Rachel would have been gratified to know how something as simple as skiing, how just being herself, was allowing Matt to really see her, to finally appreciate all that she was offering him.
But at that moment, she was so lost in her personal reverie, her unity with the mountain, that she wasn't thinking of him at all.
Rachel didn't realize how far ahead of him she was until she heard the thunderous crack.
Matt felt it more than heard it, a deep rumble as much in the air as it was under his feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw the mountain shear apart, a massive, roiling wave of snow rushing up behind him.
Avalanche.
He looked ahead and saw Rachel looking back at him in horror.
'Go! Go!' he yelled.
She hunched down and shot forward, and so did he, trying to build up speed but knowing there was no way he could escape what was coming. He could feel the enormity of it, building in strength, chewing up snow, snapping trees, blasting cold air and ice against his back.
Rachel put everything she had into her arms, into her poles, into skiing faster than she ever had before.
There was a ravine ahead of them. If they could leap over it to the other side, they stood a chance of survival.
Matt saw what she had in mind and knew she'd make it. He glanced over his shoulder, and there it was.
The mountain.
Right in his face.
Rachel sailed over the ravine, knowing as she shot through the air that she was alive, more so in that moment that she'd ever been before.
And she knew that she would survive.
She hit the ground and turned to face what was coming, which she hoped would be the sight of Matt arcing through the air ahead of the avalanche.
But he was gone, lost in tons of cascading snow and trees and rock that spilled into the chasm with an earthshaking roar that was so loud, Rachel couldn't even hear her own scream.
CHAPTER NINE
February 20, 2011
If a skier manages not to be smashed against a tree, or carried over a cliff, or crushed by the weight of the snow and debris, he can survive an avalanche.
For about twenty minutes.
After that, most survivors of the initial impact and burial will die of asphyxiation.
A few lucky ones might find a pocket of air and hold on as their body temperature plummets and blood is diverted from their extremities to their vital organs.
The cruel truth, though, is that even if they manage to be rescued alive, they are still very likely to die, except in the cushy comfort of a hospital bed, a catheter and an IV shoved into them, instead of in an icy grave.
The key to surviving an avalanche is to be rescued within that first, critical half hour.
Matthew Cahill was under the ice for three months.
The facts of the case were unbelievable, so Dr. Jack Travis, the trauma specialist on call in the emergency room, chose to ignore them and deal instead with what he saw in front of him: a patient suffering from extreme hypothermia, typical of someone buried under the snow for an hour instead of months.
In all likelihood, Matt was headed right back to the morgue.
Hypothermia was a condition that Travis, having worked in the ski resort community for a decade, had plenty of experience dealing with.
Matt's body temperature on arrival was sixty-nine degrees. Travis covered him with heating blankets and put him on an epinephrine drip to elevate his blood pressure.
The patient was totally unresponsive to stimuli and his pupils didn't react to light, which indicated to Travis that Matt had suffered anoxic encephalopathy-severe and irreversible brain damage.
Travis ordered a complete metabolic panel, chest X-rays, and an MRI to see just how grim things were. But when the results came back, the doctor was stunned by what he saw.
The blood oxygen and muscle enzyme counts were normal.
The lungs were clear.
And the brain scan showed no swelling at all.
It was as if Matthew Cahill wasn't hypothermic at all, just deeply asleep.
But with the nerve response, pupil dilation, and core body temperature of a corpse.
And he was rapidly defrosting.
There really was nothing Travis could do except wonder how it was possible and wait to see what happened next.
So that's exactly what he did.
He pulled a stool up beside Matt's bed and waited, along with the leaders of nearly every department in the hospital except pediatrics and oncology.
But even those two department heads found excuses to be in the ER, having heard the news, which was already beginning to spread far beyond Mammoth Peaks.
In fact, a stooped-backed fisherman floating down the Yangtze River in a flat-bottomed wooden sampan was using his iPhone to catch up on the hash-marked tweets about 'the frozen man' at the exact moment that Matthew Cahill startled everyone in the ER by taking a sharp breath and opening his eyes.
Travis bolted up and leaned over Matt, looking into the man's questioning eyes.
'You're alive,' Travis said.
It was supposed to be a reassuring statement, but to Matthew Cahill, it sounded more like a question, one that he was expected to answer.
CHAPTER TEN
Matt was fortunate that he was taken to a university hospital, not so much for their medical expertise and wide resources, but for their selfishness and greed.
The university was known in the scientific community for offering lucrative salaries to researchers in return for retaining the patents on anything that anybody created or discovered, accidentally or intentionally, while on their payroll.
The university was also known among pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, equipment manufacturers, and third world dictatorships as a shameless whore that would sell those patents to whoever offered the best prices, the biggest endowments, the most endowed escorts, the highest bribes, and the most decadent perks.
So it was in the university's financial interest, over the three short days that followed Matt's admittance to the ER, to downplay reports of his miraculous rebirth and to keep him, and whatever lucrative secrets his body might hold, all to themselves.
The hospital's public affairs director did an excellent job deflecting press inquiries by not exactly denying the facts, but by pointing out how ridiculous and unbelievable they were, implying that it was all either an elaborate hoax or a big mistake.
The university was helped in their efforts by Matt's refusal to grant any interviews, take any calls, see any visitors, or allow any information about his condition to be shared with the media.
But most of all, the university benefitted from the media's short attention span, their insatiable hunger for news, and the timely discovery of video of a teenage Disney starlet enthusiastically engaged in a naked three-way with a couple of shockingly tumescent Nick at Nite boy toys.
