same luck here,” he said to himself. Gabe looked into the sedan one more time. The woman inside still hadn’t moved. How long had she been like that?
He was wasting time, wondering instead of doing, he admonished himself.
Working as fast as he could, Gabe secured one end of the chain to the rear bumper of the woman’s car and the other end to his truck’s front bumper. Offering up bits and pieces of a prayer his mother had insisted that all her children learn by the time they were old enough to talk, Gabe got in behind the wheel of his truck, threw it into Reverse and ever so slowly backed up.
He never took his eyes off the sedan and its still passenger.
The ground was exceedingly wet after the storm and traction not what it could have been, but of the two vehicles, his, fortunately, was the heavier one. Otherwise, he might have found himself sliding toward the one in jeopardy, not away from it.
He held his breath as his truck continued to slowly move away from the edge of the ravine.
Little by little, inch by inch, the sedan began to tilt toward him, away from the ledge, until finally he managed to get all four of the vehicle’s wheels on the ground. Still in Reverse, he got the sedan far enough away from the edge of the ravine so that it no longer was in any danger of tumbling into it.
The second he got the other vehicle securely on flat ground, Gabe quickly turned off his engine and jumped out of the truck. Rushing over to the banged-up sedan, he found that the doors on both sides were jammed shut. Rather than attempt to wrestle with them, trying to pry one of them free, he took out the firearm that the sheriff had issued to him.
Turning it around so that the butt of the weapon was facing the window, he struck at the windshield as hard as he could. Two attempts later, the glass finally cracked. Under the forceful pressure of his hand, the small, spidery cracks began to spread out. As they did so, they weakened the glass enough so that when he swung the hilt of his weapon against it, the windshield finally shattered. Parts of it fell into the car.
Which left the rest for him to deal with. Moving quickly, Gabe removed chunks of the glass until he’d managed to clear a sufficiently large enough opening for him to snake through. He made it into the passenger seat, glass fragments clinging to his hair, casting small rainbows.
The woman was still strapped into her seat. There was blood over her right eye thanks to the head wound directly above it.
She was blonde and probably not more than about twenty-six, he judged. Her eyes were closed and for a moment he thought she was dead. Feeling her neck for a pulse, he wasn’t sure if he detected any, or if what he felt faintly throbbing was merely the pulse within his own fingers.
He moved the blonde gently back so that she was in a more accessible sitting position. Gabe put his head against her chest, straining to detect even the faintest of heartbeats.
He didn’t hear anything.
But just as he was straightening up, he thought he felt the slightest brush of material against his cheek. Stunned, he stared at her chest intently. That was when he saw it. Just the smallest hint of movement.
She was breathing.
The woman was still alive!
His pulse began to race and he grinned.
She was still alive.
Chapter Two
Gabriel was torn between leaving the woman where she was until help arrived and trying to get her out of her totaled vehicle.
Weighing pros and cons, he was leaning toward the former since the ground was wet and he had no idea what sort of internal injuries she’d sustained. Since he had no medical training, he was afraid that moving her, if he unintentionally did it the wrong way, might make things worse for the blonde.
But the silent debate ended abruptly when he became aware of the very strong smell of gasoline. It was coming from her car, never a good thing considering the kind of damages the vehicle had sustained.
Staying in the wrecked vehicle was definitely not a safe choice for either one of them. Gabriel shifted, trying first one door, then the other, hoping that at least one of them was more pliable from the inside of the sedan than from the outside.
But they weren’t. Neither door gave an inch, nor gave any indications that they could be moved if enough pressure was applied.
They remained sealed even when he attempted to kick his way out.
The force he’d exerted reverberated all the way up his leg to his thigh. The door still didn’t budge.
Since the doors appeared to be permanently sealed, he thought his next best bet was the front windshield. He’d already crawled in through the windshield to reach the unconscious woman, but that had been at a price. He’d gotten half a dozen or more cuts along his arms and torso for his trouble. Using this route to get out meant he had to do some more cleaning up. The woman was already bleeding from her scalp. He didn’t want to add to her injuries if he could help it.
Bracing himself on the seat, Gabriel raised both of his legs up as high as he could, then kicked against the windshield as hard as he was able.
It wasn’t enough.
He did it again.
And again.
With each kick, a little more of the windshield shattered and drops of glass rained down on either the hood or directly into the car. Before he’d gotten started, he’d covered up the blonde with his jacket as best he could, trying to protect her from the falling glass.
Taking his jacket back now, he wrapped it around his arm, and then swung his arm in a giant sweeping motion, clearing away as much of the broken glass fragments as he could. He wanted to be able to get her out, onto the hood, with as little of the jagged edges grabbing on to her as possible.
Gabe was well aware that the maneuver would have been a great deal easier if there was someone outside the vehicle to hand her off to. But he was fighting against the clock. Who knew how much more of a safety zone he had left to work with? He had the uneasy feeling that the car could blow up at any moment and he needed to get them both out of there and in the clear before that happened.
Besides, taking a closer look, he saw that she was still bleeding from her temple. He needed to get the blonde into town and to the doctor.
It occurred to Gabe, as he struggled to get the unconscious woman through the opening he’d created, that a year ago there would have been no doctor to take her to. At least, none in Forever and none around for a fifty-mile radius. Any medical emergency had to be handled in Pine Ridge, which boasted of a hospital within the town limits. Before Dan Davenport had arrived, Forever had been without a doctor for the past thirty years.
And now they had one.
Forever wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of progress, but they were getting there, little by little, Gabe thought. He supposed that baby steps were better than no steps at all.
Despite the fact that it was cold and the woman he was struggling to get out of the car was little more than just a slip of a thing, Gabe found himself working up a sweat. There just wasn’t all that much space to successfully maneuver in.
