he suddenly volunteers.

  I just stare at him in surprise.

  “I’m not supposed to tell anyone, ever,” he says, shrugging. “Obviously.”

  “Marcus Flint has panic attacks,” I say, mostly to myself.

  Wilder’s dad is a consummate businessman, through and through, and it’s pretty clear that his success is due entirely to him being complete, utter, and total fucking asshole. Everyone in Solaris respects him, sure, but no one likes him, because he’ll do just about anything if he thinks it might make him money.

  When I was a kid, he bought all the land around the only public park in Solaris, and then somehow managed to convince a judge to use eminent domain to buy that land for a pittance, too. In exchange he promised to build another playground, and he did — at one of his resorts. I’ve never even seen it.

  An elderly woman got food poisoning and nearly died after eating in one of his restaurants. He sued her for defamation.

  “He doesn’t have them so much anymore,” Wilder says, leaning back against the plane’s metal skin. “Not surprising, given that he’s practically on horse tranquilizers now.”

  “I’ve been there,” I volunteer. “Those things will calm you down, that’s for sure.”

  He’s probably talking about the big guns — Xanax, Klonopin, that stuff. I’ve taken them before, but I don’t like to make a habit of it. At least for me, they flatten out every emotion, not just anxiety.

  Sure, when I’m on them I don’t have panic attacks, but I can’t enjoy cupcakes either. I’ve been striving for a good seven years now to find the happy medium between the two things.

  “No shit,” Wilder says. “But before all that, it was up to my mom, my brother and me to figure out how to talk him down from one. Life got a lot more pleasant when we could. He had one in front of an investor once, and of course it was our fault for not…”

  He’s looking out the window over my shoulder and the sentence trails off, but in that moment, I’m suddenly seeing him again. Wilder Flint, the boy who once stole flowers from my neighbor’s yard to give to me.

  The boy who kissed me behind the movie theater. The boy who gave me my first hickey, which I stole some of my mom’s oil paints to hide. It didn’t work very well, for the record.

  The boy who did all those things while he had a girlfriend. Melissa. The pretty, popular cheerleader. Of course.

  Wilder was the richest kid in town, the star football player, the jock with the nice car and cool friends and no curfew.

  He couldn’t be seen around with the nerd.

  “He deserved them,” I say, my voice flat again. “Though what he really deserved was a heart attack.”

  Wilder’s eyes flash, and his face goes back to being hard, closed off.

  “Fuck you too,” he says, and stands.

  Chapter Eleven

  Wilder

  It’s a long, cold night. Somehow, even though we’re the only two people for probably five hundred miles, Imogen manages not to speak to me.

  Even though I make her emergency rations for dinner. Even though I give her another water bottle, help her outside so she can pee because she refuses to pee into a container inside the plane.

  Total, stony silence. It would be remarkable if it didn’t feel so completely awful.

  We sleep on opposite sides of the plane, not that far away from each other. She’s wrapped in the parachute and a ton of coats; I’ve got the emergency blankets and the rest of the coats.

  I think she actually sleeps. I barely do.

  Because if we want any chance at survival, we need to leave this plane. It’s obvious by now that no one is coming. I’m not even sure if this plane had a flight transmitter — that’s the black box thing Imogen was talking about — and if it does, it’s obviously not working.

  I’ve got some suspicions about that, but I’ve been trying not to think about them. Right now, it’s not that important why the plane went down, it’s important that we figure out what the fuck we’re going to do next.

  If we stay here we’ll die. I’m almost certain of that. We’ll eat all our food, drink all our water, but that means that by the time we decide to head to a lower elevation and try our luck at finding civilization or a road or a fishing outpost or something, we’ll be fucked.

  Unlike Imogen’s seminar, I’ve actually done some of this stuff. I’ve spent time alone in the cold forest, making shelters and building fires and trapping fish for food.

  I’m not a Navy SEAL or something — I just flew their planes, I always knew I wasn’t a lifer — but I think I’ll be okay for a few days.

  But I don’t even know if Imogen can get down the rocks to the tree line. She won’t let me look at her ankle, so I don’t know if it’s sprained or broken. I don’t know if her only option is to stay here.

  And if it is, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  I could leave tonight, I think. Then I wouldn’t have to face that decision. No one would ever know.

  I stare at the tilted ceiling of the plane, watching my breath hover in the cold air.

  It would be easy. Just go.

  I roll over and try to fall asleep again. It doesn’t work.

  “You never did tell me where we are,” Imogen says the next morning. She’s chewing on another of the disgusting granola bars as I heat some of the MREs that we kept in the plane’s emergency kit. They’re only a year past their expiration date.

  “I don’t know where we are,” I tell her.

  “You had that map out.”

  “Do people look at maps when they know where they are?”

  Imogen chews, swallows, glugs down some water.

  We’re running low on that, I think but don’t say anything.

  “I’m asking because I thought there was an outside chance you managed to figure it out,” she says, her voice cool. “God knows you were looking at that thing for long enough.”

  “Sure, Imogen,” I tell her, settling back on some cargo. “I’ve known exactly where we are this whole time, and I’ve secretly been talking to rescuers via radio just to torment you, because I’d also rather be here, in this miserably fucking cold airplane, than back in Solaris sitting on a couch and watching movies.”

  She colors, her cheeks going a splotchy pink.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time you tormented me for no reason,” she points out.

  “So my plan was, what, to wait until you showed up at the airport needin
g a ride? Then deliberately crash into this mountain miraculously without killing either of us, and then make you wait it out?”

  She gets pinker, and I swallow hard. I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m cold and Imogen has always been able to do this to me, take any emotion at all and turn it up to eleven.

  “No,” I say. “Maybe I’m behind your research grant to begin with. I dangled that in front of you just to get you here. I’ve been planning this for years,” I snarl, sarcasm dripping from my voice. “You’re that important to me, Imogen. It’s all true, I’ve been planning one more way to make you miserable all this time.”

  She shoves at her glasses, face bright red, but she doesn’t show any expression. If I didn’t know better I’d think her eyes were glassy, but I’m sure it’s just the sunlight.

  “I don’t know why you’d go to all that trouble,” she says, her quiet voice tightly controlled. “All you’d have to do to make my life miserable is show up somewhere. It’s not hard.”

  “I wish I’d left without you,” I say.

  Her jaw clenches, and she swallows.

  “Nothing’s stopping you,” she points out, voice flat and cold as ever. “You can go freeze to death and once I get rescued maybe I’ll try to convince them that they should come look for you as well, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  “You’re that certain,” I say. “You really think that if we just stay here, someone will magically come and rescue us.”

  “It’s not magic,” she says, her voice dripping with disdain. “That’s the entire point of having radio contact, having the emergency beacon, all that stuff. That’s why the plane is bright yellow, Wilder, because everything I’ve ever read or been told has been to stay where you are if you get lost or stranded and let rescuers find you.”

  Her voice is rising slightly in pitch as she keeps talking, edging on hysteria.

  “We don’t have either of those things,” I say quietly, even though I know I should drop it for now. “We don’t have radio communications and we don’t have a transmitter. All we’ve got is a bright yellow plane in the middle of thousands of square miles of cloudy snow storm.”