Shit, shit, shit!
I awkwardly tie the rope around my foot, so I don't lose my way. Then, equally awkwardly, I dig under his helmet, my gloves off, to unhook his chin strap--
Anders jumps as my ice-cold fingers touch his bare throat. He flails and then scrambles to sit up, sees me, and blinks.
"Hold still," I say as he removes his helmet. "You hit your head." I take his chin in my hand, apologizing for my cold fingers, and check his pupils. They look normal. I examine his head next, which should be easy enough--he wears his hair buzz-cut short, as if he's still in the army--but dark hair over an equally dark scalp makes looking for blood and cuts a whole lot tougher. I don't feel any, though.
"You seem okay. I'm just worried about--"
"Intercranial injury. Yeah. Well, I'm conscious. I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance if you like."
"That would require me knowing the Pledge of Allegiance."
He chuckles. "Yeah. How about Hamlet's soliloquy." He runs through it.
"Impressive."
"Not really, considering I had to say it every night for two weeks in my junior year. Which was..." He looks up as he thinks. "June 1994. Proving I can access personal memories, too. How do my pupils look?"
"Same size and not dilated."
"I should be fine, then."
Anders was pre-med when he decided to serve his country. The US Army had started training him as a medic before they both realized he was better suited to military policing.
The wind has died down again, falling snow entombing us in white. I retrieve the first-aid kit and a flashlight from Anders's saddlebags. I shine the light up and down his snowsuit, looking for rips or tears, any sign of injury.
"How fast were you going?" I ask.
"I hit the brakes as soon as the snow blew in. Hit them too fast. Lost control. Skidded. Sudden stop, and I went flying. I wasn't going more than few miles an hour by then. Just enough to send me through the damn windshield."
He rubs the back of his neck. "I'm going to be sore as hell in the morning, but it wasn't a high-speed impact."
I nod. That's the biggest concern--he could have done serious damage to his spine.
He rolls his shoulders and moves his back, testing. "I should be good to go. How far are we from town?"
"About five clicks."
"Shit."
Under normal conditions, that's a couple hours' walk along the winding path. With a storm, it'll be several times that.
I check my watch. "We've got less than two hours of daylight left. If you call this daylight." I wave at the steady snowfall, the sky beyond already gray. "I'm going to say we collect our stuff from the saddlebags and find shelter for the night."
"Yeah. Eric'll be pissed, but it's not like he'll be flying home in this. With any luck, he won't be able to radio in either."
"We'll start out at daybreak. Which means about, what, ten in the morning?"
A wry smile. "Welcome to the north. Okay. Let's see if I can stand."
I take his hand, and he's shaking his head, mouth opening to tell me that helping him up isn't a wise idea. I place his hand on a tree instead--it can support his weight. He chuckles, and he's carefully rising when I say, "Down!" pushing him to the ground as I cover him, my gun drawn.
"What the--?"
I clap a hand over his mouth and gesture with my chin. There's a figure on the path, appearing from nowhere, just like the one I saw before the storm hit. When Anders sees, I move off him and he flips over, his gun out, gaze fixed on the figure.
The falling snow is a shimmering veil between us, blurring everything more than an arm's length away. I'm presuming the figure is a man, given the size, but I'm on my stomach, and it's at least twenty feet away, and all I can say for sure is it's standing on two legs.