She wasn’t an elderly, frail grandmother in an unbuttoned cardigan.
She was sixty, perhaps sixty-two, dressed in an immaculate, double-breasted navy cashmere pantsuit tailored with the architectural precision of Savile Row.
Her fingers clamped around my right forearm.
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Not a weak, pleading grasp.
An iron, mechanical vise that dug through my suit sleeve, the gold ring biting straight into the bone of my ulna with enough linear force to leave purple hematomas beneath my skin.
She pulled my face down until her lips were half an inch from my ear.
Her breath smelled of pure metallic ozone and sublingual nitroglycerin:
*”The manifest…”* she rasped.
The word was paper-thin.
A dry husk dragged over broken flint:
*”…the manifest in the console… Sebastian… don’t let… don’t let Carter touch the seal…”*
Then her pupils dilated until the gray of her irises vanished completely into black.
Her head snapped backward against my knee.
Her heart stopped.
***
CHAPTER 2: THE SIX MINUTES ON ROUTE SIX
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I had not frozen.
When you spend twelve years as a volunteer search-and-rescue paramedic in the Clear Creek drainage before taking a job in marketing, your hands remember what your brain wants to panic over.
I ripped her cashmere lapels open, popping two mother-of-pearl buttons that skittered across the gravel into the ditch.
I checked the airway.
Clear.
I positioned the heel of my left hand over the lower third of her sternum, locked my right fingers over my knuckles, straightened my elbows, and drove forty pounds of linear downward pressure into her thoracic cage:
The cartilage of the third rib yielded with that familiar, sickening pop that signals effective depth.
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*One-and-two-and-three-and-four…*
One hundred compressions a minute.
The gravel dug through the denim of my trousers into my kneecaps.
Commuter traffic blasted past us at seventy miles per hour, the vacuum of the semi-trucks tugging at my shirt, the smell of burnt rubber and raw mountain dust choking my lungs.
*Thirty compressions.
Two breaths.
*
I pinched her nose, sealed her mouth with mine, and forced two full ventilations into her chest.
Her chest rose—elastic, resistant, fighting the pulmonary edema bubbling in her bronchial tree.
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*Fifteen-and-sixteen-and-seventeen…*
On compression forty-eight, a black-and-gold **Colorado State Patrol** cruiser had arrived, its red-and-blue strobes cutting through the morning shadows.
The trooper—a young sergeant whose name tag read *Vance*—had leaped the ditch with an automated external defibrillator in one hand and an oxygen bag in the other.
FULL STORY on the next page.