“My town is gone,” Theo said for her. “It’s okay. I know. I just want Spencer to be okay.”
She nodded and met eyes with Glen. Glen Echo, for his part, was slicing Spencer’s flight suit open with his bowie knife even as Elsie took the cat from Spencer and handed it to Theo.
“What happened?” Glen asked tersely.
“Fought a tree,” Spencer mumbled. “Tree won. Fucking tree.”
Glen looked to Theo for clarification, and Theo didn’t even want to look at the field dressing he’d put on that morning.
“I pulled him out of the water and tried to dress everything and clean it and wrap it in bandages. But we couldn’t keep it dry.”
Glen brushed the wound at Spencer’s shin and Spencer let out an agonized whimper.
“That—he was standing in the water trying to keep the boat from raging down to the bottleneck. The wound itself was pretty bad, but—”
“Gah!” Glen said, unwrapping the bandages. “Spencer! Fuck me! This is bad.”
“Now we know,” Spencer mumbled, “why you’re not a doctor.”
Glen scrubbed at his face and called into the coms. “Damie? The school gym in Splinter or whatever isn’t going to do it. We’re going to need surgery and a full course of antibiotics—we’ve got a banana bag and some Keflex for him, but he’s going to need way more. How soon can you get us to Portland, brother?”
Glen heard him answer and nodded. “Phone it in, then. Tell them he’s wounded, he’s feverish, he’s infected, and he’s cold, and they’re going to need to work fast.”
“I’ll tell Cash and Preston—they can meet us there.”
Glen clicked a button on his coms helmet and looked up at Theo, his expression bleak and a little lost. “You did good,” he rasped. “This asshole here likes to make things tough, don’t you, Spence?”
But Spencer had apparently checked out of the conversation, his eyes closed, shallow breath still moving his chest.
“I….” Theo closed his eyes and swallowed. “I really need him to be okay,” he said, head pounding and throat sore. “I … he’s such a good man.”
Glen and Elsie met eyes again and shared a slow, painful smile. “You think he’s a good man?” Elsie asked.
“He’s the best,” Theo told her. “He tries to hide it—God, that mouth of his—but… but it’s like the sun. You can still see it. You still know it’s there. Clouds, smoke, rain—the sun is hiding, but it’s never gone.”
“Kid—” Glen started.
“I’m twenty-four!” Theo snapped, not even sure why, except Spencer had tried to use this too.
“Well, then,” Glen said. “Well, okay. Was old enough for Cash. It’s old enough for you. What’s your name?”
“Theo,” he said. “Theo Wainscott. Spencer calls me Woodchuck.”
Glen and Elsie let out a strained chuckle before they started calling orders to each other, and Theo shut up for the rest of the ride and let them work.
DAMIEN had to land the chopper in an empty part of the parking lot, carefully lowering so the raft jolted to the ground in a splinter of wood and then scooting ahead just enough to land free and clean on a bare spot on the concrete.
Theo knew this was pretty impressive because Glen said, “Holy fuck,” and Elsie said, “Dear God, we’ll never hear the end of it,” and then they both shouted into the coms, “Yes, goddammit, you’re King of the Goddamned Skies!”
Then Glen opened the bay door, and he and Elsie hopped out, grabbed the basket with a blanket-wrapped Spencer between them, and set it on the stretcher waiting with a medical team when the helicopter landed.
Elsie pulled off her coms helmet and stashed it in a compartment on the side of the Black Hawk and then looked at Theo.
“If you come with me now, we can get you some dry clothes and something to eat while we wait for Spencer in surgery. Damien’s got to take care of the chopper, but we’ve got a ground team here. Otherwise, Damien can get you hooked up with the shelter people, and maybe you can go meet your friends from your town. Did you have family there?”
“No.” Theo shook his head and looked down at Stupid, who had been sleeping tucked in his arms for the whole ride, finally warm and apparently exhausted from what had been a helluva day.
“What do I do with the cat?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Bring him. Preston’s got his truck—he usually has dog crates in the back. I’m pretty sure we can take care of Stupid as well as anybody at the shelter.”
Theo sighed and stood, handing Stupid to Elsie so he could hop stiffly out of the helicopter. The bright lights of Portland were a welcome contrast to the big roaring rapids of nothing he and Spencer had been facing all day. The rain still fell, but it was a smaller thing when they were heading for a brightly lit building. Elsie turned and slid the door closed, then squatted down and unhooked the carabiner that secured the steel cable holding the raft to the struts on the bottom of the helicopter. Then she pounded on the door twice so the pilot would know it was secure. They ran to clear the chopper blades and the ferocious updraft, and then, when they were well away, they both slowed down.
Two men were waiting in the hospital lobby—one tall and blond and enough like Glen Echo to be Preston, his brother, and the other smaller and slighter and, well, famous.
“Cash,” he said, extending his hand. “Cash Harper.”
“Quincet,” Theo said dumbly. “Oh my God. Spencer—I’m gonna strangle him.”
Cash laughed. “Let me guess. ‘Oh, now, my boss’s boyfriend’s in a band. But Preston has dogs, and that’s cool.’”
“Yes!” Theo burst out. “Oh my God—I have your albums!”
“Yeah, well, to Spencer the dogs are cooler than the band. It’s why Preston loves Spencer too.”
Preston looked down at the two dogs at his heel, one a rock-solid, dark-brown, ginormous dog with a head the size of a volleyball, and the other a German shepherd mixed with something else who appeared to be holding on to himself with every last thread of patience.
Theo fell to his knees—that undone, that suddenly. “Colonel,” he said gruffly, and then, of all things to wreck him, he wrapped his arms around the dog’s neck and cried.
IT took a while to get sorted after that. Finally, like Elsie had promised, he was clean after a warm shower, wrapped in brand-new sweats and tennis shoes, with thick socks, with his sodden, ripped clothes from that day in a plastic bag next to him.
He sat with the others in the waiting room by the surgery. Elsie sat next to him, still holding Stupid. An enormous paper cup of hot chocolate mixed with coffee was warming him from the inside out, and the remains of a hot sandwich sat on the table next to him.
Glen and Elsie had both used the same EMT shower facility Theo had and had changed, and they were waiting for Damien, who had taken the bird to a local airfield and caught a ride to the hospital with a search-and-rescue guy coming off shift.
Preston and Cash—and Colonel, and Preacher, the other dog—were with them. Colonel had perched his chin on Theo’s knees and watched soulfully as Theo ate, but Theo had been cautioned by a very stern Preston not to give him snacks that way.