“Brad! Can you take off your jacket and hold it over the wound?”
He tries to laugh and it devolves to a pained cough. I can see part of the wreckage lays in the direction of his voice and I think he might be under it. “I’m pinned, Leo. There’s a piece of metal right through me.” He starts crying again.
I feel simultaneously relieved that I’m still alive, and like shit that I’m helpless to at least go comfort him, even if there’s little I can do to actually help him.
There’s nothing I can do but lie there for the next twenty minutes or so and listen as he films himself leaving more messages for his family. I eventually give up trying to tell him to hang on. It’s obvious we’re the only two who survived, or we would have heard something from the pilot and Mike by now.
But then there’s ominous silence.
“Brad?”
Nothing but the distant, eerie sound of trees creaking together outside my field of vision somewhere downslope in the fog. I feel like I’m stuck in a horror movie. That some huge monster reached up out of the fog, grabbed us from the sky, and ripped us open like a vengeful child with a toy.
“Mike?” I yell, but there’s no answer.
I hope that, as the day progresses, the sun will burn off the cloud cover but that doesn’t happen. If anything, it gets thicker and I shiver worse. I’ve passed out a couple of times when I tried to move, so I have no idea what time it is. Without shadows to give me guidance, I don’t even know what direction is north.
We train for a lot of shit. We train for stuff that has little to no chance of possibly happening. For events that have worse odds than hitting the lottery jackpot.
And yet…
Here I am.
Alive.
For now.
* * * *
I don’t know when the fire burned itself out but with the relentless cloud cover, it’s doubtful it would’ve been helpful for rescuers to spot us, anyway. It lifts a little, giving me about a hundred and fifty feet of visibility now, yet the air remains damp and chilly. The day creeps on, with the light slowly changing, growing dim as the day wanes.
Surviving the night out here will prove iffy. Temps will likely drop into the forties, or lower, and I’m damp. I won’t make it. I’m shivering, teeth chattering, and drifting in and out of consciousness when a low droning noise starts tugging at the corner of my attention.
It finally filters in that it’s the sound of a helicopter, and it seems to be getting louder.
I start screaming and waving my left arm. Hopefully, they’re equipped with FLIR and can pick me out of the wreckage. As the sound grows louder still, I feel the air swirling around me, sending the fog eerily spinning off in lazy circles.
When I look up, I realize they’re right over the top of me and I start crying as they lower a crewman to the ground not far up the slope from me.
I’m so choked up I can barely speak but I point when he makes his way over to me. “Brad. Please, go check on him. He said he was pinned in the wreckage.”
He tries to kneel next to me to check my vitals, but I shove him away. “Go check on Brad! He’s got a wife and kids. I can wait.”
The guy looks where I’m pointing and finally gets up to check.
They drop another guy, and then a rescue basket. The second guy is checking me over when the first returns, looking grim. “Four DOA,” he tells the second guy. “This is the only survivor. Let’s get him loaded and transported.”
They start to move me, and I scream in agony. They cut my sleeve and start an IV, pump me full of morphine, and I fuzz out a little. The actual lift and flight are a morphine-clouded blur. My next cogent memory is sometime late the next morning, when I awaken in the ICU. I find my grim-faced boss, Special Agent Christopher Bruunt, sitting next to my bed, on my right side.
I’m now clothed in a hospital gown and hooked up to IVs and monitors. The pain is a lot less, but I suspect I’ve had at least one surgery while I was out, and that they’re pumping heavy levels of painkillers into me now.
“Hey,” he says when he realizes I’m awake. “Let me get the nurse—”
“Brad,” I choke out. “He was alive and talking. He was filming messages on his phone for his family.”
Chris slowly shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Leo. Even if they’d reached you right after the crash happened, he wouldn’t have made it. He was crushed and impaled by wreckage. There’s no way they could have rescued him in time.” He squeezes my right hand. “The others died on impact. There’s nothing you could’ve done for any of them.”
I don’t release his hand, even though I start crying. “I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve—”
