“You take the lead,” Jimmy says through the earpiece in my helmet.
“Any suggestions?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” His voice is right in my ear; it’s a bit unnerving. “We’re either going to get lucky because he walked a long way in,” he continues, “or it’s someplace accessible by truck and he drove right up to it. That’s going to be a lot harder to find.”
I nod my understanding. “Cross your fingers.”
“And say a prayer,” he adds.
*
We stop for a chicken-and-rice MRE supper just after seven. I have a raging headache from staring at shine too long and pop three ibuprofens, chasing it with a couple gulps of warm water. While we eat, I wear my special glasses. The relief is almost immediate when I put them on, though the headache doesn’t entirely retreat; instead it lingers in the background at half strength.
Funny thing about the glasses is that the same thing happens if I wear them too long. It usually takes at least six or seven hours before I start to feel the low throb, so I’ve learned to alternate. I wear the glasses for an hour or two, then take them off for fifteen or twenty minutes. It seems to do the trick.
Sunset is at 8:43 P.M., so we figure we can search another hour and a half before we start losing the light. It doesn’t matter; not from my perspective. I can see shine without the light. It glows like neon; the darkness might actually help.
The problem is terrain.
One wrong turn, one miscalculation, could send us tumbling end over end down the side of a steep hill. Worse, the landscape is filled with small plateaus and ledges that could end with a sudden drop and a quick stop. Some are long falls ending in certain death, others are content to cripple and maim. In either case, the last thing we need to do is complicate the search by having to be rescued ourselves.
So we sit on the crest of a green hill with the sun wallowing in the western sky and eat chicken and rice while we weigh the risks of a nighttime search.
Caution loses; unanimously.
By 7:20 we’re rumbling down the hill with new resolve. The trail is here; we know it; we just have to find it. My glasses are tucked away in my shirt pocket and my headache is making a stunning encore performance despite the ibuprofen.
At 9:07 we turn on our headlights.
They’re little help against the darkness.
“See anything?” Jimmy says through the earpiece.
“’Course I do, just not what we’re looking for,” I reply. “I’m having a hard time filtering out the other shine. I don’t know if it’s because of this pounding headache or because it’s so dark out here. Everywhere I look is lit up like the Vegas strip on steroids.”
“Can you go on?”
“I have to.”
“No, Steps, you don’t. We can head back anytime you like.”
I just shake my head in the dark and keep riding.
By 12:30 A.M. the gas starts to give out and now I’m worried we won’t have enough to get back to base camp. Earlier in the evening, Ross tracked us down on one of the many dirt and gravel roads that snake their way through the hills. He topped off our tanks and our extra cans, but that was hours and miles ago.
Jimmy’s ATV starts sputtering two miles out from the command vehicle. Mine soon joins in and we nurse them along the last open stretch until pulling in and parking at the front of the command vehicle.
Our tanks are so empty you could drop a lit match inside and all it would do is choke and fizzle.
As we approach the command vehicle, saddle-weary and numb from too many hours on the quads, a steady droning emanates from inside. The sound spills from the RV in waves as Jimmy opens the door; I recognize it immediately and every trail-jarred bone in my body sags as the prospect of a good rest vanishes like mist before the sun.
Walt’s asleep on one of the rear beds, still fully dressed, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. And speaking of the dead, three bodies occupy the other bunks, each snoring in their own right, or at least breathing deeply. They’re exhausted beyond death, much the way I feel right now.
A SAR volunteer is manning the communications gear at the front of the vehicle, but at this point it’s almost symbolic, since Jimmy and I were the last ones searching. I give her a nod and notice she’s wearing a large pair of ear-enveloping headphones that aren’t plugged in. She sees me glance at the plug and shoots me a big grin, her eyes shifting quickly to the symphony of snoring bodies to the rear, then back to me. Despite my fatigue, a chuckle manages to clear my throat and I return her smile.
We decide to rack out in Walt’s Expedition, but when I open the rear gate we find an overflowing mountain of equipment jammed into a hill-sized space. Walt’s got it packed with random electronics, supplies, and tactical gear; everything from traffic cones to clipboards. He’s even got a bag of stuffed teddy bears that he hands out to kids who’ve been traumatized by an accident or an assault.
“Damn,” I whisper under my breath.
“Shotgun,” Jimmy says after quickly assessing the situation. He climbs into the front passenger seat and reclines the back as far as it will go. The seats are large and well padded; he doesn’t even say good night, just surrenders to fatigue, and in minutes he assumes the rhythmic breathing of slumber.
I curl up in the only other moderately viable spot, which is the second-row seat, and there I lie for the longest time with my feet pressed into one door and my head pressed into the other.
Slumber ignores me.
Slumber snubs me.