by Sandra Brown
As soon as he turned his back, Rusty slipped a colorless lip gloss, a bottle of shampoo and a razor into the bag. He might not need to shave before they reached civilization, but she was sure she would.
She jumped guiltily when he turned back and asked her, “Do you know how to shoot one of these?” He held up a hunting rifle.
Rusty shook her head no. Only yesterday she’d seen a beautiful Dall ram being brought down with a rifle just like that. It was a distasteful memory. Rather than celebrating the kill, her sympathies had been with the slain animal.
“I was afraid of that,” Cooper muttered. “But you can carry it anyway.” He hooked the heavy rifle over her shoulder by its leather strap and placed another, presumably his own, over his shoulder. He shoved a fearsome-looking pistol into his waistband. Catching her wary glance he said, “It’s a flare gun. I found it in the cockpit. Keep your ears open for search planes.”
By seaming up the neck of a sweater with a shoelace, he had fashioned a backpack out of it. He tied it around her neck by the sleeves. “Okay,” he said, giving her a cursory inspection, “let’s go.”
Rusty cast one last sad, apprehensive look at the wreckage of the airplane, then struck out after him. His broad back made an easy target to follow. She found that by keeping her eyes trained on a spot directly between his shoulder blades, she was able to put herself into a semitrance and ward off her memory of the bodies they had left behind. She wanted to lapse into forgetfulness.
She plodded on, losing energy with each step. Her strength seemed to be seeping out of her with alarming rapidity. She didn’t know how far they had gone, but it couldn’t have been very far before it seemed impossible for her to put one foot in front of the other. Her legs were trembling with fatigue. She no longer swatted aside the branches that backlashed, but indifferently let them slap into her.
Cooper’s image grew blurry, then began wavering in front of her like a ghost. The trees all seemed to have tentacles that tried to catch her clothes, tear at her hair, ensnare her ankles, impede her in any way possible. Stumbling, she glanced down at the ground and was amazed to see that it was rushing up to meet her. How extraordinary, she thought.
Instinctively, she grasped the nearest branch to break her fall and called out weakly, “Coo...Cooper.”
She landed hard, but it was a blessed relief to lie on the cool ground, damp and soggy as it was. The leaf mold seemed like a compress against her cheek. It was a luxury to let her eyes close.
Cooper murmured a curse as he shrugged off his backpack and let the strap of the rifle slide down his arm. Roughly, he rolled her over onto her back and pried her eyelids open with his thumbs. She gazed up at him, having no idea that her face was as pale as death. Even her lips were as gray as the clouds overhead.
“I’m sorry to hold you back.” She was vaguely surprised that her voice sounded so faint. She could feel her lips moving, but she wasn’t sure she had actually spoken aloud. It seemed imperative to apologize for detaining him and being a nuisance in general. “I’ve got to rest for just a minute.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, uh, Rusty. You rest.” He was working at the hook and eye buried deep in the fox-fur collar of her coat. “Do you hurt anywhere?”
“Hurt? No. Why?”
“Nothing.” He shoved open her coat and plunged his hands inside. He slipped them beneath her sweater and began carefully pressing his fingers against her abdomen. Was this proper? she thought fuzzily. “You might be bleeding somewhere and don’t know it.”
His words served to clarify everything. “Internally?” Panicked, she struggled to sit up.
“I don’t know. I don’t— Hold it!” With a sudden flick of his hands, he flipped back the front panels of her full-length coat. His breath whistled through his teeth. Rusty levered herself up on her elbows to see what had caused him to frown so ferociously.
The right leg of her trousers was soaked with bright red blood. It had also made a sponge of her wool sock and run over her leather hiking boot.
“When did you do this?” His eyes, razor sharp, moved up to hers. “What happened?”
Dismayed, she looked at Cooper and wordlessly shook her head.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”
“I didn’t know,” she said weakly.
He slipped his knife from its scabbard. Pinching up the blood-soaked hem of her trousers, he slid the knife into the crease and jerked it upward. With one heart-stopping stroke, it cut straight up her pants leg, neatly slicing the fabric all the way from her hem to the elastic leg of her underpants. Shocked and fearful, she sucked in her breath.
Cooper, gazing down at her leg, expelled a long, defeated breath. “Hell.”
Chapter Two
Rusty’s head began to buzz. She felt nauseous. Her earlobes were throbbing and her throat was on fire. Each individual hair follicle on her head felt like a pinprick. The pads of her fingers and toes were tingling. She’d fainted once after having a root canal. She knew the symptoms.
But, damn, did they have to afflict her here? In front of him?
“Easy, easy.” He grasped her shoulders and lowered her to the ground. “You don’t remember hurting yourself?” She shook her head dumbly. “Must have happened when we crashed.”
“I didn’t feel any pain.”
“You were too shocked. How does it feel now?”
Only then did she become aware of the pain. “Not bad.” His eyes probed hers for the truth. “Really, it’s not that bad. I’ve bled a lot, though, haven’t I?”
“Yeah.” Grim-faced, he rummaged through the first-aid kit. “I’ve got to sponge up the blood so I can see where it’s coming from.”
He tore into the backpack she’d been carrying and selected a soft cotton undershirt to swab up the blood. She felt the pressure of his hands, but little else as she gazed up through the branches of the trees overhead. Maybe she’d been premature to thank God for being alive. She might bleed to death lying here on the ground. And there wouldn’t be anything Cooper or she could do about it. In fact, he would probably be glad to get rid of her.
His soft curse roused her from her macabre musings. She tilted her head up and looked down at her injured leg. Along her shinbone a gash ran from just below her knee to just above her sock. She could see flesh, muscle. It was sickening. She whimpered.
“Lie down, dammit.”
Weakly, Rusty obeyed the emphatic order. “How could that happen without my feeling it?”
“Probably split like a tomato skin the moment of impact.”
“Can you do anything?”
“Clean it with peroxide.” He opened the brown opaque plastic bottle he’d found in the first-aid kit and soaked the sleeve of the T-shirt with the peroxide.
“Is it going to hurt?”
“Probably.”
Ignoring her tearful, frightened eyes, he dabbed at the wound with the peroxide. Rusty clamped her lower lip with her teeth to keep from crying out, but her face twisted with anguish. Actually, the thought of the peroxide bubbling in the gash was as bad as the pain.
“Breathe through your mouth if you feel like vomiting,” he told her tonelessly. “I’m almost finished.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and didn’t open them until she heard the sound of ripping cloth. He was tearing another T-shirt into strips. One by one he wrapped them around her calf, binding her lower leg tightly.
“That’ll have to do for now,” he said, more to himself than to her. Picking up his knife again, he said, “Raise your hips.” She did, avoiding his eyes. He cut the leg of her trousers from around her upper thigh. His hands worked beneath her thighs and between them. His callused knuckles brushed against her smooth, warm skin, but she needn’t have felt any embarrassment. He could have been cutting up a steak for all the emotion he showed.
“You damn sure can’t walk.”
“I can!” Rusty insisted frantically.
She was afraid that he would go off without her. He was standing
over her, feet widespread, looking around. His brow was beetled and beneath his mustache she could tell that he was gnawing on the inside of his cheek as though giving something careful consideration.
Was he weighing his options? Deciding whether or not to desert her? Or maybe he was thinking of killing her quickly and mercifully instead of letting her die of her wound.
Finally he bent down and, cupping her armpits in his palms, lifted her into a sitting position. “Take off your coat and put on that ski jacket.”
Without an argument, she let the fur coat slide from her shoulders. Using the hatchet he’d brought along, Cooper hacked down three saplings and stripped them of their branches. Silently Rusty watched as he fashioned them into an H, only placing the crossbar higher than normal. He bound the intersections with rawhide tongs, which he’d taken from the boots of the men they’d buried. Then he took her fur coat and ran a sleeve over each of the tops of the two longer poles. Rusty flinched when he stabbed through the fur and satin lining, gouging out a hole in the bottom of her precious fox coat.
He glanced up at her. “What’s the matter?”
She swallowed, realizing that he was testing her. “Nothing. The coat was a gift, that’s all.”
He watched her for a few seconds more before making a similar hole in the other side. He then ran the poles through the holes. The finished product was a crude travois. No self-respecting American Indian would have claimed it, but Rusty was impressed with his ingenuity and skill. And vastly relieved that he obviously didn’t plan to leave her behind or otherwise dispose of her.
He laid the rough contraption on the ground. Turning to her, he caught her under the knees and behind the back and lifted her. He laid her on the soft fur, then piled several pelts on top of her.
“I didn’t see any animal up there with a hide that looked like this,” she said, running her hand over a skin of short, fine wool.
“Umingmak.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what the Inuit called the musk-ox. Means ‘the bearded one.’ It wasn’t my kill; I just bought the pelt. It’s very warm.” He tucked the wool around her and threw another pelt on top of that. “It’s up to you to stay on and keep covered.”
Standing, he wiped perspiration off his brow with the back of his hand. He winced when he grazed the bump on his temple. Rusty would have gone to bed for a week if she had sustained a blow like that; it must be killing him.
“Thank you, Cooper,” she said softly.
He froze, glanced down at her, nodded quickly, then turned and began gathering up their paraphernalia. He tossed both backpacks onto her lap, along with both rifles. “Hang on to those, too, will you?”
“Where are we going?”
“Southeast,” was his succinct reply.
“Why?”
“Sooner or later, we’ll bump into an outpost of civilization.”
“Oh.” She dreaded moving, anticipating that the journey wasn’t going to be a joyride. “May I have an aspirin please?”
He unpocketed the plastic bottle and shook two aspirin tablets into her hands.
“I can’t take them without water.”
He made an impatient scoffing sound. “It’s either dry or with brandy.”
“Brandy, please.”
He passed her one of the flasks, watching her closely. She bravely put the spout to her mouth and took a hefty swallow to wash down the aspirin tablets. She choked and sputtered. Tears filled her eyes, but with dignity and poise she returned the flask to him. “Thank you.”
His narrow lips twitched with the need to smile. “You might not have any common sense, but you’ve got guts, lady.”
And that, she thought, was as close to a compliment as she was ever likely to get from Cooper Landry. He secured the trunks of the saplings beneath his arms and moved forward, dragging the travois behind him. After having gone only a few teeth-jarring, butt-bruising yards, Rusty realized that she wasn’t going to be much better off in the travois than she would have been walking. It required all her concentration just to keep from sliding off. Her bottom would be black and blue with bruises— legacies of the rocks it encountered every grueling step of the way. She dared not even think of the satin lining of her coat being ripped to shreds by the forest debris as it was hauled over the rough ground.
It grew progressively darker and colder. A light precipitation began—snow grains she thought the meteorologists called the stuff, pellets of ice no larger than grains of salt. Her injured leg began to ache, but she would have bitten her tongue in two before she complained. She could hear Cooper’s labored breathing. He wasn’t having an easy time of it either. If it weren’t for her, he could cover three times the distance in the same amount of time.
Darkness closed in suddenly, making it perilous for them to continue over the unfamiliar terrain. He stopped in the next clearing he came to and dropped the poles of the travois. “How’re you doing?”
She didn’t think about how hungry, thirsty, and uncomfortable she was. She said, “Fine.”
“Yeah, sure. How are you really?” He knelt down and whipped off the covering of furs. Her bandage was soaked with fresh blood. He quickly replaced the furs. “We’d better stop for the night. Now that the sun has set, I can’t tell which direction I’m going in.”
He was lying, only saying that to make her feel better. Rusty knew that he would keep going if it weren’t for her. It was doubtful that he was afraid of the dark or that inclement weather would faze him. Even though he’d been dragging her for hours, he appeared to have enough stamina to go at least another two.
He circled the clearing and began shoveling pine needles into a pile. He spread the pelts over them and came back for Rusty.
“Cooper?”
“Hmm?” He grunted with the effort of lifting her off the travois.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
She couldn’t see him clearly in the darkness, but she could feel his shocked stare. Embarrassed beyond belief, she kept her head down. “Okay,” he replied after a moment. “Will your leg support you while—
“Yes, I think so,” she said in a rush.
He carried her to the edge of the clearing and gently lowered her to stand on her left leg. “Brace yourself against the tree,” he instructed gruffly. “Call me when you’re done.”
It was much more difficult than she had expected it to be. By the time she had refastened what was left of her trousers, she was shaking with weakness and her teeth were chattering with cold. “All right, I’m finished.”
Cooper materialized out of the darkness and lifted her into his arms again. She would never have thought a bed of pine needles and animal pelts could have felt so good, but she sighed with relief when he laid her on it and she was able to relax.
Cooper packed the furs around her. “I’ll build a fire. It won’t be much of one. There’s not enough dry wood. But it’ll be better than nothing and might help ward off visitors.”
Rusty shivered and pulled the furs over her head, as much to protect her from the thought of wild animals as the icy precipitation that continued to dust the ground. But the increasing pain in her leg wouldn’t let her doze. She grew restless and finally peeped out from beneath the covering. Cooper had succeeded in building a sputtering, smoky fire. He’d lined the shallow bowl he’d scooped out of the ground with rocks to keep it from igniting her bed.
He glanced over at her and, unzipping one of the many pockets in his coat, took something out and tossed it to her. She caught it one-handed. “What is it?”
“Granola bar.”
At the thought of food, her stomach rumbled noisily. She ripped open the foil wrapper, ready to stuff the whole bar into her mouth. Before she did, she got hold of herself and paused. “You...you don’t have to share with me,” she said in a small voice. “It’s yours and you might need it later.”
His gray eyes looked as hard and cold as gunmetal when he turned his head. “It isn’t mine. I found it in a coat pocket th
at belonged to one of the others.”
He seemed to take brutal delight in telling her that, implying that if the granola bar were his, he’d think twice before sharing it with her.
Whatever his intention, he had spoiled it for her. The bar tasted like sawdust in her mouth; she chewed and swallowed it mechanically. The tastelessness was partially due to her thirst. As though reading her mind, Cooper said, “If we don’t find water tomorrow, we’re in trouble.”
“Do you think we will?”
“I don’t know.”
She lay amid the furs contemplatively. “Why do you think the plane crashed?”
“I don’t know. A combination of things, I guess.”
“Do you have any idea where we are?”
“No. I might have a general idea if it hadn’t been for the storm.”
“You think we were off course?”
“Yes. But I don’t know how far.”
She rested her cheek against her hand and stared into the feeble flame that was struggling for life. “Had you ever been to Great Bear Lake before?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“Several years ago.”
“Do you do a lot of hunting?”
“Some.”
He wasn’t exactly an orator, was he? She wanted to draw him into conversation to keep her mind off the pain in her leg. “Do you think they’ll find us?”
“Maybe.”
“When?”
“What do you think I am, a damned encyclopedia?” His shout bounced around the ring of trees surrounding them. He came to his feet abruptly. “Stop asking me so many questions. I don’t have the answers.”
“I just want to know,” she cried tearfully.
“Well, so do I. But I don’t. I’d say the chances of them finding us are extremely good if the plane was still on the flight plan and extremely remote if it was too far off, okay? Now, shut up about it.”
Rusty lapsed into wounded silence. Cooper prowled the clearing in search of dry tinder. He added a few sticks to the fire before moving toward her. “Better let me tend to your leg.”
