In an offhand way, she noticed something pinging in her knee when she knelt beside him. Other pains popped in and out of her consciousness. Her head thrummed, as if swollen to ten times its size. Didn’t matter. Her fingers were red and raw and ached like someone had taken a hammer to them, her feet were bleeding through the cold, wet socks she still wore, leaving dark footprints in their wake. Nothing mattered but getting dry and getting warm.
Even words made a difference, so she used them, out loud. “Dry.” She pulled out the first thing she found—a boot enclosed in plastic. No. It dropped to the side. Another boot. Two more.
Something else—soft and rolled up—also in plastic.
“You get Best Prepared in high school, Elias? Huh?” No way could these ice-block fingers open the zip lock, so she brought it to her mouth and bit through it, gnawing like a beaver, then pulled the plastic apart. Sleeping bag.
She spread it out on the rocks, turned to him, hands out, and hesitated.
His clothes.
Something like despair took over when she looked at how big and soaked he was—how many layers he’d put on. How impossible it would be to undress him.
Then she remembered the knife at her waist.
The coat she unzipped. The next layer, too. She did hers, scrambling out of them as fast as she could manage. One layer, another, another, each gripping at her skin like heavy, wet eels.
Next, him. His socks came off, flung aside, his outer pants, then the inner layer—of which, she noticed, there was only one. Bastard made her put on three!
It was his shirt she had to cut off, the thinner one, too, before she stopped dead at the gash in his side, oozing blood, just above his hip.
She sagged, breathed for a second or two, then forced herself back into motion.
From his pack, she grabbed another wet bag, ripped it open, pulled out whatever item of clothing was in it and shoved it against the wound. Damn bullet got his abdomen. How was he not dead?
She swiped at the blood and eyed it again. Not a bullet hole. A graze. Something in her belly released, letting her breathe almost normally again. Blood seeped out, but she’d seen worse.
Time to move him. No, wait. Underwear. As efficiently as she could manage with lead weights for limbs, she slid her blade from his waist down his thigh, slicing the fabric open, without sparing a second’s thought to his nudity.
Back to the underarm hold, she hauled him up to the side, away from the remnants of wet clothes and onto the sleeping bag, ignoring his pained moan. Pained moans were good. If he cursed her right now, she’d be ecstatic.
Another scavenging dive into the backpack—more dry clothing that she threw on top of him, stopping when a particularly rough bout of trembling took her over. Shit. Shit, she couldn’t see straight. Panic tried to edge in.
She used action to push it back.Get dry.
Working hard to stave off exhaustion, she looked at herself, tore the last clinging layers from her body, grabbed the emergency blanket from his bag… Another reach… There. Something bulky and soft. The other sleeping bag, followed by another plastic package.Oh, hallelujah!Foot warmers. She knew better than to put those right on his skin, but with a layer or two of insulation, they would help.
She turned on aching knees, caught sight of his massive, shaking form, and stuttered to a stop.
How should she…?
Never mind. There weren’t a million choices of how two people could get warm together. There was one. And she set out to do it.
***
Elias groaned at the painful wrenching of one foot, then the other.Back off! he tried to say, though all he produced was a garbled mumbling.
What the hell was pulling at his hands? He shoved at them, hard. Useless. Useless. He didn’t have the energy to protest. His eyes closed, darkness beckoning like a bridge to the afterlife.
Someone called his name.
No. No.
A jackhammer to his head—loud and abrasive. He tried to swat it away, but couldn’t move. Couldn’t lift his arm or his head or make a word with a tongue that was a big, dry slug in his mouth and—
Liquid flowed in and back out, gagging him so he turned and retched. More of it, more.
Over and over. Again. Again. Burning, pain, tingling, moaning. Low, guttural throbbing every time he breathed a fiery path from mouth to lungs. Excruciating agony.
