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.

Chapter Twenty-Two

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…”

A distant whirring sound reached down into the darkness, the thwop-thwop-thwop of a helicopter.

She unwound from Matthew and scrambled into the mud. “We’re here!” she shouted, sloshing to the break in the rocks where the sky showed.

She flattened herself to the sheer rock wall, waved her good arm, screaming, “We’re here! Down here!”

She heard dogs barking, the buzz of human voices.

A flashlight shone down on her.

“Lenora Allbright,” yelled a man in a brown uniform. “Is that you?”

*   *   *

“WE’RE TAKING YOU UP FIRST, Lenora,” someone said. She couldn’t see his face in the mix of sunlight and shadow.

“No! Matthew first. He’s … worse.”

The next thing she knew, she was being strapped into a cage and hauled up the sheer wall. The cage banged into rock, clanged. Pain ricocheted in her chest, down her arm.

The cage landed on solid ground with a clatter. Sunlight blinded her. There were men in uniforms all around, dogs barking wildly. Whistles being blown.

She closed her eyes again, felt herself being transported to the grassy patch up the trail, heard the thwop-thwop-thwop of a helicopter. “I want to wait for Matthew,” she yelled.