Page 75 of The Merger
“Stryker,” I pushed back.
He sighed. “I know you can walk, but I need you close. Just, let me.”
I nodded my head and groaned with the movement.
The plane shuddered under each step he took. When we got to the door he helped me down before jumping down himself. He took my hand, and we climbed over downed limbs and loose rocks. I looked back and saw a scar torn through the vegetation.
We didn’t speak as we moved away from the trees. After being up most of the night, and coming down from the adrenaline rush of the crash, it took all of our energy to focus on getting far enough from the smoldering wreckage. There was risk of fire spreading from the burning engine. The forest floor was littered with fallen pine needles and dried vegetation this late into the fall, prime kindling for a fire.
For hours we moved down the mountain until we got to a stream. It hadn’t snowed yet, but there was still a lot of runoff feeding the stream. “We need to follow it down and find a place to cross. If the fire does spread, hopefully, it will give us some protection.”
The air grew cold as the sun began to sink behind the peak of the mountain. “Stryker, we need to find shelter.”
Shock, exhaustion, and cold caused my body to shiver. I didn’t have any way to gauge the temperature but based on the fact my breath was fogging, it had to be well below fifty degrees. Cold enough to cause hypothermia.
“You’re right. We can’t risk getting wet this close to dark. Let’s look for a spot where the trees block some of the wind.”
Together we moved deeper into the trees. The branches hung low providing a natural roof.
“Look around for any kindling or logs we can use to build a fire. I’m going to see what I can add to this so we can stay as warm as possible.”
I did as he asked and started filling my arms with the driest branches and logs I could find. He bent and twisted the branches to make a sort of lean-to out of the limbs. He wove an opening in the middle of the roof. I paused in my collection and raised a questioning brow.
“We survived a plane crash. We’re going to need a fire to keep from freezing to death, and I’ll be damned if we end up dying of smoke inhalation,” he explained.
“Were you a boy scout or something?” I doubted Malcolm knew a thing about survival in the outdoors.
Stryker continued to fill in the holes of the natural canopy with fallen branches and any he could break off. “No. It was too expensive for my mom, and it required a lot of volunteering by the parents. My mom needed to work, so I never pushed it.”
I dropped the wood near the entrance to our shelter. The cold made my hands shake and my cheeks burn. Stryker was the perfect distraction. There was still so much to learn about him, and I was like a sponge trying to absorb every drop of information.
“Then how did you learn how to do all of this?”
He fixed one last branch in place and started arranging the firewood before stopping to answer my question. “My uncle taught me. My mom’s younger brother, Matthew, loved the outdoors. Hunting, fishing, camping, all of it.”
“You said, loved. Past tense,” I said.
He bobbed his head. “He passed away when I was a freshman in high school.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“He’d taken a job as a hunting guide up in Alaska. To get to one of the remote camps they had to take a bush plane. A freak storm blew in, and they crashed out in the middle of nowhere. It was a week before a rescue crew could make it out to them. Not that it would have done any good if they’d made it there immediately. The autopsies showed they all died on impact.”
“That’s why you’re scared to fly.” I could have kicked myself for not listening to him and booking a commercial flight. “I don’t understand how you were able to land the plane.”
“I hardly landed it. I just made the crash survivable,” he corrected.
Stryker started moving some stones to form a fire circle. “Try and find something to pad the floor so we don’t have to try and sleep directly on the rocks. Once the fire is going I’ll answer all those questions I can see swirling around in your head.”
Unlike my husband, I was not particularly outdoorsy. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be a problem, but we weren’t on a fun vacation. This was a survival situation, and I didn’t have the skills. If Stryker weren’t here I’d freeze to death. Hell, I’d have died in a fiery crash before I’d had a chance to experience hypothermia. Which of course had me even more curious about how a man who’d built a reputation as a corporate savior knew how to emergency land a small plane, construct a shelter and hopefully build a fire out of sticks.
Not knowing what I was searching for, I grabbed anything that looked like it could be soft to lay on. Maybe soft was a stretch, but it would be better than sleeping directly on top of a slab of rock. I was rapidly losing the light, so I grabbed whatever I could find and returned to the shelter.
It appeared that Stryker was spinning one stick into a divot of another stick. “Does that really work?”
He lightly blew where they met, and a tiny trickle of smoke rose from it. “If you’re patient enough it does. I’d rather have matches or a lighter, but neither of us smokes, so we have to make due.”
Considering we had nothing but time on our hands for me to ask endless questions, I sat back and watched Stryker do the most primal thing mankind has ever done–make fire. The wind started to pick up, but the structure he built blocked most of it out. Still, I started shivering hard enough to rattle my teeth.