by Angela Scott
I saw him, too, and stopped moving.
The tree he’d been tied to lay on its side with him sprawled out on top, almost like a pig tied to a spigot over an open flame. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but a tree equally as large, if not larger, had fallen over the middle of him—forming the letter T. I couldn’t see anything of his lower half. The second tree seemed to swallow it.
I now understood why he couldn’t feel his legs.
A huge grin spread across his sweaty face. He waved at me as though we were meeting in a park, and not as if he lay crushed beneath a massive tree.
I had to force myself to smile back, tell my legs to move, to walk towards him. What am I going to do? What do I do?
His grin widened.
It took everything to keep moving toward him and not away. My stupid smile remained plastered to my face, as my mind fought to find something, anything to hang onto that could make this situation right.
He looked to me to save him, make everything better, but I knew I couldn’t.
I couldn’t fix this.
“I took the rope off,” he said as I drew closer. “I couldn’t reach my bag, but managed to get the rope undone, just like you told me to. It was tough, but I did it.” He seemed so proud and pointed to the frayed rope on the ground.
I nodded. “That’s good.”
“Did you bring water? I’m so thirsty.”
I nodded again and eased my backpack off my shoulders. As soon as I placed the bag on the ground, Callie wiggled her way out. She stretched, yawned, and then did as cats do—ignored us and licked her paws before swiping them over her face to groom herself. I tied the end of her leash to a thick branch and left her to her business.
“It’s probably warm.” I unscrewed the lid from the water bottle and held it up to his lips. “I filled it up a couple of hours ago. I didn’t think to get cooler water, but I can get more later.”
He couldn’t sit up but turned his head to the side, so I could pour the water into his mouth. It wasn’t an easy task. Much of the water ran down his neck and soaked his shirt. I poured a little, and then he’d gulp it and indicate he wanted more. When he had enough, he held his hand up.
“That was good.” He laid his head back against the rough bark. “I needed that. Warm or not.”
I nodded and took a couple of swallows of warm water, too.
“So, what do you think? Can you get this tree off me?”
I gagged a little on water but managed to swallow. It wasn’t as if the situation could be avoided, but I hadn’t expected to approach it so quickly. He appeared so content and happy that I wondered if he had even realized the tree lying across his lower half was even there.
But we were diving in, head first, clothes and all, and I didn’t know what to say. I had hoped for a little more time to process the situation and pray for a miracle of inspiration, that something would come to mind, and I could actually rescue him. It was what I wanted because the alternative terrified me.
I shook my head. “Marco, I’m not so sure I can.” Not without a giant forklift or two, though I didn’t say that last part.
He turned his eyes from me and stared upward at the darkening sky. He didn’t say anything for a long time, which wasn’t normal for him. Since I had no idea what to say to make any of this better, I remained silent.
“Can you get my bag? It’s over there.” He pointed beyond me. I turned to see his backpack stuck in a thicket of brush.
“Sure.” I slowly got to my feet again, doing my best to hide my pain. Everything hurt, but in that moment, it didn’t seem right to feel any pain or discomfort at all.
I untangled his backpack and carried it back to him.
“Can you reach in the front pocket for me?”
I nodded, undid the zipper, and slipped my hand inside. My fingers brushed across the cool metal surface of the handle. I looked at him as I slowly removed the large hunting knife. I stared at it then stared at him, not handing him the knife even though he reached his hand out for it. “What’s going on, Marco?”
He dropped his hand but kept his eyes on me. “Well, if you can’t get the tree off me, then you’re going to have to get me out from under the tree with that.”
Chapter 13
It was as if all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had been put together and I held the final one that would make it complete. As long as I didn’t place that last piece, my brain didn’t have to see the big picture.
“What are you saying, Marco?”
His dark eyes locked on mine. Seriousness coated his features. “I don’t want to die here.”
I didn’t want him to die there either. From the moment I saw him trapped beneath the mammoth tree, my mind took off at a speed I could barely keep up with to find something, anything, that could fix all of this. So far, I had no answers.
“I watched a movie once,” he said. “About this guy who went hiking on his own and somehow got trapped in a crevice with a giant boulder pinning his arm. He couldn’t budge the boulder, so he took out his pocketknife and cut himself free. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and that’s what we’re going to have to do. Cut me free.”
The last puzzle piece, despite all my efforts, slammed into place.
I looked at the knife in my hand and then at him. Maybe if he only had one leg trapped beneath the tree, I could do it. Not that I wanted to or even knew if I could cut someone’s limb off, but I might be persuaded to at least try.
But this wasn’t one leg. This wasn’t even about two legs. Marco’s entire lower half had disappeared beneath the trunk of the tree lying across him. How he was even awake and talking to me was beyond my comprehension.
“I’m not….” I paused, taking a moment to grapple with my thoughts and make sense out of them. “I mean, I don’t think … that in this case … that’s going to work.” Trying to be tactful yet truthful proved difficult.
He pointed at the knife. It felt as though I held a thousand pounds in my hands. “My knife’s bigger. The guy in the movie, I can’t remember his name, but it was totally a true story, based on real events, only had a pocketknife. This will be easier.” He smiled, as if smiling would make all the difference and convince me he was right about this.
There was no “easy” when it came to cutting-off someone’s limbs. If he had only a finger trapped under there, it would still be hard.
“It’ll hurt.” The words tumbled from my lips. It seemed easier to say than the truth —there was no way in hell he was getting out from under that tree. “It’ll hurt a lot.”
He continued to smile. “I can’t feel anything. I’m totally numb.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You don’t get it. This isn’t like that movie.” I hadn’t seen the movie myself, but I’d seen the trailer. Knowing the guy made it out of his situation — walking away minus an arm — made our situation completely different. There would be no walking away from this.
Not for Marco.
“We need to at least try.” He pointed at his pack. “There’s a lot of bandages in there we can use. I even think I have thread and a needle for stitches. If we—”
“It’s not going to work!” I couldn’t take his smile. There was nothing to smile about here. Thread and needle! Was he kidding? “I can’t do it! I can’t!”
“Then give me the knife.” He held his hand out toward me, his smile gone. “I’ll do it.”
Without thinking, I threw the knife as far away from us as I could. I needed to get rid of it and the weight that came with holding it in my hand. “You’re going to cut into your abdomen?” I shook my head. “That’s what you’d have to do. You’d have to slice right below your belly! Everything right below your navel. And then what? How do we bandage that up? How am I supposed to carry you off a mountain without the bottom half of your body?”
He wasn’t thinking right. I wasn’t thinking right, but he asked the impossible. As much as I wanted to avoid saying anything, it had to be said. However mean. Ho
wever insensitive. I sucked at sensitivity. I sucked at a lot of things as of lately.
Maybe I should’ve given him the knife. Maybe I should’ve let him try. I was pretty certain that after he nicked himself, poked it into his belly just a little, he’d forget the whole thing.
But I didn’t give him the knife. Instead I stood there, facing him like the meanest and most cruel person in the world. How could I have taken away what little hope he had left?
He tried to sit up. He rose himself a couple of inches and then fell back against the bark. He did it again, but fell back a little more forcefully, slamming the back of his head against the tree. As if a switch had been flipped, the cool and collected Marco I had walked up to earlier, the happy go-lucky guy, became a screaming, violent lunatic.
He punched at the tree lying across him until his fists became scraped and bloodied. When that failed, he sat up as much as he could and pushed against the trunk of the tree as if he could drag himself from under it by sheer force and determination — whatever mangled mess was left to drag out.
I stood, unmoving and unsure of what to do. What does a person do when there is absolutely nothing that can be done?
“Get me out of here! Get me out!” His face reddened. The veins on his forehead threatened to split right open from all the straining. “Ahhhhhh! Help me! Help me, please!”
He fell back against the tree again, sobbing. He stared upward with his arms dangling at his sides. “Please help me,” he whispered. “Please.”
His pleas for help weren’t directed at me, but to the skies overhead. I couldn’t help feeling as though I was letting him down by doing nothing.
I couldn’t breathe, not in that moment, as I watched his will to survive drain from him and hopelessness settle in.
Where my brain once ran wild inside my head, searching for ideas, it froze. Totally blank. Despite the fear of watching Marco’s physical and internal struggle, I’d never felt more helpless.
Callie leaped onto the tree near Marco’s silent, sobbing self. She didn’t seem at all bothered by the situation and placed both her small paws on his chest, looking at him.
He had his head turned to the side, but when Callie stepped fully onto his chest and laid down, Marco’s hand slipped from his side. He cupped his hand over her back. Slowly, he ran the tips of his fingers over her fur, a little at a time. She purred as she snuggled into him. If he moved his head just right, he could’ve rested his chin on top of her.
Callie did for him what I couldn’t. I watched, allowing her to comfort him for as long as he needed it. I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything. A sense of peace settled over Marco, which in turn settled over me.
“Have you seen anyone else? Any of the others?” he asked after several minutes ticked by. He kept his eyes turned away from me.
My body unfroze, thawing slowly at first and then a little more as each second passed. I stepped closer to him and sat at his side. “No,” I said. “No one alive.”
He gave a slight nod. “This was a pretty bad storm, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it was pretty bad.”
He was trapped between two trees, another person lay crushed beneath a tree that fell in front of me, Dale had been smashed against the base of one, and a dead man dangled upside down from another. Saying it was a pretty bad storm was an understatement.
He continued to pet Callie, stroking her orange and white hair. “I wonder if my dad’s okay.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see it. Since waking up in the grassy field, that’s all I’d been thinking of. “Me, too. I worry about my dad and Toby.”
He turned his head toward me. Redness rimmed his eyes, and his dried tears left two paths down his dirty cheeks. “Do you think they survived?”
“I hope so.” Dad and Toby needed to be alive. I couldn’t accept any other option. “I really really hope so.”
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then he opened them again, and stared at me. “But you did see something, right? You said, ‘no one alive,’ so you saw…” His voice trailed off, and I didn’t need him to finish to understand what he meant.
I nodded. “I wish I hadn’t.”
“But none of them were your dad and Toby, right?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.” I was fairly certain the body hanging from the tree wasn’t either of them, but I couldn’t say who it was for sure. We had several men in our group, of which I mostly kept my distance. These were Richard’s friends, after all, and since Richard was a crazy S.O.B, I stuck close to Dad and Toby.
“What about…” He took a deep breath and then swallowed hard before continuing. “…My dad?” Hopefulness filled his eyes. “You didn’t see my dad, did you?”
“I don’t know.” That was the truth. I had no idea if it was Richard or not. “I couldn’t really tell. The body wasn’t … it wasn’t in good shape.”
He thought about that for a minute. “My dad’s too tough to be killed by some stupid wind storm. He’s a fighter.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d thrown his knife. I didn’t need to remind him that Dale, a huge man, had been killed while I, a tiny teen girl, still lived. Death was random and hardly ever made sense.
“My dad was wearing his favorite plaid shirt. Mostly brown with large black lines that crisscrossed over it. It had a couple of large pockets he liked to carry things in.” Marco watched me. Although I tensed at the mention of brown plaid, I did my best to keep my face from revealing anything. “You didn’t see anything like that, did you?”
It didn’t necessarily mean the dead man was Richard. Lots of doomsdayers wore plaid and flannel and other weird crap that helped them feel like true winners over nature and the elements. Big pockets? I couldn’t recall one way or the other. Plaid meant nothing. Not really.
As much as I wanted to believe this, I had a sinking feeling, for Marco, that it really did mean something. Something really bad. I could have asked about a wedding band, but I didn’t want to go there. Not for him.
It was bad enough he was trapped beneath a tree with no good possible outcome. Mentioning the dead man might be his father would be horrible for him. I’d already dashed his hopes once by removing the knife from the scenario. To add the death of his dad would be cruel. I was mean where I had to be. I didn’t need to be mean this time.
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t see a shirt like that. I think it was green.”
Marco smiled, his first smile since I threw the knife and forced him to face the situation. “That’s good, thanks.” He sighed and drew Callie closer to him, tucking her close and petting her with both hands. “That means he could come back for me and get me out of this mess.” He tapped the tree. “We just have to hang on until he gets here.”
Apparently, there would be no facing of any situations today.
Chapter 14
“Are you hungry?” I grabbed both our packs and rooted around inside them even though I wasn’t hungry. If I didn’t try and focus Marco’s attention on something other than his dad coming to his rescue, I worried I might blurt out the truth. “I think I can come up with something to eat if I put our supplies together. What do you think?”
Callie, who had been more than content to lie on Marco’s chest and be loved, raised her head and perked her ears. She cocked her head to the side and meowed. I had obviously said something of interest. Smart cat.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess I should eat something. I haven’t eaten anything since this morning. Looks like your cat is hungry, too.”
She meowed again as if to make the point.
“She’s always hungry.” In some respects, we all were, but where I could munch on a protein bar, she’d turn her nose up at it. She had become less and less picky as time went on. If she wanted to survive, she had to.
I laid out our supplies to get a better idea of what I had to work with. Not a lot, but two nearly destroyed backpacks had more options than had we been forced to live off the meager supplies from just
one. Still, there wasn’t much.
I glanced above us. “It’s starting to get dark. It might be good to start a fire.”
“Yeah, a fire would be nice. Maybe the others could see it and find us easier.”
I’d had that same thought. If Dad and Toby were out there, smoke rising above the canopy of trees might draw their attention. At least I really hoped so.
“Do you even know how to start a fire?” He smiled at me. Where his smiling had annoyed me before, now I appreciated it. I’d experienced his opposite of smiling and didn’t want to experience it again. “You don’t seem like a fire-making kind of girl.”
I would’ve been offended had I not been honest with myself — I wasn’t a fire-making kind of girl. I hated camping. Even though Dad dragged us to the mountains all of the time, I didn’t participate in the outdoorsy stuff. Dad made the fires. Dad did the cooking. Dad and Toby put up the tent. I came along grudgingly. Sometimes I would lay in a hammock. That was my contribution.
Even when I’d traveled with Cole, I’d pretty much allowed him to take the lead.
My hand hovered over the remaining contents in the bag, touching nothing.
Cole.
It was the first time I’d thought of him since losing the bracelet. It was also the first time I allowed myself to fully acknowledge that he wasn’t coming to my rescue. I didn’t want to accept it, but after everything I’d gone through — was still going through — he hadn’t shown himself. The noises in the forest, the breaking of branches, had been nothing but false hope.
Cole was not coming back.
And I kind of hated him because of it.
“Well,” I said as I removed some loose matchsticks and held them up for him to see, “we’re about to find out if I can start a fire or not.”
“I’d help, but…” He smiled and pointed to the tree trapping him in place. “I’ve made a fire or two, so I can give you some pointers if you like?”
I wouldn’t have thought him to be a fire-making kind of guy, but I didn’t say so. He seemed pretty eager. “Sure, I could definitely use some pointers.” I wasn’t just appeasing him; I could use all the help I could get.
