Janice Johnson - Brace For Impact

She gave up, lay back and waited, staring now at the opening she’d crawled through.

Once again time blurred—or maybe it had ever since the crash. Had that really happened today? Was she forgetting a night? Maddy clung to a picture in her mind of Will Gannon, alarmingly tall as he looked down at her. That too-bony face with a nose that didn’t seem to quite belong, but eyes that were kinder than she deserved, considering she was holding a gun on him.

Hearing that deep, husky voice saying, I was shot, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t love seeing that gun pointing at me .

The relief of letting it sag, of feeling his big hand close over hers as he deftly took the gun.

Her head throbbed even as the pain radiating from her arm and shoulder worsened.

Please come, Will. Please hurry .

HE STOPPED UNDER cover twenty yards or so from the boulders to use his binoculars again. He could no longer hear the helicopter, but after a slow sweep he found it, deep down in the Stetattle Creek valley. Down there only fools would think they’d see anything from the sky; the Stetattle and Torrent Creeks ran through tangles of vegetation as thick as any jungle. When Will was reading about routes into and out of this wilderness, he’d seen several references to “bushwhacking.”

If he could get Maddy down to that low elevation, they’d be hard to find. On the other hand, he didn’t have a machete or any other tool that would be good for clearing their way.

He wondered if he wouldn’t be able to find something like that in the airplane wreckage. Crap, he wished he’d beaten the damn helicopter there, had time to search.

Couldn’t be helped.

He rose and scrambled the distance to the two largest boulders, steadying himself on other large rocks.

“Maddy? It’s me.”

The silence stretched. He was almost to the opening when she said, “Will?”

“Yeah, I’m coming in.”

He parted the pile of fir branches and crawled between them. Same response he’d had earlier. Disliking the cramped space, he wanted to back right out. Tending to claustrophobia, Will had been especially unhappy when his unit was assigned to search caves in Afghanistan for the Taliban. Until today, he’d hoped he would never see a cave again.

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