Mountain Terror
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Cindi Myers
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15.2K
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19
HarlequinChapter One
The school bus lay on its side halfway down the canyon, its path from the roadway marked by the torn limbs of trees and deep groove marks in the layer of snow over the rocky surface. As Ryan Welch and the other members of Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue made their way down to the wreck, the terrified screams of children rose above the roar of rushing waters from the creek below. An involuntary shiver raced up Ryan’s spine, and he picked up the pace, half skidding down the incline, his boots sinking into the snow with every step, the vacuum mattress strapped to his back bouncing against his pack.
“We’ve got to secure the vehicle before we can go inside,” SAR Captain Tony Meisner ordered. He directed a trio of volunteers—Ted Carruthers, Eldon Ramsey and Austen Morrissey—to affix lines to the vehicle and chock the wheels, while the others waited in an anxious huddle just up the slope.
The screaming in the vehicle rose to a fever pitch, and several children stuck their heads out the open windows of the bus. “Help!” they screamed, and waved their hands, frantic. “Our teacher is hurt and I think the bus driver is dead!” one girl shouted.
“Remain calm!” Tony, a tall, bearded man in his late thirties, instructed through a handheld hailer. “Help is on the way.”
“That bus isn’t going anywhere now.” Ted Carruthers, tall and wiry, with thick gray hair and a gray goatee, reported to Tony. “It’s wedged against some good-sized boulders, and we’ve secured all the lines.”
Tony nodded and studied the vehicle. “Let’s see if we can get those back emergency doors open and go in that way,” he said. “If not, we’ll climb on top.”
Tony led the way to the bus. “Can someone open the emergency exit?” he shouted.
“I’ll try,” a voice called from inside. Ryan couldn’t tell if the speaker was an adult, or an older child. The person who had called in the accident hadn’t been able to tell the dispatcher how many people were on the bus, only that it was full of middle school students and their chaperones, on their way home to Eagle Mountain, Colorado, from a drama competition on the other side of the pass.
The back door of the bus popped open and children began to spill out. “Stop!” Tony shouted. “Nobody move!”
Everyone froze. One boy had one foot on top of a boulder beside the bus, the other still inside the vehicle, but he stilled and looked expectantly at the SAR commander. “You’re going to exit one at a time,” Tony instructed. “A volunteer will help each of you and check you out to make sure you’re okay. Then another volunteer will escort you to the road. If you’re hurt, remain inside the bus until one of us can help you. Understood?”
Choruses of “Yes,” and “Okay” and “Yes, sir,” rose from the bus.
Things moved quickly after that. Sheriff’s deputies and fire department personnel moved in to assist the children who hadn’t been injured. As soon as they were out of the way, Ryan, along with paramedic Hannah Richards and nurse Danny Irwin, climbed into the bus, scrambling awkwardly over the seats to reach the huddle of people near the middle.
While Hannah and Danny focused on a child who was screaming and clutching her arm, Ryan moved toward a woman who sat slumped against the roof of the sideways bus. Blood poured from a gash on her head. Twentysomething, with honey-brown hair now soaked in blood, she wore a stick-on name badge that identified her as Ms. Traynor. “Ma’am?” Ryan touched her cheek, which was soft and reassuringly warm, in spite of the chill that had seeped into the bus. “Ma’am, can you hear me?”
The woman’s eyelids fluttered, then she looked up at him with green-blue eyes. Beautiful eyes, which should have been full of distress, considering her situation. Instead, she began to giggle.
Ryan sat back on his heels. “Deni! You’re supposed to be seriously injured. You’re not supposed to laugh.”
“I know!” She choked back a fresh wave of laughter, and tried to sit up a little straighter against the sloping roof. “It just sounds so funny when you call me ma’am.”
“Could you just get back in character, please?”
She assumed a sober expression. “Of course. Where were we?”
“I’m trying to assess if you’re conscious or not.”
“Right.” She closed her eyes and rested her head back against the bus once more. The high school student who had volunteered to do the makeup for this training exercise had done a phenomenal job, making Deni’s injuries look real. The only thing missing, he realized, was the metallic smell of blood. Instead, the aroma was slightly sweet. He forced his thoughts back to the task at hand. His job was to assess Deni’s status.
But as soon as he touched her shoulder, she opened her eyes again. “Am I conscious or not?” she asked. “I can’t remember.”
Before he could answer, Danny leaned over Ryan’s shoulder. “What have we got here?” he asked.
Ryan decided to skip ahead in the script. “We have a young woman with a head injury. She’s conscious, pupils evenly dilated and responsive to light, vision tracking.” He reached up and gently felt the back of her head. “No depression of the skull.” He caught and held Deni’s gaze. “Have you vomited?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No!”
Ryan shifted his hand to her neck. “Pulse is strong and regular,” he said, ignoring the flutter of awareness at the feel of her warm, silken skin against his fingers. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” he asked.
“No. I was in my seat, with the seat belt fastened, when the bus went off the road, and I was slammed against the side of the bus and hit my head.” She touched the gash on her forehead and winced, convincingly, then stared at her hand, now red and sticky with fake blood.
“Let’s get her in a cervical collar and on the litter for transport to the ambulance,” Danny said.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Deni whispered after Danny had left them.
“Whatever we tell you,” Ryan said.
“That could get pretty interesting,” she said. The words—and the flirtatious look that accompanied them—sent a rush of heat through him. Maybe she really had hit her head—this was a side of Deni he hadn’t seen before in their frequent encounters at the local coffee shop where they both stopped before work most mornings. Not that he knew her well, but he had definitely noticed her. He looked forward to seeing her. He had even been thinking about working up the nerve to ask her out.
Tony and Eldon moved in with the litter and the three of them set about the awkward task of balancing it over the bus seats and helping Deni into it. She played the part of a disoriented injured person well, complete with being uncooperative and unable to follow directions. “You don’t have to be quite this realistic,” Ryan whispered to her ten minutes into the ordeal. “We have other patients to see to.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, and meekly hoisted herself onto the litter.
He left Eldon and Tony to transport her to the roadway, while he moved on to the next “victim,” a thirteen-year-old boy who sported an impressive network of cuts on his face, as well as bruises indicating a broken nose. He moaned dramatically as Ryan touched him. “Am I going to be scarred for life?” he asked.
“It’s amazing what plastic surgery can do,” Ryan said. “Can you tell me where it hurts?”
“My back hurts.”
“Your back?” Maybe the dramatic makeup job on the kid’s face was designed to throw him off. “Where exactly, does it hurt?”
The boy started to sit up, but Ryan pushed him down. “It’s very important for you to lie still. If you try to move, you could injure yourself further. Just tell me where the pain is.”
“It’s in the middle of my back,” the boy said.
Ryan prodded the boy’s ankle. “Can you feel that?” Each victim had been coached ahead of time as to what symptoms they should display, but the first responders had been kept in the dark about what to expect.
“I can feel you fine.” The boy sat up. “I just ended up laying on something and it’s poking me.”
Ryan reached back and retrieved a red aluminum water bottle. The boy’s face lit up. “Hey, I’ve been looking for that.”
“Great,” Ryan said. “Now could you lie back down and let me treat you?”
The boy grinned. “Sure.” He lay back down and let out another moan. “My face! My modeling career is ruined!”
DENI, FREED FROM the litter, some of the corn-syrup-and-food-coloring fake blood wiped away, sat on a boulder just past the ambulance, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. The trip up from the canyon, strapped to the litter, had been more frightening than she had thought it would be, though the search and rescue volunteers had assured her they knew what they were doing and wouldn’t drop her. Still, the sensation of having to rely totally on other people for her safety had been unsettling.
Those few minutes with Ryan in the bus had been fun, though. She smiled, remembering. After weeks of exchanging hellos and comments about the weather with the good-looking man who always stopped for coffee about the same time she did, it had been nice to get a little more up-close and personal, as it were. Careful questioning of friends who kept track of that kind of thing had revealed that Ryan Welch was twenty-four, worked for the Ride Brothers, a local manufacturer of snowboards and skateboards, and was not, as far as anyone knew, seriously dating.
As it so happened, neither was she. So the challenge became how to arrange for the two of them to go out together. She could simply ask, she supposed, but if he turned her down it would be too embarrassing. So her plan was to let him know she was interested and take it from there.
“More coffee?” Iris Desmet, owner of the Cake Walk Café, approached, a large insulated carafe in one hand.
“I’m good.” Deni smiled. “Thanks for providing refreshments.”
“It’s the least I can do. Would you like a cookie?” Iris slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a large cookie wrapped in Cling Wrap. “Chocolate chip.”
“Wow. Thank you.” Deni accepted the cookie, which she knew from previous experience was as close to perfect as a cookie could get.
“How’s your dad?” Iris asked. “He usually comes in a few times a week, and I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Oh, he’s fine. Just busy, I guess.” She struggled to keep her smile in place, and tried to ignore the sudden cramping in her stomach. The truth was, she hadn’t seen her dad in several days, either. She had spoken to him on the phone, once, when he called to tell her he was going to be working on something for the next few weeks and it would be better if she didn’t come around. He had refused to elaborate and had ended up hanging up on her. Her father had always had his quirks, but this secretiveness was new, and worried her.
“Well, when you see Mike, you tell him to stop in soon.” Iris moved on to the next volunteer.
A cheer rose from the crowd by the roadside and Deni looked up to see the search and rescue crew, their bright blue parkas and yellow climbing helmets standing out against the gray and white of snow and rock, climbing out of the canyon. The county’s emergency management director, Sam Olsen, shook SAR Captain Tony Meisner’s hand as Tammy Patterson from the Eagle Mountain Examiner snapped a photo. “Great exercise,” Sam said. A young man with a long blond ponytail, Sam was a familiar figure in town. He had visited Deni’s eighth grade classroom earlier that year to talk about outdoor safety to kids for whom hiking, skiing and camping were as much a part of daily life as riding public transportation might be for city kids.
“Thanks, everyone, for all your help,” Tony said, addressing the gathered volunteers. Several of the students, still sporting their “victim” makeup, stood with their parents, grinning broadly. Tanner Vincent, who had played the part of someone cut up by windshield glass, raised two thumbs up. “These kinds of exercises help us learn the best ways to respond to a real emergency,” Tony continued. “Though let’s hope none of what we pretended today ever becomes a reality.”
Another cheer rose, though a shiver ran down Deni’s spine. As much as no one ever wanted to deal with a tragedy like a school bus crash, the treacherous mountain passes and harsh winter weather around Eagle Mountain meant they were only one icy spot on the highway from a scenario very like what they had playacted today.
She finished her coffee and stood to go. “Hey, Deni!”
Her heart beat faster as she turned to see Ryan striding toward her. He had removed his helmet, leaving his dark hair ruffled, and his cheeks were reddened by wind and cold. The effect was to make him look even heartier and more rugged. Or maybe she just thought that because she had been nursing a crush on him for weeks now. “It was good to see you today,” he said, stopping in front of her.
She put up a hand to brush her hair back from her cheek and felt the stickiness of the fake blood. She must look horrible, with most of the makeup still in place that portrayed her as having hit her head. She guessed it was a good sign that that wasn’t putting him off. “It’s good to see you, too,” she said.
“How did you end up volunteering for this?”
“When Sam came to recruit kids from my class, he asked if I’d like to participate, too.” She shrugged. “It sounded like a fun way to spend a Saturday morning.”
He chuckled. “If you say so.”
“We can’t all moonlight as superheroes,” she teased, and felt the spark of heat from the look he gave her in response.
“Listen,” he said. “I—”
But she didn’t get to hear what he would have said next, as Sheriff Travis Walker interrupted with an announcement over the speakers in his SUV. “Everyone needs to leave the area immediately,” he said. “Please return to your vehicles and leave now!”
“What’s going on?” Ryan asked one of the deputies who was hurrying past.
“There’s a suspicious object attached to the piling of the bridge.” He pointed downhill, toward the highway bridge over Grizzly Creek, approximately one hundred yards from where Ryan and Deni stood.
“What kind of object?” Deni asked.
The deputy shook his head. “We don’t know for sure, but it might be a bomb. We need to get everyone out of here, just to be safe.”
A bomb. The word hit Deni like a punch in the gut. She swayed, suddenly dizzy. No. This really can’t be happening.
