One arm would not work. It dangled before him. With his good hand he fumbled to find the mask again. He emptied the mess, pressed the rubber to his face.
The oxygen burned cold across the nitrogen wounds in his throat.
'Ram?' he croaked. No answer.
'Ram?'
He could feel the emptiness behind him.
Strapped facedown, bones broken, wings clipped, Branch did the only other thing he was able to do, the one thing he had come to do. He had entered this dark forest to witness great evil. And so he made himself see. He refused delirium. He looked. He watched. He waited.
The darkness eased.
It was not dawn arriving. Rather, it was his own vision binding with the blackness. Shapes surfaced. A horizon of gray tones.
He noticed now a strange, taut lightning flickering on the far side of his Plexiglas. At first he thought it was the storm igniting thin strands of gas. The hits of light penciled in various objects on the forest floor, less with actual illumination than through brief flashes of silhouette.
Branch struggled to make sense of the clues spread all around him, but apprehended only that he had fallen from the sky.
'Mac,' he called on his radio. He traced the communications cord to his helmet, and it was severed. He was alone.
His instrument panel still showed aspects of vitality. Various green and red lights twinkled, fed by batteries here and there. They signified only that the ship was still dying.
He saw that the crash had cast him among a tangle of fallen trees close to Zulu Four. He peered through Plexiglas sprayed with a fine spiderweb. A gracile crucifix loomed in the near distance. It was a vast, fragile icon, and he wondered – hoped – that some Serb warrior might have erected it as penance for this mass grave. But then Branch saw that it was one of his broken rotor blades caught at a right angle in a tree.
Bits of wreckage smoldered on the floor of soaked needles and leaves. The soak could be rain. Rather late, it came to him that the soak could also be his own spilled fuel.
What alarmed him was how sluggish his alarm was. From far away, it seemed, he registered that the fuel could ignite and that he should extricate himself and his partner – dead or alive – and get away from his ship. It was imperative, but did not feel so. He wanted to sleep. No.
He hyperventilated with the oxygen. He tried to steel himself to the pain about to come, jock stuff mostly, when the going gets tough...
He reared up, shouldering high against the side canopy, and bones grated upon bones. The dislocated knee popped in, then out again. He roared.
Branch sank down into his seat, shocked alive by the crescendo of nerve endings. Everything hurt. He laid his head back, found the mask.
The canopy flapped up, gently.
He drew hard at the oxygen, as if it might make him forget how much more pain was left to come. But the oxygen only made him more lucid. In the back of his mind, the names of broken bones flooded in helpfully. Horribly. Strange, this diagnosis. His wounds were eloquent. Each wanted to announce itself precisely, all at the same time. The pain was thunderous.
He raised a wild stare at the bygone sky. No stars up there. No sky. Clouds upon clouds. A ceiling without end. He felt claustrophobic. Get out.
He took a final lungful, let go of the mask, shed his useless helmet.
With his one good arm, Branch grappled himself free of the cockpit. He fell upon the earth. Gravity despised him. He felt crushed smaller and smaller into himself.
Within the pain, a distant ecstasy opened its strange flower. The dislocated knee popped back into place, and the relief was almost sexual. 'God,' he groaned. 'Thank God.'
He rested, panting rapidly, cheek upon the mud. He focused on the ecstasy. It was tiny among all the other savage sensations. He imagined a doorway. If only he could enter, all the pain would end.
After a few minutes, Branch felt stronger. The good news was that his limbs were numbing from the gas saturation in his bloodstream. The bad news was the gas. The nitrogen reeked. It tasted like aftermath.
'...Tango One...' he heard.
Branch looked up at the caved-in hull of his Apache. The electronic voice was coming from the backseat. 'Echo... read me...'
He stood away from the earth's flat seduction. It was beyond his comprehension that he could function at all. But he had to tend to Ramada. And they had to know the dangers.
He climbed to a standing position against the chill aluminum body. The ship lay tilted upon one side, more ravaged than he had realized. Hanging on to a handhold, Branch looked into the rear cavity. He braced for the worst.
But the backseat was empty.
Ramada's helmet lay on the seat. The voice came again, tiny, now distinct. 'Echo
Tango One...'
Branch lifted the helmet and pulled it onto his own head. He remembered that there was a photograph of the newborn son in its crown.
'This is Echo Tango One,' he said. His voice sounded ridiculous in his own ears, elastic and high, cartoonish.
'Ramada?' It was Mac, angry in his relief. 'Quit screwing around and report. Are you guys okay? Over.'
'Branch here,' Elias identified with his absurd voice. He was concussed. The crash had messed up his hearing.
'Major? Is that you?' Mac's voice practically reached for him. 'This is Echo Tango
Two. What is your condition, please? Over.'
'Ramada is missing,' Branch said. 'The ship is totaled.'
Mac took a half-minute to absorb the information. He came back on, all business.
'We've got a fix on you on the thermal scan, Major. Right beside your bird. Just hold your position. We're coming in to provide assistance. Over.'
'No,' Branch quacked with his bird voice. 'Negative. Do you read me?' Mac and the other gunships did not respond.
'Do not, repeat, do not attempt approach. Your engines will not breathe this air.' They accepted his explanation reluctantly. 'Ah, roger that,' Schulbe said.
Mac came on. 'Major. What is your condition, please?'
'My condition?' Beyond suffering and loss, he didn't know. Human? 'Never mind.'
'Major.' Mac paused awkwardly. 'What's with the voice, Major?' They could hear it, too?
Christie Chambers, MD, was listening back at Base. 'It's the nitrogen,' she diagnosed. Of course, thought Branch. 'Is there any way you can get back on oxygen, Elias? You must.'
Feebly, Branch rummaged for Ramada's oxygen mask, but it must have been torn away in the crash. 'Up front,' he said dully.
'Go up there,' Chambers told him.
'Can't,' said Branch. It meant moving again. Worse, it meant giving up Ramada's helmet and losing his contact with the outside world. No, he would take the radio link over oxygen. Communication was information. Information was duty. Duty was salvation.