For the thousandth time, Bettie looked up into the bright blue sky with its clear white sun... shading her eyes against the pristine glare that had chased away the false winter and started melting the flurry of snow that had so unpredictably stranded them here.
Without any clouds in the sky, there was no way she'd miss a search plane—nothing to hear except the whirr of a plane engine. But there was nothing in the sky except the susurrations of flocking birds and the odd flittering insect. The wind whispered through the branches of swaying trees, making its way to her ears extraordinarily loudly with nothing else to hear but how wood creaked.
The longer she spent out here in the wilderness, the more she heard of it. The chatter of squirrels, the vibration of insectile wings, and the babble of water over the rocky stream bed.
Under other circumstances, it would have been an idyllic paradise. As it was, it reminded Bettie quite a lot of the boring farm life she'd fled from. That was why all those guys had left Shangri-La in that movie she'd seen, right? Because heaven on earth just wasn't heaven unless you chose it...
No, nothing good could come out of that crash... the grinding torture of metal, not one singular event, but a slow torment, each second stretching years. The same way a man might be drawn and quartered, they'd been ripped from their normal lives and
buried
in this existence. It took a conscious act of will for Bettie to remove the details of their sharp descent and violent crash from her thoughts. The memory of those stricken moments were too vivid, too charged with fear for her to hold them in her head with any comfort.
Bettie looked down at Izzy, his bandage-swathed head an indelible reminder of what she couldn't forget. When the plane had hit, he'd been flung forward, his head striking hard against the floor. He'd been left unconscious, a nasty gash across his forehead. Then he'd been unconscious for the longest time...
Since then, he'd had periods of lucid wakefulness, but always he lapsed back into pained incoherence, moaning and gasping at the hurt he was clearly feelings. His obvious suffering drove her to seek out Danny and ask him if there were any painkillers among their medical supplies.
"Yeah, we've got some codeine tablets: why?"
He made no move to get them, as Bettie had expected... she'd thought, going to see Danny, that he'd immediately recognize the problem she'd brought to his attention and move to resolve it. But she realized how busy he had been. Probably he didn't even know of all the issues they were facing.
"Izzy... Mr. Ashkenazy... he's in a lot of pain. I'd like to give him something to make him more comfortable."
