by Julia Kent
No Mike.
Squinting, he felt his muddy ass to find his phone. No phone. Must have fallen out somewhere. Great. He had nothing more than his shoes and clothing, and who the hell knew what condition Mike might be in when he found him.
A searchlight from above began covering the space where Jeremy suspected Mike had landed, Miles clearly thinking in tandem with Jeremy. The guy was a total asshole sometimes, but smart as hell.
A truck engine revved above, and then Jeremy watched as the F-150 disappeared, headlights on, pulling away. A pulse of panic shot through him. They were leaving?
No, he told himself. One of them was, probably to rush Mike Pine off to the hospital. They wouldn’t leave him here alone like this.
Right?
“Jeremy?” That was Dylan’s voice. “I’m here. Got the light. I can see you. Tell me where to point.” That answered his question: Miles had taken Pine, and left his partner. The partner who was a trained paramedic. Made perfect sense. He wondered if Alex was still up there, ready to give aid.
He wouldn’t let himself think about what condition Mike might be in when he found him. No shouting, no cries for help, no sound at all but the churning of the ocean waters and the sound of wind and rain against leaves, brush, shells and rock.
No sound wasn’t good. He knew that much.
“Mike!” he called out, trying two, three, four times until his voice got louder, his throat shredding with the effort. The pain made him pull back, his throat suddenly dry, a hacking cough his reward for his efforts. Pain was visceral. It required attention. It took him away from his imagined grief at what he was about to find.
And still no sound.
He began walking in a grid, imagining the curved shoreline as a half-circle, his eyes peeled for what should be easy to spot: a full-grown man’s body. The rain mixed with ocean water, the salt stinging his eyes, making everything blur.
And then he found himself facedown, hands stinging from tiny shards of shells in his palms, his cheek screaming with scrapes and saltwater, his feet in the air.
He had tripped over something big.
Not something.
Someone.
“Mike!” he said, but no answer came. Wiping away the rain from his half-blind eyes, he had to go by feel, finding Mike’s head and running his fingers carefully over the scalp, until he closed his eyes and willed himself to go slow.
The wet hair changed as he reached behind Mike’s ear, finding thick, gelatinous blood. No amount of light would make it more clear: Mike had a nasty head wound, and Jeremy’s stomach sank with the brutal understanding that the rescuer had just become a rescuee.
He held his fingers over Mike’s lips, relieved to feel steady heat coming out with breaths, and used one hand to rest his palm on the space over his heart.
Bah-DUM. Bah-DUM.
A tremor came out of Jeremy in the form of a sigh. His arms tingled with fear, his pulse racing, but by God, Mike was alive.
Thank God Mike was alive.
A shrill sound caught his ear, a tinny ring he couldn’t quite place. Mike’s arm twitched, then stopped, his leg kicking. Jeremy placed his hands on the limbs, wondering what the hell the brief movement meant.
And then that weird, high-pitched noise again.
Through the chaos of his external and internal worlds, both a storm of unparalleled craziness. He dimly realized he was hearing his phone’s ringtone.
The phone was somewhere within range, and he was being called.
Standing, he leaned into the harsh wind, willing himself to walk toward the sound. It stopped abruptly. Torn between needing to get back to Mike and worrying he’d lose the path, and needing the phone to explain what had happened, he froze. Paralysis set in.
He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Emotion drained out of him. He became a void.
Riiiiiiiiiiing.
Lydia had jokingly turned his ringtone to the old-fashioned rotary phone sound recently, and he so seldom used his phone as an actual phone for talking that he’d never bothered to change it back. Now he was grateful. The sound was distinct. Turning sharply to the left, he made his way partially up the slope, following a dim glow in the night.
If the phone faced up, he had a chance of finding it.
Riiiiiiiiiiing.
The searchlight above blasted him in the eyes, blinding him for a few seconds, and then he realized they were helping him, trying to highlight where the damn device might be. The wind and rain whipped against the trees, making shouting impossible at this point. The phone would have to do for talking to Dylan.
Jeremy just needed to stay calm enough to talk. Mike was still breathing. His heart was beating. Just get to the fucking phone and do whatever came next.
And then—on the last ring, he saw it. Lunging, he slipped, the crunch of bone against bone in his knee making him scream.
It pulsed with the kind of pain that radiates outward, like an atom bomb, but the ripples subsided fast. He would limp, but he could walk.
And now, he could talk.
Half-mad with fear and tension, he wiped the phone’s face and found the last number that called, tapping fast, hoping he could get the call through.
“Jeremy,” said a worried voice. “You found it.”
Jeremy’s body went liquid, his back sliding into the wet mud and sand, his face tipped up to the dark, skyless night, his eyelids pelted by more rain.
“Yeah. Got it,” he finally said. “And I found Mike. He has a bad head wound, but he’s breathing.”
“Fuck,” Dylan said. A new set of car headlights appeared, and Jeremy craned his neck back, seeing two more men appear, one in a jacket with a long reflector stripe on it, like a construction worker.
Or a cop.
Or a firefighter/paramedic.
The professionals were here.
“...Jeremy? You there?” Jeremy shook his head, water spraying out from him like a dog shaking its coat. Dylan must have been speaking the entire time.
“What?”
“I asked whether his pupils are dilated.”
“I don’t know. Now that I have a phone, I can use the flashlight app and look.” Jeremy sat up, forcing himself into a standing position, his knee screaming but functional. He turned on the flashlight app and moved his arm in a wide arch, finding Mike’s body on the second arc.
By the time he got there, Mike was groaning, and Jeremy damn near slipped and fell on him again.
“What?” Mike said stupidly, jerking his head from side to side, then screaming from pain.
“Hold on,” Jeremy commanded, stripping off his useless windbreaker and holding it over Mike’s face like a pathetic umbrella.
“Jeremy? What are you dooooo—” Mike’s words broke into a moan of deep pain, his hand scraping against shells and brush to reach behind his ear.
“You really bashed your head when you rolled down, Mike. Just sit still. Help’s coming.” Jeremy used his flashlight app to shine it in Mike’s face.
“What are you doing?”
Pupils contracted.
“Following orders,” Jeremy said with a sigh.
“What about Pine? He okay?” Mike said, his words coming through pain.
“We got him up there. He’s on the way to the hospital.”
“Good.”
“Thanks to you.” Unfamiliar tears threatened to incapacitate Jeremy, so he made a joke. “You just had to turn into your drama queen self and make an even bigger mess than Pine did, huh? Can’t let anyone else be the center of attention, can you, Mike?”
“That’s me. Attention Whore,” Mike groaned. “First a viral sex tape, now a bashed head on a Maine beach in the middle of nowhere.”
Jeremy laughed out of relief, not because it was fun. If Mike could joke, maybe he could walk.
“I ripped something in my hamstring,” Mike said as he struggled to sit up. He plastered both palms to either side of his head, covering his ears. “And I can barely hear.”
“That’s because of the storm.”
“No. It’s not. Storms don’t ring.”
They’d have to worry about that later. Right now, Jeremy eyed the sky in the distance. It lit up with a grotesque beauty that made every wet hair on his body stand on end. Lightning.
Tiny rivers had begun to form, trickles rolling past them like water in the city rocketing toward a storm drain. Jeremy didn’t like the idea of being at the receiving end, like a sewer. The ability to get up that cliff was narrowing, their window passing soon. They couldn’t leave by helicopter, not by boat, and if Mother Nature kept this shit up, they weren’t getting up that cliff, either.
He didn’t relish the idea of spending the rest of the storm hunkered down with his partner possessing a bleeding head wound.
“Can you stand?” he asked Mike, his arms aching from the strain of holding the soaking wet coat over them. Mike didn’t answer, his hands still plastered over his ears, biceps bulging, forearms shaking slightly with the kind of strain that comes from pressing very hard against something. Mike’s pain must be horrific.
Jeremy’s panic fought its way to the surface. He sucker-punched it to sleep.
“Look, we have two options here. We can walk up that hill again—without slipping, and without trying to help Pine—or we can wait out the storm.”
Lightning crackled in the distance, one of the streaks making a grim smirk.
“And I don’t like option number two.”
“What about a basket? Can they put me in one and winch me up the hill with a rope on the truck?”
“Are you serious?”
Mike nodded.
Oh, fuck. This was worse than Jeremy realized.
“Mike,” he said softly. “Is it that bad?”
Mike turned, and for the first time Jeremy saw the side of his face where the wound was. It was black, awash in blood that poured out, bubbling from a thin line where Mike had clearly been gashed against his right ear, the cut far worse than Jeremy realized, stretching from behind his ear to the eye socket.
“Holy shit. Can you see out of that eye?”
“I think so, but everything’s blurred.”
“Okay. Okay, okay, okay,” Jeremy muttered to himself, thinking the word over and over as he pieced together their next move.
“Coming down!” shouted a voice, and through the dark, wet night, Jeremy watched as Dylan scaled down the cliff, but facing it. The man was nuts. As he dodged bushes and tree roots, he looked like he was slipping, and yet there was a stable grace to his movements.
By the time he reached the bottom of the cliff, Jeremy understood why. Dylan was wearing a harness attached to a rope.
Duh.
Oh, man—what an obvious way to get someone up the cliff.
Dylan unclipped himself from the rope and jogged over, soaked to the bone like Jeremy and Mike. He dipped his head under the makeshift umbrella-coat and pulled out a tiny penlight flashlight, the kind medical professionals use.
“I thought Miles was coming?”
Dylan shrugged. “We’d better warn Darla’s Uncle Mike and Mike’s dad not to come anywhere near this damn shore,” Dylan said in an overly cheerful voice, clearly evaluating Mike as he made small talk. “All you Mikes are having a string of bad luck tonight.”
Mike grunted.
Without even bothering to pull him aside, Dylan turned to Jeremy and said, “Can he hold on to me as we climb? A second harness won’t work with this set-up. I can harness him to it, but I—”
“Whatever you think is best,” Jeremy said hastily, glad to have someone else in charge, someone with risk assessment and rescue experience. He put a hand on Mike’s shoulder. Mike grabbed it and squeezed, hard. All Jeremy could do was be here. Just...be here.
“Then we need to get over to the rope. Mike’s got to be able to hold on to it. We’ll use it to brace ourselves, and they can pull us and the rope up. Consider it security. You’ll walk in front of me and we’ll go slow, step by step. I’ll catch you if you slip.”
Mike said nothing. Jeremy nodded for him.
“As long as you can hold a rope and walk in front of me, we can do this.”
Mike sat up and flattened his soles against the ground. Jeremy saw blood trickling over his calves.
“You’re cut somewhere other than your head.”
“Yeah. My ass.”
“I’m being serious, Mike.”
“So’m I. My ass got cut.” As he bent and used his legs to push up, Mike’s statement became abundantly clear. The wet suit had a long, diagonal slash through it, from just above Mike’s left knee across both buttocks to his right hip.
Dylan let out a low whistle. “Ouch.”
“Tree branch, I guess,” Mike said, his body swaying. Jeremy threw the wet coat over his shoulder and urged Mike to lean on him. The sudden torrent of rain made his eyes sting. He could only imagine what the salt water felt like on wounds.
“Ready?” Dylan asked, flanking Mike.
“Like there’s an alternative?”
There was, but Jeremy didn’t want to talk about that.
No reply, but Mike took a first step, then a second. Jeremy wasn’t sure how to interpret the level of danger Mike was in. He wasn’t quite leaning on Jeremy, but the prospect that Mike could pass out at any given second loomed large in Jeremy’s mind. He seemed like a ghost, like an ancient man, moving slowly, with a stoop and a tension in his curled-in demeanor that made Jeremy’s mind jump to his worst fears.
Dylan reached the base of the cliff and hooked the rope to his harness, then guided Mike into position ahead of him.
“What should I do?” Jeremy asked.
“Stay here and enjoy margaritas on the beach?” Dylan joked.
Jeremy laughed, appreciating the stupid joke.
“Just wait here. No heroics. I’ll come back for you as soon as Mike’s done. The ground’s too wet and mudslides make it damn impossible to get up.”
“Have you done this kind of thing before?”
Dylan nodded. “Flood rescues. It’s been a while, but the training kicks in. You remember everything. It’s stored in the muscles, waiting to come out.”
“Thank you.” He grabbed Dylan’s shoulder, overcome by emotion suddenly.
Dylan clasped his hand. “Hey, man—your guy did it for mine. I’m just paying him back.”
“How’s your Mike?”
Dylan shrugged. “Less talk. More rescue. We’ll talk over a beer in a place where the only water stinging me is the lager hitting the back of my throat.”
And with that, Dylan and Mike began the very slow ascent up the cliff trail, Jeremy standing in the rain, watching helplessly as he put the life of his partner in the hands of the only other man he’d met who might understand what he was feeling this very moment.
Riiiiiiiing!
Jeremy dropped the phone, the ringtone combined with the phone’s vibration making him lurch. He bent over to grab it, losing his footing, and did the best wet imitation of Jerry Lewis a man could do.
“Jeremy?” Lydia’s voice was like having the clouds part and the shining sunbeams of Heaven appear.
And yet on it rained.
“Dylan’s got him now, pulling him up the hill, Lydia.” In his mind, he’d been narrating all of this the entire time to her, so his non sequitur didn’t feel like one.
“He what? Huh? Jeremy, what in the hell happened to Mike?” She was hysterical, her words nothing more than a choked sob, and yet he understood exactly what she was saying. If he weren’t so robotic right now, operating on autopilot and deep terror, he’d feel exactly like her.
“Mike slipped. Got a head injury—“”
“Oh, God!” she moaned.
“He’s bleeding and scraped up bad. Ripped his ass open.”
“That’s not funny!”
“Lots of blood loss. Dylan’s inching him up the hill right now.”
“Where are you?”
“At the bottom of the hill.”
> “Why aren’t you with them? Climbing up?”
“Because the hillside is too slick. We don’t need me to fall down this fucking cliff, too.”
“Is it bad?” She didn’t mean the cliff. If she’d asked in a normal voice, he probably could have replied with a pre-programmed soothing tone that he knew he was supposed to muster.
But she whispered. And when Lydia whispered, she sounded like a tiny, scared little girl.
His heart snapped in two.
“Oh, Lydia,” he said, his voice choppy. “Mike’s face got split. It’s bad. His ass, too.”
Silence.
“His ass got split? You’re not joking? Did I hear that right, Jeremy? Did you just say that Mike’s ass got split?”
“Yes.”
“And his face?”
“A cut from behind one ear all the way to the eye socket.”
“Cut by what?”
“Probably a tree branch.”
“Damn. Are you okay?”
“Shaken. Freezing. Freaked. But I haven’t broken any bones or cut my scalp to the bone, so in light of everything else, I think I’m probably the most together person in this entire group right now.”
Silence.
“Which means we’re totally fucked, Lydia.”
“Quit joking around.”
“Please don’t take my one defense mechanism away from me. If you do, I’ll just collapse here on the sand and wither away.”
“Oh, Jeremy,” she whispered again. “I’m sorry. You’ve been so brave. I’m here going out of my mind, and all I knew was that Mike fell and no one updated me and—” She made a mewling sound, like an injured, small animal, and Jeremy’s heart did the impossible.
It broke in half again.
“Lydia, no. No,” he murmured, all the words in the world dissolving into cotton in his mouth. He wasn’t good at this. He sucked at this. Others could play the hero or say all the right things at the right times. Jeremy was an affable goofball who joked his way out of messes.
He didn’t solve them.
That had been Mike’s role, for all the years they’d been friends. Mike was the strategic thinker, the one who planned ahead, who had five- and ten-year plans, the one who really got it when their ex, Dana, dumped them—and who could move on to whatever next step life intended for him in his grand vision for himself.
