Boucenna's Walk
By EB
©2004
"Holy shit."
It's a tiny cave, not even big enough to really warrant the name. A shallow pocket cut into the cliff side, about six feet in a rough oval, barely tall enough to sit up inside.
Behind him, Dean's breathing is harsh and fast. "Is he in there?"
Gil stands as steadily as he can, feeling his feet trying to slip treacherously out from under him. Roger's squeezed inside the miniature cave, and beyond him there's a body. It's not moving.
Roger turns, showing Gil his sweaty red face. "I can't tell," he says helplessly. "God almighty."
"Let me through."
Dean pushes past Gil, and his bulky pack scrapes Gil's shoulder on the way by. Roger's sliding backward, plants his foot in the scree to keep from simply riding all the way down the cliff side again. The two dogs are whining, panting so loud Gil wants to hiss at them to shut the hell up.
"Can't get a radial pulse." Dean sounds remote, cool, professional. "But he's breathing."
Gil's knees wobble. He's breathing, he's alive. Somehow, after all this, Nick's alive.
"Somebody get on the radio," Dean snaps without turning around. "Get that chopper here ASAP."
There's been a Lifeflight crew on standby for hours. They're maybe ten minutes away. Gil listens to Roger talking, and looks over his shoulder. Warrick's about halfway down the slope, standing at an awkward slant, hand shading his eyes as he looks up.
"Is he there?" he calls.
Gil nods slowly.
"Is he alive?"
"Yes," Gil answers, and hears his voice echoing off the rock walls.
Even lower on the slope, Catherine sits down hard. Warrick's teeth shine in a grin.
"Gonna be a bitch getting him out of here." Dean wipes his face on his sleeve while he rummages in his pack. "Christ. He's all jammed up inside there."
"Let me see him."
Dean glances at him. "For a second, okay? He's got no veins, and I gotta get IVs in him."
Gil nods.
The little alcove-cave smells dusty and sweet. Gil wedges himself awkwardly into the side, bent over, staring at Nick. He's lying on his side, a rock digging into his right cheek. It has to be Nick, there's no other candidate. But it doesn't look like Nick at all. Nick's face is drawn skeletally tight, a mask pulled thin over the bones. His closed eyes are sunk deep into the sockets, and blood has clotted around his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. His hand lies motionless on the dirt. When Gil touches it, it's cool and the flesh tents. There's no capillary refill, no natural elasticity.
"Hi, Nicky," Gil whispers. "Sorry it took us so long. I'm so sorry."
"Keep talking to him." Dean scoots in, too, takes the hand Gil has recoiled away from. "See if you can wake him up. If he'll wake up he might have a chance."
But Nick doesn't stir. Not while Dean searches fruitlessly for a vein that still works, some way to start the fluids into Nick's dehydrated body.
Gil reaches out to touch Nick's sunken cheek. It's fiery hot, horribly so.
"His temp's 105.6," Dean mutters. "Christ. Where's that chopper?"
They both hear it, a moment later. Dean sighs. "Thank God."
It takes nearly an hour to get Nick out of his cave and onto the helicopter. In that time all of them get a good look at what his ordeal has done to him. It's hard to believe he could be alive, seeing him now. It's hard to imagine that he will survive at all, even after all the people working on him, the diligent efforts of the medical personnel. He may not. Gil isn't prepared to say.
He sits next to Catherine, and feels her hand on his own, squeezing hard. When he looks at her he sees lines cut through the dust on her face, tracks of wetness.
"He's got to make it," she says in a parched, terrible voice. "After all this. He has to be okay."
Gil doesn't say anything. He nods, and holds her hand, and looks back while they put Nick on the helicopter. This is the end stage of dehydration. When the blood has grown too thick to circulate, and can no longer move heat out of the body. Nick's burning with fever, the outward sign of a body whose inner thermostat no longer works, blazing out of control.
But he's alive. Perhaps only clinically, but that's enough for now.
The wind stirred up by the chopper is strong enough to disturb the dirt for hundreds of feet. It catches bits of vegetation, creates tiny tornadic eddies. One of those eddies catches the plastic bottle Nick carried for several miles. It bounces, flips end over end, rolls until it thumps into a rut made by the occasional torrential spring rains.
This rut will deepen next spring, and after four more years it will widen enough to join up with several similar long fissures in the hard earth. It takes about sixty years before the rut is big enough to hold water for longer periods. By that time the climate is well along in its changes, and rain isn't as rare in these parts. The rut becomes a stream, almost a river at times. Plenty of water for someone in need, although it's sandy-brown and silty at best. But it's a beacon for wildlife, who beat paths to its banks.
A thousand years from now, this little rut is a wide river, and the cliff where Nick found shelter and comfort in the arms of his mother, who at that moment was listening to her husband as he found out their youngest child was missing in the desert, is long disappeared. There are other cliffs, much taller ones, and they're well-covered with undergrowth. No one in Nick's rescue party would even recognize the area any longer. It isn't desert, but the beginnings of bottomland forest, nourished by plentiful rain and the yellow, steamy atmosphere. The river rushes downhill, past cracked asphalt roadways, tipped-over highway markers. Toward the verdant empty canyons of what once was a place you could see for miles, lights brightening the sky at night.
But for now, this is still the desert, and the plastic bottle wedges between a piece of limestone and the roots of a young mesquite. And when the helicopter's rotors are gone, disappearing toward the glow on the southeast horizon, a few critters peep out again, cautious but resolute. There's no advantage to hiding any longer once the obvious dangers are gone. A horned lizard sniffs at the bottle, and scuttles on past it. Nothing edible there. It's just another bit of detritus, that's all. Move along.
The death of Mike Carson and the eventual rescue of Nick Stokes create a media flurry for a few days. Nick's survival is heralded as miraculous, even though it's much more than two days before that survival is in any way guaranteed. There are multiple public-interest stories about desert safety, what to do if one is stranded without water. Nick's by no means the only victim of this terrible heat, but he's certainly the most sensational.
The heat wave breaks a week after Nick's arrival in the hospital. Rain, cool and welcome, beats down on Gil as he hurries through the main entrance. He shakes out his umbrella and tucks it under his arm before taking the elevator to Nick's room.
Nick's family is here en masse, his pensive-looking father and calm, competent mother, a brother so much taller and heavier than Nick that it's hard to see the familial resemblance, more sisters than Gil can actually remember from visit to visit. The hospital is a seething hive of Stokeses, uncles and aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews.
But tonight the titanic family is out, and Nick's company is far more familiar: Catherine, Sara, Greg, Warrick. They all tend to congregate in the early evening, before they have to go to work. This is the fourth evening in a row they've all gotten together like this, and Gil suspects they'll keep doing it until Nick's eventually released from the hospital.
Everyone smiles when he walks in, but it's Nick Gil looks to first. Nick, whose face is no longer the mummified mask Gil glimpsed in that tiny sour-smelling California cave. Traces linger; Nick is still pinched-looking, and he tires easily. But a week of multiple wide-open IVs and treatment for his injured kidneys has done him a world of good. His doctors say he will be ready to go home in a few more days. It's astounding, and wonderful.
"We were just talking about you," Catherine announces, grinning.
"Oh?"
Someone pushes over a chair, and Gil sits, still taking in Nick's renewed health, the strength in the hand that briefly grips Gil's before subsiding to lie on the white blanket. "My ears weren't burning."
Nick's lips are still scabbed, but he smiles. "About how from now on we'll make sure we carry water on our persons when we're out in the field," he says. There's humor in his voice, but his eyes are older, warier. His eyes are the most different now, in the aftermath. Nick has aged, more than his body warrants. That look is wiser, and sadder.
"At the very least," Gil agrees.
"I still don't know how you did it, man." Warrick still hasn't quite relaxed around Nick, Gil sees. It may be guilt over how long it took to find him, or that Warrick wasn't with him when all this began. It may simply be lingering discomfort in the face of Nick's terrible initial debility. Warrick shifts in his seat, shakes his head. "All alone like that. Jesus."
Nick considers. "Well, I wasn't alone."
They all gaze at him. Unsure if this isn't another one of the hallucinations that plagued Nick's first few days in the MICU. He wasn't lucid then, and sometimes they wonder if he is now. But his smile is calm and quite sane. "I mean, sure, I was alone. But it was like you guys – were with me, kinda. Talking me through it. Weird, I know. But that's how it felt."
"I would have been terrified," Catherine whispers. She's got Nick's left hand, and it doesn't look as if she's letting go anytime soon. "Scared out of my mind."
"I guess." Nick's look at her is sweet, kind of sad. "Yeah. That, too. But after a while, you stop being so scared. Or maybe you don't. I don't really know. You do what you gotta do."
Gil contemplates his hands, lying loose on his lap. "I read an article several years ago." They look at him, but he's not quite seeing them any longer. "A man was talking about a fellow he knew, who was lost in the Sahara. He knew the ways of the desert, all of that, and yet he wandered, and he eventually died. His friend said that we all have our times to go. And that was his. Boucenna. I remember his name. The friend said it wasn't a bad thing. That he walked because that was his destiny."
"Because he was out of his mind with thirst," Sara observes tightly. "More like."
"Maybe." Gil shrugs. "I'm not sure." He looks at Nick. "Who did you see in the desert?" he asks.
"Everyone," Nick replies. His dark eyes meet Gil's, and there is understanding there. In Nick's gaze Gil can see endless vistas, beyond swirling dust and the hiss of the wind. In Nick's calm look Gil sees what he himself has only glimpsed before, and never completely grasped. The contemplation of the infinite, perhaps. Recognition of the abyss before which we all eventually stand.
Or it may only be that Nick is tired, and those eyes are only glad to have made it.
"How do you feel?" Gil asks softly.
Nick smiles. "Good. Did you find my truck?"
People laugh, and Gil grins. "We found it."
"My shirt," Nick says suddenly. "Carson gave me -- I got something. For his wife."
"The necklace. We found it."
"Can you give it to her? I promised."
"Absolutely. It's in my desk at the lab."
"Thank God." Nick nods slowly. His smile is gone, but the brief shadow is already gone from his eyes.
Gil leans forward and touches Nick's hand again. It's warm, and Nick's skin springs back, the way it should. "Anything else you need?"
Nick shakes his head. He looks sleepy. "I'm good. Glad you guys came by."
"Get some rest," Catherine says, disengaging her own hand. "We'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
"Sounds good."
Nick's eyes slide closed, and Gil can't see the knowledge there anymore. Nick is just a man, who's been through a terrible ordeal and needs some more shut-eye.
Gil pats Nick's limp hand once more and glances around. Who did Nick see, out there in the desert? All of them? Hallucinating? That's what it has to be.
But for a moment he wonders. About the clarity in Nick's gaze, the sense that Nick has seen things Gil has not, ever. He wonders if maybe there is more to it. The difference between a lone Bedouin's destiny and Nick's own. Why Boucenna walked to his death, and Nick did not.
Catherine's hand touches his shoulder, and he looks up. "Time to go to work," she says, smiling and lifting her chin.
"Yes," Gil says rustily. "You're right."
END