6.
Petal
Awareness returned slowly at first. Bits and pieces, memories, vague thoughts. Nothing she could recall later, but enough to let her know she wasn’t dead.
Then the pain hit, and Petal became all too aware that she was very much alive.
Her scream ripped through the air as she sat up, abruptly remembering that she was in a car and they were going over the edge of the road in a storm-caused mudslide. She slammed her hands down to brace herself, wondering why the car felt so cool and solid. There wasn’t any light to see by, but as her brain continued to return to functionality, Petal understood that she wasn’t in the car any longer.
Nothing was moving, and she was alive. A quick check told her that she was unharmed as well. Minus a plentitude of bruises and aches of course. But no broken bones or other traumatic injuries. It was a minor miracle really. The hill below the road hadn’t exactly been a gentle slope. The nearest trees were easily three hundred feet below. That was a long fall before something might have stopped them.
So what had happened? And where were they? Questions started to abound in her head.
“Lex?” she called out tentatively.
Her voice echoed back to her. She was somewhere inside. Her hands felt the ground beneath her once more, tapping on it. Solid rock. All at once Petal knew they were in a cave. No, she was in a cave. Lex was nowhere to be seen, and nobody else had responded to the sound of her voice.
She was alone. Focusing through the headache pounding in her skull, Petal did the first thing she could think of. She found a weapon. It was a rock perhaps the size of a soup bowl. It wouldn’t be any good if someone had a light, but perhaps she could sneak up on them and hit them on the head with it. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing.
“Hello?” she tried again, but once more there was no response. “Dammit Lex, where the hell are you? Why did you leave me?”
The sound of her voice had given her some idea of the layout of the cave. Petal determined that she was sitting against one wall. To her left and right the cave expanded. It was long and narrow, as best she could tell. Anything more than that would require light.
A sound from off to her right caught her attention. It was the sound of something scrabbling on rock.
She swallowed nervously.
Like claws.
Oh no. She had somehow made her way into a wolf den, and now the wolves had returned. They were going to kill her. Petal wasn’t sure what the best course of action was, but she knew she couldn’t just sit there and stay quiet. She needed to try and scare them off. If they weren’t expecting her to aggressively come at them, maybe she could startle them, get them to leave the cave. Then she could make her escape before they came back.
She drew in as much courage that remained to her. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough. Petal sucked air into her lungs once. Then twice, letting them expand in size. Then she sucked in a third breath, and began to bellow at the creature even while she pounded her rock against the stone of the ground.
“Get out!” Bam. “Leave me alone!” Bam! Bam! Petal started to advance toward the sound, feeling her way as she went. “Begone! Leave this place!” She kept hammering the rock in her hand into the side of the cave wall, the crack of sound echoing crazily. “Raaagghhhhh!” She did her best roar, not caring how it sounded.
“Calm—”
The voice sounded from just off to her left. Petal didn’t let it finish as she launched herself at the noise, swinging the rock with all of her might.
Something wrapped around her wrist and stopped it cold. The sudden cessation of movement caused a backlash up her arm and into her shoulder that made her whimper in pain. It was only when it released that she realized it had been a hand.
“That’s enough,” the voice said in an iron tone.
“Lex?” she gasped, more relieved that she recognized the voice than with the way he’d spoken to her.
“I hope you’ll believe it’s me. I lost my nametag though, so I can’t prove it.”
She sagged into his arms, barely registering the sudden change in his voice. “Oh thank God it’s you.”
“Who else would it be?”
Suddenly feeling silly that she’d thought herself under attack by wolves, Petal just shook her head and rested against him. Lex, for his part, stood there and held her easily, as if she didn’t weigh a thing. After several moments of that she stood up, brushed herself off and gathered her thoughts.
“Come on,” he ordered. “Let’s get you seated. You took a nasty bump on the head.”
Strong, confident hands guided her back to her sitting area, where she realized for the first time she’d been half on top of a sheet of some sort. It felt crinkly and vaguely metallic.
“It’s a reflective heat blanket,” Lex informed her. “From the truck’s safety gear.”
“The truck,” she said suddenly, sitting upright. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?” Lex’s voice came out of the darkness from the opposite wall, where apparently he seemed to have seated himself.
Petal wished he would have sat down next to her, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. He appeared to be able to see better in the dark than her, but letting him know she was afraid of it wasn’t an option. She still had some dignity left. Probably. Maybe.
“The storm. The rain. We were driving in the truck. The road washed out. Then…blank.” She smacked the palm of her hand against her head in frustration at her inability to remember everything that happened after. Immediately pain blossomed and she hissed as agony lanced deep into her brain.
“Gentle,” Lex urged. “You hit your head pretty hard. You need to take it easy for a bit, okay?”
“Yeah. Got that now.” Eventually the suffering eased and she found her breathing returning to normal. “Definitely got it.”
“Just try to relax. I’ll tell you what happened.”
Petal nodded weakly, forgetting that he couldn’t see her.
“We were going backward as the road gave out in front of us. We went around a tree, but we were going over some branches of it. The bottom of the trunk went over the lip of the road, and the top rose into the air, the edge of the road itself acting like the fulcrum of a lever. Follow so far?”
“Yeah.”
“That took the truck with it, obviously.” He made an odd grunting noise before continuing. “Anyway, the branches suddenly going up flipped the truck around and onto its back. You blacked out when you hit your head. The road kept washing out and we went down the hill. I managed to pull you out, and get you to shelter here.”
“Where is here, by the way?”
“A cave I found,” he answered, tapping his fist against the sidewall loud enough to echo. “Thank goodness I did too.”
Petal sensed more bad news. “Why do I get the feeling the story doesn’t get any better from there?”
Lex snorted into the silence that followed. “Because it doesn’t. I also grabbed the truck’s safety gear. It was about all I could manage between the rain and the mud pouring into the truck.”
She shook her head. “You let a company vehicle get dirty?”
“Well, I was planning to write it off for insurance fraud anyway. I could use the money for a nice vacation down somewhere south. Where it’s warm.”
“Insurance fraud? What were you going to say? That the door just magically opened and it filled with mud? Nobody is going to believe that,” she scoffed. “As if one of our employees would be dumb enough to drive it out on a road that was unsafe. Do you know how many regulations that employee was probably breaking?”
“Hmm,” Lex said, sounding thoughtful. “I suppose you’re right. But what about the giant boulder that crushed the entire bed? Or the tree that slammed into the cab a minute or so after we exited it? Can we make either of those work?”
“I don’t think we have boulder protection. But a falling tree? Oh yeah. Much better excuse.”
“Glad to hear it. I can imagine my villa on the ocean even now.”
“A villa on the ocean? I don’t think our trucks are worth that much.”
He laughed, the sound helping ease her fear, as was the banter between them.
“I assumed there would be a reward for returning a lost beloved corporate executive as well.”
“Oh probably.” Petal grew quiet after that, lost in thought. The truth was, she wasn’t beloved.
Hell, I’m not even liked. Even my own boss is scared of me, preferring to send messages through our secretaries instead of directly to me. Nobody would be happy to have me back. They would probably celebrate if I didn’t return from this.
All at once the direness of her predicament came rushing in, cloistering around her with a claustrophobic tightness she’d never felt with the cave itself. There was a very real chance that one Petal Olson didn’t come back from this. She’d never really considered how she was going to die before. It was just sort of assumed that she’d go at a ripe old age, surrounded by her family.
Now that future wasn’t looking so accurate.
“Can we call for help?” she whispered, changing the topic.
“Unfortunately, no. The cell phones were charging in the dash, remember? In my rush to get you and the safety gear, I didn’t have time to get them.”
“What? Those were our best chance for getting rescued!” she shouted, struggling to get to her feet.
Lex was there in a flash, his hands somehow finding her shoulders and settling her back onto the thermal reflective blanket.
“Petal, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“We could have been rescued by now!”
“No, we couldn’t have!”
She recoiled as he raised his voice for the very first time. The sharp tone cut through her building hysteria like a steak knife, deflating it swifter than it had formed.
“What do you mean?”
His arms guided her back down. This time he sat beside her, not even breathing hard from the little episode. Petal on the other hand was forced to take deep breaths to replace the oxygen she’d used up in her struggle.
“Minutes after I got us free of the truck and mud the temperature started to drop rapidly. Everything started to turn to snow and ice. There’s several feet of snow outside the den now. We would have frozen to death before rescuers could ever have reached us.”
“That sounds bad.”
She could sense him nodding. “I’m not going to lie. It is bad. But, it’s also survivable. We have warm weather gear, including the blankets.”
“Blankets? There’s more of them? Can I have them?” She was suddenly feeling a little chilly.
“No. The other one is acting as our door, helping to keep the heat in. The ground is still quite warm, so we should be okay as long as we stay in here until it melts. I pulled enough snow up across the entrance to form a sort of igloo. That and the blanket should prevent the cold from really penetrating in here. We’ll survive. It won’t be that villa on the ocean, but we’ll live through it. I promise.”
The confidence in his voice reached out and grabbed her. Petal basked in it, feeling confident about their chances with Lex at her side. He was a quick thinker, fast on his feet it seemed. Hopefully he could find a way to get them out of this mess.
Otherwise she was going to die stuck in a cave with a lowly line worker.
Romeo and Juliet it was not.