“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
Then Mitch called Beth to tell her the news. “We’re doing everything we can. Unfortunately, they won’t mount a rescue until tomorrow morning. We left him with everything we could. He told us to tell you that he loves you and that he’ll be okay.”
Mitch hung up again. “To hell with this. Let’s buy a thermos, fill it with coffee, and head back up to him. We can ride the storm out with him.”
“Shit.” Megs walked up to the counter. “We need a fresh pot of coffee. Do you sell hand warmers?”
“In the summer, ma’am? No, we do not. I’ll thank you to watch your language.”
Megs glared at him. “Our friend is in dire straits, and you worry about profanity.”
They bought the thermos, coffee, beef jerky, cheese, crackers, and plastic garbage bags to help keep them dry, and then drove back to the trailhead. They made holes in the garbage bags for their head and arms to keep the rain from drenching them and started back up the mountain, climbing with the light of their headlamps. But after about an hour, their headlamps began to fail because of the rain, leaving them in the dark.
“Megs, we have to turn back!” Mitch shouted to be heard above the storm. “If we can’t see where we’re going, we might walk off a cliff or miss the route and end up on another part of the mountain!”
“Damn it! We should never have left him!”
Defeated and demoralized, they struggled to find their way back to the parking lot, where they once again took shelter in Dean’s vehicle, shivering and wet to the skin despite their best efforts to stay dry.
“Jesus.” Megs stared up through the windshield toward a summit that wasn’t visible from here. “He’s up there with a broken leg.”
Mitch turned on the engine, started the heater, while he and Megs stripped out of the plastic bags and their soaked parkas. “The sheriff will be here in the morning. At least we set that in motion. Have some coffee. You’re shaking.”
Megs sipped from the lid of the thermos. “Imagine how coldheis.”
Neither of them slept, the night seeming to last forever, rain falling off and on, the wind relentless. Finally, around four in the morning, the sky cleared to reveal stars. They climbed out of the vehicle at dawn, looked up at El Diente, saw that its summit was blanketed in white. As tempted as they were to head up, they were only a handful of minutes away from the sheriff’s arrival. Someone would need to lead rescuers to Dean.
The sheriff, an older man with a sun-browned face, asked a few questions as other deputies and a few volunteers rolled in. “There’s no place to land a chopper up there. We’ll need to get him down to a safer location before we can call for a bird.”
And so Mitch and Megs started up the mountain again, followed by the sheriff, a deputy who was also a paramedic, a firefighter who had volunteered to help, and a couple of EMTs, one of whom carried a folding stretcher. More than once, Mitch and Megs were forced to stop so the others could catch up.
It was almost one in the afternoon when the overhang where they’d left Dean came into view. A flash of silver from the emergency blanket. The blue of his parka.
Megs waved, called for him.
He didn’t answer.
Was he asleep?
Mitch and Megs set off at a faster pace, the talus buried in snow and treacherous. They had just reached the top of that chute where Dean had stopped them yesterday when they saw him.
Mitch’s heart hit his breast bone, his stomach seeming to drop. “Jesus.”
“No!” Megs scrambled over the snowy talus on her hands and feet. “No! Dean!”
Almost buried in snow, he was slumped over, eyes open, skin blue, snow covering his hair and lashes, the emergency blanket peeking out from behind him.
Megs dropped to her knees in front of him, tried to dig him out with her bare hands. “Help me! We need to start chest compressions! You remember CPR, right?”
Mitch caught her, drew her back against his chest, held her. “He’s gone, Megs.”
“No!” She screamed the word into Mitch’s parka, pounded him with clenched fists, fought to turn back to Dean. “Maybe they can revive him.”
The note of desperate hope in her voice crushed Mitch, left his heart broken.
“Megs, he’s dead. He’s gone.” Mitch wasn’t sure how he found the words, his brain seeming to move in slow motion. “He unzipped his parka. See? He wasn’t wrapped in the blanket. He was probably hypothermic and couldn’t feel the cold.”
Megs pulled away from Mitch, held Dean’s head against her shoulder, and broke down sobbing. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
