“Damn!” he heard her mutter, and a second later even more of the rock came scuttling down the cliff and pattered on the top of his helmet. Dust blew into his eyes, and before he could do anything to clear his vision, the rope went loose—terribly loose—and he heard a pinging sound—nuts and pitons and hexes popping out of the rock—and Kristin screaming as she hurtled past. Instinctively, he had braced himself, clutching the rope, but the rapidity of her fall was too much—the anchor-pieces he’d hammered in held for no more than an instant before jerking free, the rope around his shoulder had fastened like a tourniquet, and he’d been whipped around, half-blind, just in time to see Kristin swinging headfirst, like a wrecking ball, into the cliff below. Her scream had stopped dead, and even as he felt his shoulder pop out of the socket in a blazing shot of pain, he’d managed, though he still could not imagine how, to arrest his own fall. He’d been dragged to the very edge of the narrow strip he’d been standing on, and lying flat, hanging on to the lifeline, all he could hear was the creaking of the rope and the grinding of the rock that was fraying it.
How long he stayed that way, he could never tell. And he had only the vaguest recollection of looping the rope around a block of stone, then running it through a fresh piton, hammered home with his one good hand. He called down to her, but there was no reply. He dug into his gear, found the emergency whistle, and blew on it as loudly as he could, but the sound simply echoed off the surrounding cliffs.
Before he could even think about hauling her up, he had to attend to his left shoulder, and with no one there to help, he would have to try to knock it back into place on his own. With the rope secured, he considered his options, and the only one looked like a flat wall of stone behind him. He lined himself up parallel to it, then—after taking a deep breath—bashed himself up against it. The arm exploded in pain, but it did not fall back into the socket. He dropped to his knees and vomited the remains of the high-protein bar he’d eaten. When he could stand up again, he wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand, then took another look at the side of the cliff. There was a section where the wall swelled, like a pregnant belly, and he thought that it might be possible, if he could stand the pain, to use that swell to massage the shoulder back. He approached it gingerly, trying to gauge the best way to use it, but he also knew that he had to move fast. Kristin was still swinging at the end of a rope, above a thousand-foot fall to the pine trees below.
He braced himself against the rock, laid his shoulder on it, and pressed hard—then harder; he could hear the popping and grinding of the joint, as the parts sought to regain their proper places, and though the pain was excruciating, he kept thinking only of Kristin, and pressed up, then down, then sideways. With each motion, he felt the parts realigning, until, like the pieces of a puzzle all of a sudden falling into place, he heard the shoulder click back to where it belonged. He gasped several times, and waited, terrified, to see if it would hold…but it did. His entire body was drenched in sweat.
He took a swig of water from the bottle in his backpack, then began the laborious process, a few inches at a time, of hauling Kristin up to the ledge. He had tried calling to her again and again, but ominously there had been no answer. He prayed that she had only been knocked unconscious and would come to her senses soon. But when her head appeared above the rim, and he saw that even the yellow safety helmet had been pulverized as if by a giant mallet, he knew that things were bad. Very bad indeed.
Once he had her body all the way up, he unfastened her harness and removed her backpack, which had ripped open in the fall; everything, including their cell phone, had spilled somewhere far below. He checked her heartbeat and her breathing, then unfurled his sleeping bag and laid it over her. He felt his own body going into a kind of delayed shock, and he stopped to take four Tylenol from their first-aid kit, then tried to eat another protein bar to keep his energy levels up. But his mouth was so dry he could barely chew, and he wound up just breaking it into pieces and washing them down with sips of water. He debated trying to give Kristin some water, but he was afraid of making her choke. Instead, he simply elevated her head on a mound of dirt and gravel he’d gathered, and waited.
The last rays of the sun were tingeing the Western Cascades a pale pink, and Big Lake, far below, was as black as obsidian. He remembered thinking that it was a beautiful sight, and that Kristin should really sit up and enjoy it. She loved sunsets, especially when she was off in the wilds somewhere; she used to say that she slept better under the stars than she did at the four-star hotels where her family sometimes stayed. The stars that night were out in profusion.
But the temperatures were dropping.
Michael made a windbreak out of whatever loose rocks he could assemble, then tucked his nylon jacket carefully around Kristin’s head, leaving her shattered helmet in place. Her face was blissfully unmarred, and she looked peaceful. Not in pain. And for that at least he was grateful. Until the first light of dawn, when it would be possible to begin the descent, he would just have to stifle his own fears, hunker down and try to keep her as warm as possible. For what it was worth, he blew on the whistle one more time, and as the sound faded away among the surrounding peaks, he scrunched up next to her under the sleeping bag, and whispered in her ear, “Don’t worry—I’ll get you home. I promise I’ll get you home.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
December 9, 1 p.m.
DARRYL FELT A LOT LIKE an astronaut who’d just been told he couldn’t take his space shot.
“But I feel fine,” he repeated as he watched Dr. Barnes make another note on his chart.