Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

"What's wrong with me?" Worry colored her words, but Frieda sounded calm, in control. Anna was so proud she felt her heart swell until it became a lump in her throat. Trussed up helpless, deep underground, she doubted she would behave as admirably. To banish the lump, she reminded herself that Frieda liked burrowing in the dirt.

Fussing with bandages and buckles, she told Frieda all she knew of her injuries. She was careful to relate nothing of the speculation surrounding the accident. Frieda's mind would still be vulnerable, open to suggestion. When she finished, she forced herself to stop fiddling with Frieda's packaging. The woman was stable. Anna was only reassuring herself.

Frieda blinked up through the clear Plexiglas safety screen on the helmet they'd fitted her with. Seeing her friend's discomfort, Anna eased it off, careful not to change the alignment of Frieda's cervical spine.

"Thanks," Frieda said. "Let me sit up."

"Better not."

"Shit. I feel like such an idiot. I'm fine. If my leg wasn't broken, I could walk out of here. I'm tempted to call the whole circus off and crawl out. It's been done."

Anna knew that. Years before, after the last big publicized rescue, a caver had broken an ankle a long way in, near the Leaning Tower of Lechuguilla. Rather than subject himself to the Sturm und Drang of a grand rescue, he crawled the two days out. He wore through his own kneepads and the kneepads of every member of his team, but he self-rescued.

"It's not your ankle," Anna reminded Frieda. "It's your knee. Not to mention your brains are scrambled. Besides"-she gestured to the cascading humanity on the wall, each caver busy and intent-"everybody is having such a good time."

Frieda snorted, but there was a thread of laughter in the rude sound. A good sign.

Anna questioned her about her hurts, asked all the things she'd been taught to ask to test for disorientation or brain injury. Frieda had a vicious headache that hurt down into her left shoulder, and her leg throbbed, but she knew who she was, where she was, and who was president of the United States. The only question she'd missed was "What day is it?" and since Anna wasn't all that sure either, she'd let it pass.

Anna backed off, let the patient rest. Frieda lay staring at an invisible sky. Her jaw-length red hair was stuck to her cheeks. In a sudden spill of light from above, the freckles across her face stood out black against her unnatural pallor. McCarty had cleaned and bandaged the wound on her temple, but an ugly bruise spread from beneath the dressing, blacking the corner of Frieda's eye and suffusing her cheekbone with angry purple.

"Last night you woke up and talked to me," Anna said. "Do you remember?"

Frieda thought for so long that Anna worried this was not an end of the crazies but only another moment of clarity in ongoing delirium.

"No," Frieda said finally. Her voice was strained as if the effort of remembering had exacerbated the pain in her head. "I had zillions of dreams. All bad. Not nightmare quality, just the can't-find-your-keys show-up-at-work-naked variety. On and on. Every time I'd think I was awake and could stop, something bizarre would happen and I'd realize I was back in the dreams." She reached for the water bottle and Anna pressed it into her palm. When she drank, water spilled down her cheeks. Anna wanted to wipe it away but didn't. Frieda wouldn't appreciate being mothered, and it was an art Anna was not sufficiently skilled at to risk rebuff.

"You said 'It wasn't an accident.' Was that part of a dream?" Anna kept her voice intentionally casual. What she knew about head wounds would fit in chapter twelve of an EMT manual. A chapter she hadn't read in a while. It just made sense not to fever an already traumatized brain with unnecessary fears.

"Did I?" Frieda asked. Anna waited, letting her work things through at her own speed. "Shit," Frieda said after a time. "Everything is like those stupid dreams. Piecemeal. Broken film."

"It's okay," Anna said.

"I remember all of us splitting up to follow a handful of leads. I remember going down a crack in the breakdown on the cavern floor. Maybe I heard something?"

Anna kept quiet. Anything she suggested would only add to Frieda's confusion.

"I must have been looking up." Frieda fingered the bruise on her temple. "Shit," she said again. "Maybe I saw something. I think I saw something. Somebody's hand. That might have been what I meant. I remember I saw a hand above me on a big fucking rock. Get thee behind me, Hodags."

Anna thought Frieda had slipped back into her dream world, then remembered Hodags, like their German cousins, the Kobold, were spirits that didn't take kindly to foul language. Frieda was metaphorically throwing salt over her shoulder, knocking on wood.

"Did you see the hand before the rock hit you in the head or after?" Anna asked. The hand could have belonged to Zeddie, lifting the stone from Frieda's shoulder.

"I don't know."

Anna could hear the weariness in her voice. She didn't want to overtire her. One more question, she promised herself, then she'd stop. "Was it a man's hand or a woman's?"

"Gloved," Frieda replied with certainty. "Damn."

"Don't push," Anna said. "It'll come back."

"You won't go away, will you?" Frieda asked. Both women heard the fear in her voice. Frieda didn't approve of it. "No big deal," she said. "It's probably all bullshit. Scrambled brains."

"Probably," Anna said, helping her save face. "But I've got to stick close anyway."

"Why?" Frieda sounded stubborn.

"So nobody will put me to work."

Frieda tried to laugh, but it came out as a moan.

"Hey, is that Frieda talking?" Sondra McCarty was five yards off, pulling her lean frame up onto a rock. "Oscar said to come back and see if you needed relieving or anything."

If someone wanted Frieda dead, then comatose was surely the next best thing. Till Anna knew more, Frieda would be safer with the status quo. "No, just muttering. She's still delirious." Anna found Frieda's hand in the darkness and squeezed it. "Delirious," she repeated, and felt an answering pressure. Anna knew the ruse would not be foolproof. They could lie to Sondra and the others, but she was going to have to take Peter McCarty into her confidence. Frieda needed something for the pain. This far from the hospital, shock could kill her as surely as the most determined assassin.

Anna wanted Frieda to pretend she remembered nothing, but quoting "in for a penny in for a pound" as her rationale, Frieda opted to tell Peter everything. Anna didn't put up an argument. For her own peace of mind, Frieda needed to trust her doctor. McCarty agreed to go along with the lie that she was still delirious-not because he deemed it necessary but because Frieda became upset when it looked as if he wouldn't. He seemed more annoyed than alarmed by the disembodied glove on the rock. Anna couldn't remember hearing a theory so thoroughly pooh-poohed since she'd told her sister, Molly, Jimmy Newton's idea that Dad and Santa were one and the same.

McCarty laughed, shrugged, did everything short of actually saying "pshaw." The fact that he did it with humor and a thick gob of charm didn't let him off the hook. He put Anna's hackles up. If she'd had a tail, by the end of the performance it would have been lashing. She kept her misgivings to herself. There were two possibilities: the doctor had a reason for wanting Frieda to think it was all a dream, or it actually was all a dream and, knowing a whole hell of a lot more about head injuries than Anna ever would, he had chosen this method of allaying his patient's fears.

However unsatisfying to the ego, Anna hoped it was the latter. Still, she watched him closely as he gave Frieda a shot for pain. Hovering, a suspicious and sweating guardian angel, Anna realized if McCarty wanted Frieda dead he could easily have killed her in the hours before Oscar, Holden, and she had arrived.