Then the pain kicked in, knife-sharp, sheering through her left thigh. If the bullet had hit her femoral artery, she was dead.
Fueled by adrenaline, she crawled farther away from the edge, pulled off of her backpack, and searched with aching fingers for her first-aid kit. Inside, she had Quikclot bandages and a tourniquet. She found the kit, pulled it out, then checked the wound.
Relief flooded her.
The wound was low on the outside of her thigh. Though it bled heavily and hurt like hell, it wasn’t an arterial bleed.
Gizmo whimpered, snuggling against her, cold, exhausted, afraid.
“It’s g-going to b-be okay.” She packed the clotting bandages inside her jeans and used the tourniquet to bind them into place. She couldn’t do more than that, or she would freeze to death right here.
She tried to stand, but the pain was too much. Instead, she crawled again. “H-help me find the w-way back, buddy.”
She tried to follow their tracks, but wind and snow quickly erased them. Soon, there was no trail to follow, nothing but Gizmo’s senses to lead them through the landscape of white.
Keep going. Keep. Going.
Soon, it was too much even to crawl. She stopped to check the bandages and saw that they had bled through. She needed to apply more, needed to stop the blood loss.
But cold enfolded her like a tomb, pinning her down, dulling her mind.
“I-I’m sorry. I’m s-so sorry. Good … b-boy, Gizmo. Run h-home. G-go.”
He licked her cheeks, whimpering for her.
Her last thought as she lapsed into unconsciousness was of Harrison.
* * *
“You’re almost directly downhillfrom her signal. The blip quit moving a few minutes ago.”
“Copy that.” Conrad jammed the satellite phone back into his pocket, his sense of dread growing into the fear that they were already too late. “He says we’re just downhill from her signal. He says she isn’t moving.”
That meant that the phone had been abandoned—or that Kenzie had stopped. In this cold, that would be fatal.
Hold on, honey. We’re almost there.
The five of them started up the mountain at a jog again. They practiced for situations like this. Anyone who couldn’t complete a four-mile uphill trail run with a full pack in thirty-five minutes didn’t make the Team. It kept a person warm in the cold, but running on talus at altitude in snow came with risks. One slip, one stone flipping beneath your feet, and you’d have a broken ankle and be in need of a rescue yourself.
Conrad was faster than the others. He had also climbed at more than twice this altitude. Running up a talus slope in a blizzard at eleven thousand feet was a helluva lot easier than slogging up a snowfield at twenty-eight-thousand feet. But none of this would matter if he didn’t reach Kenzie soon.
With every step, his last words to her haunted him. He couldn’t let those words be the last thing she’d heard from him. He couldn’t.
From somewhere in the distance, Conrad thought he heard a dog bark.
He stopped, listened, heard only wind.
He started forward once more—and he heard it again. He looked around but saw nothing. He whistled. “Gizmo! Gizmo, come here, boy!”
Hawke stopped beside Conrad, breathing hard. “I don’t see him.”
“I don’t see him either, but I thought I heard… There!”
Up above them and a little to their right, Gizmo bounded toward them, snow in his golden fur.
“Come here, boy! Come here!” Conrad knelt down, took the dog into his arms. There were booties on his feet—proof of Kenzie’s love for him. “God, am I happy to see you. What a good boy you are.”
Belcourt, Megs, and Moretti caught up with them.
