Another gentle stroke along my cheek. The voice was closest to me. “How long until they get here?”
Wait, helicopter?
“Hard to say. I’ve got a flare I’m going to shoot off when they get close enough so they can find us down here. I’ve got their dispatch on standby.”
“Thank you.”
Wasn’t I dead?
Why the hell were they calling a helicopter if all they needed to do was belay my dead body up the ravine or wherever the fuck I ended up?
Sure, it was going to cause a little bit of an emotional scar to those there witnessing everything, but that was far better than wasting resources trying to do things ‘respectfully’.
Who cared about that when I was gone?
“Ivan’s going to start taking everyone back down. Lydia finally made it up.”
“Good.”A soft sigh. “Good.”
Why did all of this feel so very real and not some far off dream?
My heart thudded hard in my chest.
This was no out of body experience. I was trapped somewhere, not floating above it all like a ghost drifting in the wind attached to the place its corpse passed at. Like the kind of spirits mediums saw on the side of the highway after a major car accident.
My consciousness was grounded with no sense of anything other than this black void surrounding me.
How was that possible?
If I was still alive, wouldn’t I be in pain?
No way I landed all right and ended up with only a slight concussion.
Or—
Holy fuck, was I paralyzed?
My eyes shot open immediately, my sense of being having slammed back into my body with a kickstart that had my body twitching against the cold, solid ground. It was dark all around where I was, faint outlines of the trees and other brush I’d landed in hard to make out, even with whatever lantern lights were set up and trying to illuminate this little piece of land.
Pain ricocheted inside of my body the moment I became aware of this not being some kind of fucked up ferry to the afterlife, so intense it stole the air from my lungs. Minutes before this, I’d been in some kind of void inside of my own mind, free from whatever mortal shackles bound me to my own flesh and bone that I’d somehow shattered the moment I’d forced my eyes open.
A groan rumbled past my lips.
Holy fucking shit?—
Now, I felt it all. Every single scrape, bruise, break, and slice inflicted onto my body as I’d dropped and rolled against the sharp rocks below the base of the rock shelf. Whatever I’d landed on and eventually slammed up against to prevent my body from rolling all the way down to the base of the valley had cracked me apart in several things, making it nearly impossible to pull in a full lungful worth of air without causing my eyes to water.
“Marlow?” The voice near me sounded choked up with emotion, hard to make out through how clogged my ears still felt as blood rushed through my skull.
I groaned again.
“Oh my god.” A shadow passed over me, blocking out the light from the lantern closest to me. “Tell me where it hurts.”
Fucking everywhere.
Was it normal to feel like your body was simultaneously on fire and frozen to the core?
Or was that just a special gift given to me?
