It was raining again. Water sluiced down the rock walls, turned the mud into a viscous pool. There was water all around them, swirling in the indentation in the rock, splashing, dripping, pooling. In the wan daylight that drifted down with the rain, she saw that Matthew’s blood had turned it pink.
Help him. Help us.
She crawled over him, slipped down off the rock, and dug through his pack for a tarp. It took a long time to tie it in place with only one good hand, but she finally did it, created a gulley to catch rainwater into two big thermoses. When one was full, she positioned the other thermos to collect water and then climbed back up onto the rock.
She tilted his chin, made him drink. He swallowed convulsively, gagged, coughed. Setting the thermos aside, she stared at his left leg. It looked like a pile of hamburger with a shard of bone sticking out.
She went to the packs, salvaged what she could. The first-aid kit was well stocked. She found Bactine, gauze, aspirin, and sanitary pads. She removed her belt. “This is not going to feel good. How about a poem? We used to love Robert Service, remember? When we were kids, we could recite the good ones by heart.”
She put her belt around his thigh and yanked it so tight he screamed and thrashed. Crying, knowing how much it had to hurt, she tightened it again and he lost consciousness.
She packed his wound with gauze and sanitary pads and bound it all in place with duct tape.
Then she held him as best she could with her broken arm and cracked rib.
Please don’t die.
Maybe he couldn’t feel her. Maybe he was as cold as she was. They were both soaking wet.
She had to let him know she was there.
The poems. She leaned close, whispered in his ear with her hoarse, failing voice, over the sound of her chattering teeth. “Were you ever out in the Great Alone when the moon was awful clear…”
*
HE HEARS SOMETHING. Jumbled sounds that mean nothing, letters flung in a pool, floating apart.
He tries to move. Can’t.
Numb. Pins and needles in his skin.
Pain. Excruciating. Head exploding, leg on fire.
He tries again to move, groans. Can’t think.
Where is this?
Pain is the biggest part of him. All there is. All that’s left. Pain. Blind. Alone.
No.
Her.
What does that mean?
*
“MATTHEWMATTHEWMATTHEW.”
He hears that sound. It means something to him, but what?
Pain obliterates everything else. A headache so bad he can’t think. The smell of vomit and mold and decay. His lungs and nostrils ache. He can’t breathe without gasping.
He is beginning to study his pain, see nuances. His head is pressure building, pounding, squeezing; leg is sharp, stabbing, fire and ice.
“Matthew.”
A voice. （Hers.） Like sunshine on his face.
“I’mhere. I’mhere.”
Meaningless.
“Ssshitsokay. I’mhere. I’lltellyouanotherstory. MaybeSamMcGee.”
A touch.
Agony. He thinks he screams.
But maybe it’s all a lie …
*
DYING. He can feel the life draining out of him. Even the pain is gone.
He is nothing, just a lump in the wet and cold, pissing himself, vomiting, screaming. Sometimes his breathing just stops and he coughs when it starts again.
The smell is terrible. Mold, muck, decay, piss, vomit. Bugs are crawling all over him, buzzing in his ears.
The only thing keeping him alive is Her.
She talks and talks. Familiar rhyming words that almost make sense. He can hear her breathing. He knows when she is awake and when she’s asleep. She gives him water, makes him drink.
He is bleeding now, through his nose. He can taste it, feel its viscous slime.
She is blearying.
No. That’s a wrong word.
Crying.
He tries to hold on to that, but it goes like everything else, at a blur, too fast to grasp. He is floating again.
Her.
IloveyouMatthewdon’tleaveme.
Consciousness pulls away from him. He fights for it, loses, and sinks back into the smelly darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
After two terrible, freezing nights, Matthew moved for the first time. He didn’t wake up, didn’t open his eyes, but he moaned and made this terrible clicking sound, like he was suffocating.
A trapezoid of blue sky hung above them. It had finally stopped raining. Leni saw the rock face clearly, all the ridges and indentations and footholds.
He was burning up with fever. Leni made him swallow more aspirin and poured the last of the Bactine on his wound and rewrapped it in new gauze and duct tape.
Still, she could feel the life ebbing out of him. There was no him in the broken body beside her. “Don’t leave me, Matthew…”