“Can you move?” I ask him.
“Not this fucking leg, much. I think I could hop or something, in a minute. I’m going to sit a minute,” he says. “It hurts like a fucker. Fucking shit.” He’s mad at the plane for crashing, or the fucked condition of his bones. It has to hurt him, what I see of it.
“Fucking fuck—“ he’s groaning, and wincing, and getting too pissed off. He’s barely remembering to breathe. The wind's starting up on us, more. He’s freezing. So am I.
“It’s good it hurts,” I say. “That’s good.” I look at him to see if he understands.
“Oh yeah? Good,” he says. “I’m fucking terrific, then.”
“What’s bleeding?” I ask.
He looks down, lifts his shirt, his side and stomach are scratched and cut, some a little deep, but it doesn’t look bad, just cuts. It’s too cold to worry about infection. If there’s a fucking bacteria alive in this it deserves whatever it can get. There’s some big bulge sticking out under his skin, some kind of hernia, guts bulging, or something. He doesn’t notice it, and I don’t say anything. I don’t think it’ll kill him, just make it harder for him. I don’t know.
“Anything else?” I ask him. “Anything else bleeding?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t fucking know yet. Fuck.” He looks at me. “Ottway, yeah? What— John?”
I nod. “You’re Ojeira, right?”
He nods. “Yeah. Fuck.”
We look at each other. ‘
“Stay there for now, OK?” I say. Ojeira nods again. He looks at his hand. Two fingers are bent sideways, the whole hand is blowing up, I see now, it looks dark, purple, I’m guessing.
“Fuck me,” he says. He tries to clench a fist, and almost gags.
“That hurts more than the rest of it,” he says. He looks down at himself, his legs at different angles from the way he flopped down. He starts trying to set them right, and gives up, stops. He huffs in air, his eyes fill up. I think he’s going to start crying again, but he just sits there.
“I’m going to sit. A minute,” he says.
“I’ll come back for you. Stay here, OK?” I say. He doesn’t have much choice. I look across the snow to the other guy. He’s still crawling, trying to get on top of the snow, I see now he’s been moving, he’s just stuck in a drift so deep he’s barely made a yard. I go over to him, past bloody clothes and more parts of bodies and bodies. It’s Luttinger, another tool-pusher. They’re all tool-pushers.
“What the fuck,” he says. “Fuck.” He finally gets up on harder snow and stays up, this time, nothing seems wrong with him except he’s still unsteady, but no bones sticking out or limbs going the wrong way.
“Something rolled, broke open, I don’t know. Slid a fucking mile.” He touches his face, up by his eye and his forehead.
“I have any face left?” I can’t tell much in the light, but it looks like he’s just torn up. He still has a face.
“I think so. Yeah,” I say. He’s touching it.
“Feels like I scraped it all the hell off,” he says. His clothes are half-ripped away, or burned away, from sliding across snow, or something, but he’s got more on him than Ojeira.
He looks at me.
“You OK?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
He looks across to Ojeira.
“That guy looks half-fucked,” he says. Ojeira’s gotten up, again, he’s trying to walk. He looks pretty bad doing it. “Who is it?”
“Ojeira.” Luttinger nods.
“Yeah. Shit.” Luttinger says. “I’m Luttinger.”
“I know,” I say. He looks at me, doesn’t know me.
“I’m Ottway.” He looks at me again, sort of guarded, nods, not so glad to see me, suddenly.
”We should get him inside a piece of plane or something. Try to get him warm,” I say. We both look around. There are more dark clumps in the snow, bodies or seats or wreckage, chunks of shell. Luttinger nods.
“Anybody else moving over here?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Nobody.” Of the ones we can see close to us, it’s plain enough they’re dead. I should start assuming everybody’s dead.
We start back for Ojeira. It’s hard going. I’m finding things hurting I didn’t know were hurting before. The cold is numbing everything but sharpening everything at the same time. I stop at the first body we pass. The guy has boots on. I pull them off, his jacket too, his sweater. The guy’s got insulated pants, I get those off him too. He looks familiar, but I don’t think I know him. Luttinger doesn’t say anything. I give the jacket to him. He looks surprised, but takes it. The other bodies we pass on the way to Ojeira are in t-shirts, or half-naked. I’m not understanding how clothes ripped off in the crash, but they did.
Luttinger and I reach Ojeira, finally. He’s glad to see us and pissed at the same time.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” he says.
“We did, though,” I say.
