Long Lost by David Morrell Read Free Book Online

rain slicker, pushed the Ziploc bags of trail food aside, and found the plastic case of the first—aid kit.
    I clumsily pried it open, dismayed to find only Band—Aids and two—inch—square pads along with scissors, antiseptic swabs, antibiotic cream, and a plastic bottle of Tylenol. None of that was going to stop the bleeding.
    A tourniquet, I thought. I’ll use my belt. I’ll tighten it around my arm and …
    But even as I unbuckled my belt, I remembered something I’d read about tourniquets being dangerous, about the risk of blood clots and gangrene if the tourniquet wasn’t loosened at proper intervals.
    What difference does it make? I thought. I’ll bleed to death before I die from gangrene.
    A pressure bandage. Whatever I’d read about tourniquets had warned that a pressure bandage was the safe way to stop bleeding, something that put pressure on the wound without cutting off the flow of blood. But where was I going to find something like that?
    The bleeding worsened.
    Perhaps because I was light—headed, I took more time than I should have to remember something else that might be in the knapsack. Once when Kate had been on a college trip to Paris, she’d sprained an ankle and had limped painfully from drugstore to drugstore, trying to find an Ace bandage, the wide, long elastic material you wrap around a sprain to give the injured area some support. Since then, whenever she traveled, she made sure to carry one in her luggage, and she always took care to pack one for me.
    More dizzy, I used my right hand to search through the knapsack. Where
is
it? I thought. It isn’t like Kate not to have packed one.
    Damn it, this time she hadn’t.
    Desperate, I was about to dump everything out, when I noticed a bulge at the side of the knapsack. Struggling to clear my mind, I freed a zipper on a pouch and almost wept when I found a folded elastic bandage.
    Working awkwardly with one hand, sometimes using my teeth to open packets, I cleaned the gash with antiseptic swabs, spread antibiotic ointment over it, and pressed several two—inch pads onto it. Blood soaked them. Hurrying, I wrapped the elastic bandage around my left forearm. Keeping it tight, circling layer upon layer, I saw blood tint each layer.
    I urgently wrapped more layers, applying more pressure, worried about how little of the bandage remained. I prayed that the blood wouldn’t soak all the way through. Two more layers. One. I secured the end with two barbed clips that came with the bandage. Then I stared at the bandage, shivering, concentrating to see if blood would soak through. For a moment, I feared that the pale brown of the bandage would become pink, about to turn red. I held my breath, exhaling only when a small area of pink didn’t spread.
    My watch’s crystal was shattered, the hands frozen at ten after two. I had no idea how long I’d been on the ledge, but when I peered up through the vapor from the stream, the sun seemed to have shifted farther west than I would have expected from the brief time since I’d fallen. Evidently I’d been unconscious longer than it seemed.
    I stared up at the rim but still didn’t see Petey and Jason. Give them time, I thought.
    The trouble was, if I didn’t get off the ledge soon, I was going to be in a lot worse trouble.
    I wasn’t an outdoorsman—I’d certainly proven that. But it wasn’t possible to live in a mountain state like Colorado without seeing stories in the newspaper or on the TV news about the dangers of hypothermia. Hikers would go into the mountains, wearing only shorts and T—shirts. A sudden storm would soak them. If the temperature dropped, if the hikers were more than three hours from warm clothes and hot fluids to raise their rapidly dropping core temperature, they died from exposure.
    Lying on the damp, chill ledge, I shivered. My hands and feet felt numb. If I don’t get off this ledge soon, I thought, it won’t matter that I stopped the bleeding. Hypothermia will kill me.
    I