Nothing.
He waited longer.
Still nothing.
And then Dustin moved.
Greg's vision tunneled. That wasn't possible. Itwasn’t. He'd fallen eight hundred feet without a parachute. He'd hit the ground at terminal velocity. No human body could survive that.
Apparently Dustin had not received the memo.
He sat up.
He looked down at himself, patted his chest, his legs, moved his arms. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking.
But he was alive.
He wasalive.
Greg didn't wait to see more. While Dustin was still staring at his own hands like they belongedto a stranger, Greg turned and ran. Back toward the maintenance shed. Back toward the door that would take him to HQ. His dress shoes slipped on the dirt and rocks but he didn't slow down, didn't look back, didn't breathe until he was through the door and standing in the fluorescent hum of the office.
He bent over, hands on his knees, gasping.
He'd just tried to kill someone.
And it hadn't worked.
Greg wasn’t sure which of those things was worse.
CHAPTER 7
Dustin sat in the dirt for a long time.
He wasn't sure how long. The sun moved and shadows shifted around him. At some point a lizard skittered past his boot and he watched it go without really seeing it.
He should be dead.
The thought kept replaying in his head.
He’d known other jumpers whose gear had malfunctioned. Never had anyone been as lucky as him.
His luck wasunbelievable.
He looked down at his hands. They'd stopped shaking. That was something. He turned them over, examining his palms like they belonged to someone else. No blood. No broken bones. Not even a bruise.
What the fuck?
That he wasn’t dead was one thing, but that he didn’t have any broken bones? That made him question if he’d actually jumped or if he’d just hallucinated the whole thing.
He couldn’t have.
He remembered hitting the ground. The way the world had rushed up to meet him, too fast,too fast,and then?—
Nothing.
And then he was sitting up in the desert, completely fine, like the laws of physics had taken the day off.
You're in shock, he told himself.You're dissociating. This is a trauma response.
