“Should I go home?”
It was useless to ask because he was already half asleep and apparently she was too because she uttered a totally nonsensical reply.
“You’re going to be okay, Nick. Just stay with me. Please, please stay with me.”
Chapter Eleven
Samantha
“Okay… Okay.”
Samantha forced herself to sit cross-legged for a minute or two and let her head hang below her shoulders.
Her stomach churned with a tiny wave of nausea at first and then her head spun.
“It’s just stress and heat. It’ll pass if you stay calm,” she told herself.
She rubbed her hands over her sweaty face and neck, as she inhaled and exhaled therapeutically a few times. After a moment, the sick feeling lessened and she attempted to prioritize.
She glanced upward at the cliff, then back down at Nick’s motionless face.
“How you are still alive is beyond me,” she remarked quietly.
Clearly, his legs had borne the brunt of the fall, but since he’d now been knocked out for at least a half hour, she guessed he must have some kind of head injury.
She shifted on the ground to get a better view of his head, bracing herself in case she was about to see part of his brain hanging out or something.
Fortunately, she saw nothing like that.
Everything appeared normal so she gingerly ran her fingertips through his hair, over his scalp, feeling for anything bad—and found it on the back of his skull where his head rested on the stone floor beneath him.
It felt like a decent sized cut; long, but not necessarily deep. She couldn’t quite tell without seeing it, but she could feel that it was bleeding quite a bit.
The wave of nausea returned at the sight of her fingertips. She hastily scrubbed them off on her pants, then dropped her head again, but held her breath this time.
“Oh God,” she spoke silently, not wanting to infect Nick’s subconscious with her own steadily increasing terror and doubt. “I don’t know what to do. What do I do? I don’t know what to do.”
Samantha was a self-admitted “indoor girl,” and she’d warned Nick of this on the drive that morning. She’d never been a Girl Scout. Never went camping before. The extent of her outdoor experience involved occasional jogs on sidewalks next to well-manicured lawns.
She knew literally nothing about dealing with the great outdoors and now she was smack in the middle of a worst case scenario, a potentially life and death situation, in a remote desert.
She suddenly felt like she was drowning. Then she realized she was still holding her breath.
She blew it out in a puff of air as her gaze landed on his gruesome leg injury, and out of nowhere it occurred to her that she should probably try to stop the bleeding.
She lifted the hem of his T-shirt. No belt. She wasn’t wearing one either so she unbuckled her small water pack with the intent to find something she could use to cut off the flow of blood—and saw the solution immediately.
The pack was essentially a backpack, with a couple pockets to hold a few small extras, but its main purpose was to house a water pouch. A tube threaded from the inside of the pack, out the top, and attached to one of the shoulder straps, giving you easy access to your water supply.
She unzipped the pack and noticed the tube plugged into an opening at the base of the pouch.
She bit her lip as she hesitated.
The last thing they needed was for her to accidentally drain the already diminished water supply.
As carefully as she could, she unthreaded the tube from the strap, then turned the pack upside down, and gently twisted the tube off without spilling a drop.
Placing the tube between her teeth, she scooted over the rock slab to sit next to his mangled right leg.
