Right in front of Sommer’s eyes.
A hasty choice. And death.
The woman lay dead right by her door. She hadn’t taken a single step when she went down because when they hit the pole, they dropped the electrical line.
The main thing Sommer had to do in this situation was to sit extraordinarily still and not touch anything metal.
After all these hours, Sommer would have thought she could decompress, rest, and be ready for action as soon as the opportunity came.
That might have been true for the first hour.
Less so in the second hour
But now that she was moving into the heat of the day, being trapped in the car was torture.
Abbie and Marna were still in dire straits on the mountain, and Sommer was stuck in place until someone drove by.
She would have thought that after all these hours, someone would have come by.
All those cars she heard that morning must have been heading to work.
Sommer hated the idea that no one would pass again until the shifts were over and they drove home again.
And if they came by, would they recognize the danger of the line lying across the road? Or would they, too, get stuck in this situation?
Sommer reached up to her billed hat and pulled off her headlamp.
All she could do was watch and wait, and when someone came, she’d flash SOS to try to warn them away.
Sommer was exhausted after the long night of full-effort hiking and the aftereffects of adrenaline.
Yet, she couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t sleep. She needed to be focused and ready to protect people on the road.
And in her sleep, she might shift and die.
Sommer wasn’t an emergency responder. She was making an educated guess about her situation. Much of her education had come from the driver’s body lying in her view.
That she shouldn’t put one foot on the ground at a time when a line was down was something she’d seen in a meme on social media. It didn’t tell her what to do if she was stuck in the car.
Stuck. In. The. Car.
Hours ago, Sommer had rolled her fingers into the fabric of her hiking pants and held her elbows tight to her ribs, sitting like a statue, so she didn’t risk touching metal.
It wasn’t only her life at risk.
If Sommer were killed, and there weren’t any hikers that reached the summit and found Marna and Abbie, her friends, too, could die.
Sommer felt the weight of her responsibility.
And she could feel her twin, Sloane, freaking out.
As twins, they had always been so close they finished each other’s sentences.
They had always known when the other was in danger and often acted in time to save the day.
But no matter how freaked out Sloane got, there was no way Sloane could send any help their way until Saturday night, more likely Sunday morning, when Sommer’s itinerary said she should be home.
If she were electrocuted and couldn’t tell the tale, at the least Sommer had left the marker with information on it.
