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“Mayday, mayday, mayday!” he repeated, followed by his call sign and his coordinates. “Extreme temperatures, engine involvement.”
A voice from a tower two hundred miles north of their location spoke in his ear. “Roger that,” the voice said, stating what he’d just told the person. “Got you. Can you maintain altitude?”
“Negative,” Gage sent back. “Going down.” He heard Merry gasp, but he couldn’t even look at her right then as the voice said, “I read you five by five.”
“Starting now,” he said into the radio and eased back on the rudder, cutting his speed so the nose slipped lower. “Now!”
“Roger that. Assistance is on the way.”
* * *
MERRY HUGGED HERSELF AGAIN, but she couldn’t make herself close her eyes and imagine the meadow and the bubbles. She stared at the icy snow hitting the window, and the way the light was all but gone. Mountains? Had he said mountains? And they’re going down? An image of a huge peak coming at them shook her, the visibility cut so drastically that she wasn’t sure they’d see anything before they got to it.
She said a quick, silent prayer for both of them, and for the children. She looked at Gage. “Are we going to crash?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said. I have to cover all eventualities.”
She remembered something her father had mentioned years ago. “A couple of those Carson boys are big risk takers, going to be hard to control when they get older.” He’d explained that there was no other reason why Gage and Adam ended up at the lake one night, hanging from an outcropping like two puppets, just because they’d wanted to climb the face of the cliff right after a rainstorm.
At the time, she hadn’t given her dad’s remark much thought, and couldn’t recall anything other than he had been called out for the rescue party by the boys’ grandfather, old Jackson Wolf. “You climbed the cliff at the lake and dangled there with your brother Adam until your grandfather found you, didn’t you?”
He cast her a sharp glance. “What made you think of that? Adam and I missed the route we planned on the climb and got stranded. My grandpa found us. He said he had a vision or a hunch, but he came and got us down.”
“I bet you enjoyed it until you realized how far you’d gone, didn’t you?”
His expression got quizzical. “When you’re a kid, you think you’re immortal, and nothing can—” His words were cut off when the plane lurched violently, making her heart drop just as suddenly.
He was on the radio again, giving new coordinates, over and over again, and something else that she couldn’t make out. She just knew that they were well and truly going down, not up. The plane shuddered ferociously, dropping more quickly than she knew it should. “Go back,” she yelled. “Just turn around and go back!”
He ignored her hysteria, speaking into the radio again, giving what she thought were coordinates.
The plane dropped again, jarring everything in Merry, and she wanted to shake Gage and force him to turn around. But before she could do anything, he was speaking to her, not into the radio. “We can’t,” he said. “We’re past that point.”
“Are we going to die?”
He gave her one long look and said, “Listen to me. You are not going to die. I promise.”
As strange as it seemed, she believed him. She really believed him. “Okay,” she found herself saying. “Okay.”
He reached over and covered her hand that was holding on to the seat for dear life. “Now check your belts, then hold on. If I tell you to get down, put your head on your knees and clasp your hands behind your neck.”
“We really are going down now, aren’t we?”
“Yes.” Their eyes met for a moment, neither said a word, yet they seemed to be communicating just the same.
There was another sharp drop of altitude, deeper into the driving snow that blinded them to everything. Gage barked out, “Look for any level place, anywhere that’s flat!”
Before she could do more than blink, Gage was speaking into the radio again, “Mayday! Mayday!” he said urgently, followed by coordinates, over and over again
She scanned as much of the area as she could make out in the storm. Gage continued to shout into the radio, over the piercing roar of the laboring engine. “Merry! Find us a spot!”
She tried to speak, but her voice was lost to her. The engines faltered, then shut off. Only the rushing wind could be heard. “Glide, glide!” she screamed.
“Exactly,” he said as the plane glided lower and lower. He hit some switches and reported, “Fuel, shut.”
Merry stared out the window, her worst nightmare a reality. In this plane, with this man. This was all that was left of her life.
There was snow and more snow, backed by darkness. Merry strained to find anything of the ground below them, but just when she was ready to tell Gage there was nothing visible, he yelled, “Get down, head on knees, hands clasped behind your neck.”
She did so without argument, bending at her waist to press her forehead to her legs. Her last glimpse out the window was of blurred shapes through the snow, a towering one directly ahead, as if rising up to meet them.
“Stay down no matter what happens,” Gage ordered.
She heard Gage clicking something, as a numbing fear gripped her. She didn’t want to die with this man, someone she barely knew, and the children...she couldn’t even say goodbye to them or her mother and her stepfather. An aching part of her wished she had someone, truly that one person she’d always thought would come along sooner or later, a man who loved her, really loved her.
She heard the howl of the storm, felt the shuddering, a jerk, a violent upheaval and the plane dropping. With her eyes closed tight, she shuddered, whispering for her and Gage to be all right.
Her world condensed in one explosive moment when the plane hit something, and there was a cracking, ripping of metal, then the belly scraping violently against the ground before it sat upward, then crashed down again. It jarred every bone in her body. The impact willed her to go in the wrong direction, but the restraints wouldn’t let her go, digging into her, stopping her. The pain was intense.
She couldn’t scream, no words were there as the plane twisted to her left, spinning, snapping her head so violently that she felt a cracking blow by her ear. Then another snap produced more pain and disorientation. Before she could even try to assuage how she really felt, there was a gut wrenching jerk.
Then nothing.
No movement. No sound apart from the raging wind outside. Was this death? No, as pain seemed to be enveloping Merry, in her head and her ribs and arms. She tried to figure it out, the true agony came from the unbearable tightness of the restraints. No, she wasn’t dead. She was hurting. “Thank you,” she breathed, her words so simple but she meant them so profoundly.
She was grateful to be alive, pain and all, grateful for her mother and stepfather, the kids, and for Gage, who had done everything in his power to protect her. She stayed very still, almost afraid to move, wondering where they had landed.
She had to brace herself before she opened her eyes, a slit at first, then she blinked at what seemed like shadows, until she realized that the only lights were the security ones in the junction where the floor met the walls. The control panel was blank; there were no red lights, nothing was flashing.
She slowly, carefully, flexed her neck and shoulders, moved back into the seat and sank into the leather upholstery with a sigh. The pressure from the belts had eased, and she could breathe without too much difficulty.
“Oh, gosh,” she whispered, trying to absorb the lingering discomfort in her arms and head. Alive. She was alive. They were alive! They’d made it. “Gage, we—”
She startled as she turned to him. He was twisted away from her, huddled against the window, his hat gone and his headpiece askew.
“Gage, Gage?” she said, her fingers fumbling with the buckles of her restraints, her voice sounding almost like a sob. “Please, Gage, look at me. We did it. You did it. We got down safe!”
He didn’t move and the panic that she had fought to keep at bay during the last minutes of horror, welled up in her. “Gage...Gage.” She pleaded for him to respond and reached for his arm. “Please.”
Her fingers closed over the rough jacket sleeve, and she pushed closer, ignoring the way the partial console bit into her thigh. “Wake up, wake up,” she begged. The horror she felt was almost suffocating her, horror that he was wounded or even worse. She couldn’t even fathom the possibility that he was gone.
“You can’t die,” she wept. “Please, don’t leave me.” She tugged his dangling headset off and tossed it onto the backseat “Please, don’t leave me!” It was then that she received her second miracle in one day.
A groan, barely audible over the sounds of the storm, caught her attention, then his right arm twitched. Relief was heady, and grew when she saw his hand move, awkwardly lifting up as if he was going to touch his face, then it fell heavily back on his thigh.
“Oh, Gage, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she breathed.
Then he shifted, slowly moving away from the window and toward her, and relief surged through her again. But as he turned his head in her direction, the air almost drove out of her chest. There was blood, so much blood, all over the left side of his face. Blood matted his hair. Blood on the window. Blood dripping on his jaw, soaking his jacket collar, staining the whiteness of his shirt underneath.
* * *
FOR ONE INSANE MOMENT, Gage was twelve years old again, sneaking up to the “lake” in the middle of the night, climbing straight up the rocky face still damp from the earlier rain. Without warning, the world fell out under him. His hands were gripping the shale outcropping, and Adam was right with him, both of them screaming into the night.
Then everything he was thinking was gone and all he could feel was the pain. And the pain was real, very real, and someone was calling out to him, over and over again. He tried to move, to get his eyes to open, but all he could do was let out a low groan. That voice, calling to him, trying to reach through the misery in his head, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate, not any more than his eyes would. His hand fell, and the voice got louder. He tried to think beyond the pain, and then it came to him—the crash, the gut wrenching pain, and Merry. She was talking to him, urging him to wake up, and he wanted to see the world, and to see Merry.
A touch on his chin and yes, Merry was speaking very close to him. “Just open your eyes, please, just open your eyes.”
Gage fought to obey her. After several failed attempts, he finally managed to pry his eyes open. All he could see were shadows at first and then...
Merry.
“Yes,” she said on a choked sob, “Thank you, thank you.”
“What for?” he actually managed to get past his lips.
The dim light outlined her sweet face. But he didn’t miss the tears that were trickling down her cheek. She touched him, her hand connecting with his jawline. “For...” She swallowed hard. “For getting us down,” she said, then added quickly, “and for not dying. Thank you.”
He got his hand to cover hers, feeling her shake, but she didn’t move from the contact. “I hadn’t planned on dying,” he rasped.
With his free hand he felt along the side of his face, there was dampness there, but not from Merry’s tears. One touch and he knew before he even saw his fingers stained with red, that he was bleeding. He groaned and gingerly felt his cheek again.
“No, don’t,” she said quickly. “It’s...you’re cut just under your hairline, and it’s bleeding so much.”
He drew back, exhaled and grabbed the edge of his seat to get into a better position. A cut...not important. But what was important was him checking the plane, to make sure there were no fuel leaks, although he couldn’t find any chemical odor as he tested the air in the cabin. But he had to be sure, and he had to find out how badly the aircraft was damaged.
But just the simple exertion of sitting up a bit, stopped him dead. His chest raged with pain, and he closed his eyes for a moment. He caught his breath and opened his eyes to Merry. “Sorry, a bit light-headed,” he fudged.
“How can I help?”
“First aid. Backseat, underneath,” he said thickly.
He watched her move back, shifting to one side, getting over the console, then she was gone. “Got it,” she finally said. She reappeared up front with a large white tin with a red cross on its lid.
She looked at him again, barely suppressing a flinch, but he saw the expression on her face. “It’s just a cut,” he said softly.
That brought on a rush of nervous chatter from her as she awkwardly perched herself half on the console and half on her seat. She kept her eyes down on the contents of the tin once she snapped the metal fasteners open. “Yep, it’s first aid, all right, and I can do this,” she went on. “I’ve patched up a lot of kids after they’ve done something silly, and they lived to tell about it, so this should be a breeze...”
His head throbbed, and her rapid speech was grating, but he understood that in some way, this rambling was a coping method for Merry. Without warning, she stopped, and the silence amidst the sound of wind and driven snow, was almost deafening. Slowly, she looked up from the tin, and even in the low light he could see more tears shining in her eyes. He grimaced at the thought of her despair and him having no way to help her.
“I...thought for a moment that you were...that you were hurt worse than a cut.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “You aren’t, are you? You’re okay, right? Just the cut? Not any broken bones or anything else?”
He knew his ribs weren’t right, but he guessed that was from the restraints. And his head, well he’d been told often enough how hard headed he was, so he guessed it was a simple cut. “I’m okay,” he told her.
The exhaled breath said it all. “Good, good,” she murmured and looked back down into the tin.
“What about you?” he asked.
She hesitated, then shook her head. “No blood or lacerations, so I’m fine,” she said. “Just grateful that you knew what to do to get us down.”
“I made a mess of it,” he said flatly. “But any landing you walk away from is a good landing.”
The rapid-fire speech started up again as the wind moaned and drove snow against the plane. “Bandages, antibiotics, wipes, cotton pads, tape. bandages...four, no, five of them.” She pushed aside the perfectly packed supplies. “They even have gum and energy bars, pain pills and lollipops, of all things.”
“We’re covered,” he said, shifting in the seat and feeling a stab of pain on his left side.
She took some things out, laid the tin behind her on her seat, then turned to Gage. “We...we just need to stop the blood, and get a bandage on it.” She reached toward him, the tips of her fingers brushing at his hair, and a frown spread across her face. “You might need stitches.”
“Whoa, you don’t do stitches, do you?”
She drew back. “No, but I think when we get to Wolf Lake you should see your doctor.”
“Good suggestion, when we get there.” He wasn’t going to say anything about “if” they got there. Now wasn’t the time to give her a rundown on what most likely was going to happen.
She tore open a package that held a cotton pad. “I’m going to have to put pressure on the wound, so it might hurt.”
“Go for it,” he said, feeling a trickle of blood on his cheek. “It sure can’t hurt as much as the results of one of Adam’s dares that went wrong.”
She eased the cotton gently onto his wound, her free hand brushing at his hair to clear it from the mess. He winced before he could stop himself. Lots of exposed nerve endings, he thought as he closed his eyes and let her do what she had to do. When she sat back with a sigh, he opened his eyes again. The blood on her hands startled him. She reached for a wipe and started to make the deep red disappear.
“Thanks,” he said gratefully.
“What did Adam dare you to do?” she asked as she finished cleaning her hands, ripped open another package and tore off short strips of adhesive tape.
As she put on the bandage, he told her about his wild, but fun childhood. “The midnight run to the lake, and the cliff we almost fell off of,” he murmured as she wiped at his jaw and neck with a cool cleansing pad. “Adam dared me to do that.”
“I can’t believe you accepted those dares.”
“Sure did. And lived to regret them,” he confessed as she gently fastened the adhesive strips to the cotton pad and his skin.
She moved back a bit and studied him. “You need clean clothes.” She waved vaguely at his jacket and shirt that he knew were ruined. “They’re really...” She crinkled her perfectly straight nose. “Really messy.”
“I wish I had a change of clothes, but...” He shrugged. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
Unexpectedly, his offhanded quote brought the touch of a smile to her lips. “And I’d need to learn to ride if wishes were horses.”
His own smile nudged at him, despite the pain that seemed to be clamping around his head. “I’d teach you,” he murmured, intrigued by the softening in her face, and how she turned from him as he spoke.
She drew away, maneuvered back to her seat, miraculously getting the tin with the first-aid supplies back on the console before she dropped down in her seat with a whoosh. Finally, Merry glanced over at him. “Just tell me what happened to make us...land,” she said, obviously avoiding the word crash. “And what has to be done to get this thing going again.”
He blinked, hoping against hope she was joking. She wasn’t, so he answered her first question. “My best guess is, besides the storm, there was a problem with the electric and the motor was stalling, they couldn’t get in sync again.” He didn’t sugarcoat his next words. “And thankfully it doesn’t smell like there’s any break in the fuel lines, or it could have been a whole lot worse.”
He was going to continue to answer her, but was stricken with a sharp jolt of pain. He stayed very still. He had no choice. His ribs had chosen right then to feel like a hot vise around his chest. He kept that to himself. A broken rib was manageable if there weren’t any other symptoms that developed.
“I wonder how we look from outside,” he said, hating the unsteadiness in his own voice.
