“Please,” I cry when he continues retreating. “I’m stuck. I can’t get out.” My breathing turns even more irregular when my last confession sets off alarm bells in my head. “I also think I smell gas.”
My chin quivers in sync with the brutal shake my confession causes my body. The last time I announced I could smell gas, the car a young woman was trapped in exploded. The blast was so brutal, it sent the man I was helping and me flying through the air. I don’t know what injuries he endured from the blast, but I was handed a condition that almost ended my medical career before it had truly begun.
I don’t know what compelled me to take that road home that night. There was a detour sign up on my way to the hospital I was completing my final year of residency at, but it was two blocks down from the road the accident was on. I guess you could say I didn’t want to risk being detoured again, but part of me believes it was instinct. If I hadn’t arrived when I did, who knows how long it would have been before help arrived.
Not that my presence did much good anyway. With the female driver deceased upon arrival, the next fifteen minutes were a frantic blur. I remember carnage and mayhem, then a massive blast that still rings in my ears to this very day.
The man I was helping before the explosion was nowhere to be seen when I woke dazed and confused in a local emergency room. I was left to slot the pieces of the puzzle together by myself. With a knock to the head making things extremely blurry, I had a lot of questions to answer without any real knowledge of what the hell had happened.
I think the male passenger was transferred to the same hospital as me, but I’ve never found any records about his admission, and I’ve been searching for years. He’s the only one who can fill in the gaps that have kept me awake even a decade later.
“Please,” I cry out again, certain the heartache of being left to die alone is on par with discovering your fiancé in a compromising position with a woman a decade younger than him. Rosha would have been lucky to be twenty-one. “I don’t want to die alone.”
That isn’t anyone’s wish. It’s why I don’t let my patients out of my sight when they’re transferred to palliative care. Someone should be there, holding their hand. If that person can only be me, so be it. I’ll do it.
No one enters the world alone, so they shouldn’t leave it that way either.
A salty blob dribbles down my cheek when, in the corner of my eye, I spot the caveman-like brute reemerging from the dense woodlands. His hands are no longer balled up at his sides like they were when our eyes collided for the quickest second in the blackness of the night. They’re clutching a large chunk of wood that looks like a club a real-life caveman would have wielded back in the day.
Although grateful for his return, I wish I had been more specific when I voiced concerns about dying alone. I accepted my fate shortly after my car sailed over the cliff edge, what I am assuming is hours ago, but I don’t want to be knocked over the head like an animal to be put out of my misery.
The wooziness making me feel sick doubles when my savior raises the chunk of wood high into the air like he’s been ordered to knife a victim in a B-grade horror movie by a shoddy director. When he yanks it down with an absurd amount of force, I say my final goodbye.
The air my whispered words free from my lungs is a waste of breath. The club lands nowhere near my temple. It fills the minute snippet of space between my legs and the steering wheel. Its fit is so compelling, it is as if he specifically chose it for the job.
My eyes lock with a pair of murky baby blues hiding a world of secrets when the man grunts a word that resembles, “B-back.” His voice is rough like it hasn’t been used in years and was dragged over a ton of gravel before delivering his one stuttered word. I’m not even one hundred percent certain that is what he said, but it’s what I run with when he pushes me back to amplify his statement.
“I can’t,” I force out through the bile making its second trek from my stomach to my throat. “I’m stuck.”
“Back!” he repeats, his tone and volume more forceful since it’s delivered without a stutter or an ounce of understanding this time around.
Ignoring the weak shake of my head, he flattens his calloused hand against my chest, then pushes me away from the steering wheel with all his might. The pain his shove rockets through my body is intense, but not enough for me not to comprehend what he’s trying to do. He doesn’t mean to hurt me. He just needs space between the steering wheel and me so he can wedge himself between us.
Tears burn my eyes when he endeavors to reverse the effects of crumbled metal and glass with his bare hands. He grunts a deafening roar before shoving the steering wheel with everything he has.
I’d call him an idiot for attempting to replicate the jaws of life if his plan wasn’t working. The more his body-quaking grunts rumble through our almost conjoined bodies, the more distance he places between us. He’s moving the equivalent of a mountain to save me, and the knowledge makes me extremely woozy.
I’m not solely lightheaded because of the lengths he will go for a stranger or the elbow he wedged between my thighs to stabilize himself. I’m on the verge of passing out from the amount of blood that pours from my ankle when the twisted steel pinning it beneath the gas pedal pops free.
Some of the metal responsible for holding my seat in place pierced through my ankle. I’m bleeding profusely and almost certain to die before first responders arrive if he doesn’t tourniquet my leg right now, but before I can instruct him on what he needs to do, the blackness charging at me from all sides wins.
I’m out cold before a single word leaves my mouth.
ChapterThree
Crunching sticks wake me for the second time this evening. They’re breaking beneath me like I’m jogging through dense woodlands without the fancy orthopedic running shoes my feet forever don when I tackle the grueling St. Thomas Street hill in Ravenshoe.
But I’m not running.
My feet aren’t even on the ground.
They’re dangling down the front of a person who smells like woodchips and pinecones, and my ass is being clutched by a hand that feels as rough as the one that pushed on my chest before I blacked out.
After taking a moment to settle my stomach’s gurgles, I take in the scenery more thoroughly. The crunch that drew me from an unconscious state are sticks incapable of withstanding the stomp of a man with extremely large feet. The stranger who freed me from the wreckage is weaving us through trees that are hundreds of years old. His speed gives no indication he’s worried about the almost starless sky. His race through the dense woodland is without worry that you’d swear he knows the terrain out here better than the back of his hand.
We dart, weave, and bob until we reach a tree that disappears into the thick clouds above our heads. A squeal rips from my mouth when he slips us inside the massive tree’s trunk before he pulls me flush with his body. Not even a second later, an explosion to rival all explosions booms into my ears. The blast is so powerful, it rattles the tree trunk as effectively as my lungs batter my ribs. It’s a terrifying boom that thrusts me back into the nightmare of my past, where I nearly lost more than my livelihood.
My inability not to help someone in need saw me undergo test after test after test to prove I could continue with my surgical internship. Deaf doctors aren’t unheard of, but there’s amassivebridge between hearing-impaired medical practitioners and their more fortunate counterparts. It took months to prove the hearing deficiency I faced in the days following a traffic incident wouldn’t affect my surgical expertise, and even then, I doubt the outcome would have been as successful if multiple favors didn’t exchange hands.
