LITMIR.BIZ

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But a wild one. I’ve been trying to get above it, but it’s not working. And we seem to be in a dead space. I’m getting no response on the radio. Check your restraint. In a minute, I’m going to see if I can get below this.”

      Check your restraint? She was not reassured. Still, she tugged on the belt to make sure it was fastened securely.

      More hail pelted the plane and the wind screamed like the end of the world. They kept rising and dropping—hard—as if they’d actually hit some physical object, though she knew they hadn’t, that it was only the racing wind currents.

      They would bottom out, the small plane shaking as if grabbed and pummeled by the hand of an angry god. And then they would rise again, only to fall once more.

      Rain came—buckets of it. Beyond the cabin, she saw nothing but darkness and horizontal walls of water coming at them, racing by. The wind wailed and they lurched and bounced. The restraint held her in the seat, but in back, she could hear the strapped-in equipment. Even tied down with a cargo net, it was banging around, hitting the fuselage, battering the backs of the rear seats.

      And the stomach-churning drops continued. The plane bounced like a ball, a toy tossed between the cruel hands of a madman.

      Still, she refused to believe that they wouldn’t get through this. She was twenty-five years old. She had a wonderful family, a father who drove her nuts but who she knew adored her. A mother who had never wavered in her devotion, her loving support.

      She’d finally found work she could do for years and only get better at it, never get bored. She didn’t have to be the slacker of the family anymore. Her whole life lay ahead of her, beckoning. It was all coming together, and it was going to be so good.

      Surely, it couldn’t be snatched away now.

      Dax kept trying to raise a response on the radio. Nothing. He spoke to her once. “Next time, I swear, we’ll fly commercial.”

      He mouthed their coordinates into the unresponsive radio and yet again gave the distress signal.

      The plane started down. At the last second, she saw that he had found a bare space in the wall of black and green below them. A very small clearing in the dense, never-ending forest—surely, that tiny cleared space was much too small for a landing.

      She said what she was thinking, “Oh, God, Dax. Too small, too small.”

      He didn’t answer. He was kind of busy. They hurtled toward the minuscule clearing as the wind and the rain tried to rip them apart.

       Her last thought before they reached the ground was, I guess I won’t be meeting Ramón Esquevar, after all.

      With a teeth-cracking bounce, they hit the ground. Dax couldn’t keep the nose up. The propeller dug into the soggy, black earth. It dug and held, the engine screaming. Huge clods of dirt were flying everywhere.

      And the plane was spinning, spinning, the jungle that rimmed the clearing whizzing by in a circle, so fast she thought she might throw up. She heard cracking, shattering sounds. Something hit the back of her seat hard enough to force all the breath from her lungs. And then something bopped her on the back of the head.

      She cried out. And then she sighed.

      As blackness rolled over her, she knew it was the end.

      Chapter Five

      “Zoe? Zoe, wake up.” A hand slapped her cheek lightly. A delicate sting.

      And her head hurt like crazy. She groaned, reached back, felt wetness. She opened her eyes, brought her hand in front of her face. Blood, but not much. She reached back a second time, probed the injury carefully. Already a goose egg was rising.

      Goose eggs were good, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she? If the swelling was on the outside, you were less likely to end up with a subdural hematoma, which could be bad. Very, very bad.

      “Zoe?”

      She blinked. Dax was craning toward her from the other seat. He’d taken off his headphones and his chest was bare. He held his shirt to his forehead, on the left side. The shirt was soaked through with blood.

      “Thank God,” he said. “Zoe.”

      “We’re not dead.” She spoke in awe. It was a miracle. Impossible. And yet, somehow, true.

      Dax retreated to his seat, tipped his head back and shut his eyes. He still held the bloody shirt to his head. Really, he didn’t look so good. She realized he needed help. And she was just sitting there …

      Blinking away the last of her dizziness, she went for the latch on her seat restraint. For a moment, she thought it was jammed, that somehow, in the landing, which had turned out to be something of a crash, it had been broken and stuck shut.

      Panic tried to rise. She bit the inside of her cheek, focused on the sharp little pain, and worked at the latch some more.

      A second later, it popped open.

      She was out of the seat and ripping off her white shirt without even stopping to think about it. She wadded the cotton fabric into a ball and crouched over his seat. “Dax.” She caught his chin with one hand. “Let me see …”

      He lowered his hand and she saw the deep gash at his temple—the really deep gash. Beneath all that blood, she could see the ivory luster of bone.

      And the blood? It was still flowing, lots of it, pulsing from the wound in great gouts. It ran down the side of his face, into his eyes.

      “Here. Use this.” She gave him her own shirt.

      He dropped the blood-soaked one and put hers over the wound. Through the blood in his eyes, he looked at her in her bra and shorts. A corner of his mouth twitched in the faint hope of a smile. “I’ve got you with your shirt off, and I’m bleeding too hard to do a damn thing about it.”

      “I need a first aid kit.”

      “In the floor compartment behind your seat.” He held her shirt to his head, but it was already soaking through, turning a bold, bright crimson.

      “Keep the pressure on that. Good and firm.”

      “Right.” He did as she instructed without a word of complaint, without giving her any argument. It was so unlike him to be docile. And that terrified her, brought the reality of their situation too sharply home.

      The fuselage, amazingly, remained intact. They were reasonably safe inside. But outside the battered plane, the rain kept on coming, in buckets. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. The windscreen was a thick, pearly spiderweb of cracks, obscuring the world beyond. And the window in Dax’s door was the same, but with a small jagged hole punched clean through it—just possibly caused by whatever had sliced his forehead open.

      However, she could see well enough out the window in her door. Too bad visibility past the window was poor. Nothing but sheets of rain and, indistinctly, a wall of green where the jungle started.

       Not now. Don’t think about what’s out there now….

      She squeezed between the seats and had to spend several precious seconds tossing supplies, suitcases and equipment back toward the baggage area. Water bottles were scattered everywhere, broken loose from the case of them they’d brought along, rolling around on the floor. But finally, she got the area cleared. She was able to get the compartment open and take out a large, black canvas-covered bag with a white cross printed on the front.

      “How you doing back there?” Dax asked. “Need help?”

      “I’m on it. Just stay in your seat and keep the pressure on that wound.” She cleared a space on one of the backseats and zipped the bag open. It was a really good kit—way beyond the basics. More like something a paramedic might carry. It even contained the necessary tools for sewing up a man’s head.

      I can do this. I took first aid. And then there was that survivalist training

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