Scott Free Read Online Free

broken ankle felt like. This just felt like a pinned ankle. In his mind, he re-created the look of the cockpit’s floorboards and determined that he must somehow have gotten himself tangled up in the rudder pedals. If he could just ease his foot a little to the left…
    There! He felt it move. It hurt like hell, but what did he expect, leveraging bone against steel? The more he pulled, the more he felt his boot move. Okay, at least it was definitely not broken. Let’s hear a hip-hip-hurrah for that little blessing.
    Finally, his leg was free; but as his boot pulled away from its restraint, Scott dropped completely away from his seat, the strap across his lap now bearing his full weight. The pressure drove the air from his lungs and squished his guts. It was choking him. Didn’t he read somewhere that you could die simply by the act of hanging upside down for too long? Something about blood pressure in the brain.
    As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, some of the shadows began to make sense to him. Through the puffs of gray that were his breath, he could make out the outline of the windshield, and the post where it joined the side of the fuselage, but the rest was all forest and snow. And Cody Jamieson’s dangling head.
    â€œYou still awake, Cody?”
    The pilot groaned again. His breathing had become juicy—a sound like the last pull through a straw.
    â€œYou’ll be okay,” Scott said. “You just watch. We’ll be out of here in no time.” Even if we don’t know where here is, he didn’t say. A thousand things needed to be done, and first on the list was getting himself out of his seat. Once he had his feet on the ground, he could start thinking through everything else. But he was upside down! The instant he unlatched the belt, he was going to drop on his head, which was already throbbing quite nicely, thank you very much. He used his gloved hands to explore the area over (under?) his head and found that he could just barely reach the top of the cockpit—maybe a two-foot drop. Not so bad.
    Okay, this was it. Holding his left arm over his head to absorb the impact, he found the seat belt buckle with his right. One…Two…Three! He lifted the clasp with his fingertips, and instantly, he dropped like an anvil, catching most of the impact on his neck and shoulders.
    Cody Jamieson howled as the aircraft trembled under the impact. The howl became a scream as the plane shifted again, this time taking on a bizarre yawing motion that Scott might have written off to dizziness from his head injury. Outside, a gust of wind pelted them, and the yawing and the screaming got even worse.
    Scott needed that flashlight. Sprawled flat on the ceiling now, he could just make out a blinking red light, barely bigger than a pinhead, but bright as a lighthouse in the near total darkness. The flashlight on his Uncle Jim’s boat had a beacon just like it, working all the time, with or without power, always visible in an emergency.
    The plane shifted again, and he froze. Something about this wasn’t right. And when he put the pieces of the puzzle together, his heart nearly froze in his chest. “No, it can’t be,” he told himself aloud. “Tell me we’re not.”
    Suddenly petrified to move at all, Scott stretched out as far as his arms would allow to pull the light from its charger. It came free with a click. The dim beam might as well have been a klieg light, instantly transforming pitch black to blinding white. It took Scott all of three seconds to assess the severity of his nightmare, and one more to wish he’d never found the light.
    He’d never seen so much snow. It swirled everywhere, inside the aircraft and out, driven by winds that somehow grew colder as Scott could see them blow. The windows on the Cessna were all gone now, and beyond them, the snow fell in thick clouds among the twisted and broken limbs of trees.
    Wincing against his fear of