reached out to check Tony’s pulse again, then breathed a sigh of relief. This kid was still breathing.
He glanced at his watch. They’d been waiting for over an hour now, and each moment Charlie measured the time by the continuing intake and exhalation of the kid’s breath. When he finally heard voices outside the cave, and then someone calling his name, he yelled out.
“In here! In here!” Then he rolled over onto his hands and knees and began crawling toward the opening.
Within seconds, men were crawling in, and pushing a backboard and their EMT bags.
“Charlie Dodge?”
“Yes. The boy is back here.”
“I’m Larry. We heard him scream.”
“Yeah. I don’t know whether it’s from the delirium, or if he’s in so much pain that being unconscious isn’t enough to block it,” Charlie said, then grabbed his lantern and held it up for the medics, giving them light to assess and stabilize the boy for transport.
“How far will we have to carry him to get to Medi-Flight?” Charlie asked.
“Not far, and it’s already en route. By the time we get him ready, they should have landed,” one of them said.
Charlie watched in silence as they cut away Tony’s pants, revealing the rest of his injuries, some of which were obvious—like another broken bone below his knee that had pierced his skin.
When they cut away his jacket and shirt and began examining the upper portion of his body, they found ribs that appeared to be broken, but they had been broken from the back, rather than from an impact to his chest, and there was an odd bruising pattern on his back that was worse than the one on his face.
“Look at the shapes of those bruises,” Charlie said. “I found his hiker’s pack back on the trail. It had an internal metal frame that would fit those marks.”
“So he fell from the trail?” Larry asked.
“Still not sure what happened to him,” Charlie said. “I found his backpack in one location, and then found him and his missing boot here.”
“Well, wherever he fell, he did not walk here! His injuries are too severe, but if he did fall from the trail, I’d guess that backpack likely saved his life by absorbing a lot of the impact.”
“I can’t explain the backpack, but his injuries occurred in this area. His other boot is wedged between some rocks about a hundred yards away. Somehow he got his foot out of it and crawled in here,” Charlie said.
The medic shook his head and kept working to get an IV established and his broken leg immobilized, until they finally had him covered up and strapped in on the backboard.
“Okay. Let’s get him out of here,” Larry said, and they began moving the backboard toward the opening.
Charlie pushed as they pulled, and finally they were out of the dark and in sunlight again.
Charlie shouldered his backpack and then picked up one end of the backboard, while the medics took the other sides, and started walking toward the pickup site.
“I hear a chopper,” Charlie said.
“Medi-Flight. Right on time.”
“Where will they take him?” Charlie asked.
“First stop will be Big Bend Regional Hospital in Alpine. It’s a small hospital. Twenty-five beds—general surgery—but it’s his best bet right now. If they have to move him to a bigger place for more extensive surgery, they’ll stabilize him there first,” Larry said.
Charlie sighed. He’d done what he’d come to do, which was find him. Now all he could do was trust that the people Tony needed next would be there for him, so he tightened his grip and kept moving. They walked out of the forest area into rocks and sand to the waiting chopper.
The moment they appeared, medical personnel spilled out of the chopper and came running. Within minutes, they had the boy loaded up, and then the chopper lifted off.
Charlie watched until it disappeared.
“Walk with us,” Larry said. “We drove a Jeep partway up. We’ll get you back to the lodge.”
“I’ll gladly take the ride, but I need to stop and get some pictures of the kid’s boot that’s stuck in those rocks, and then I’ll take it back with me.”
“Take pictures of a boot?” Larry asked.
“You’ll know what I mean when you see it,” Charlie said, and led the way to the bloody boot still wedged between the rocks.
The medics looked up at the height of the trail above and then back down at the boot.
“Holy shit. If he fell all that way, no wonder the boot is wedged in so tight. I’m