Free Ghosts of Florence Pass by Brian J. Anderson Page A

and his pants were soaked with blood there but it looked like the bleeding had mostly stopped.
    Oh shit, David.
    He tried to lift the seat from his leg but he could only lift it a little bit and when he did the blood began to flow from his wound again and there was more pain, so much that he had to let it back down. He breathed through the pain and he was crying and reaching out to touch his mother’s hair but then he thought differently about it and lowered his hand and pressed against his thigh with his fingers where the brace cut into it. There was a lot of blood on his leg and on the seat cushion and he felt thirsty which was something he remembered from scouts as a sign that he was in trouble of bleeding to death.
    He looked at his mother and father and wanted to cry but he didn’t know where David was and if he was still alive and needed help then crying wouldn’t do any good so he just sat there and thought. After a while he wiped the condensation from his window and looked outside for the first time and saw that the plane was in high country with no trees and only boulders and snow as far as he could see through the fog. Then he looked out of the hole in David’s side of the plane and saw more snow and boulders but on that side he could tell that the earth sloped down and away from the plane like on the side of a mountain. John Parker rose up as far as he could in the seat and tried to see his brother in the rocks and snow outside the plane but he couldn’t.
    Okay, he said. You have to get out.
    He thought about the first aid badge he earned in scouts and went through in his head the steps of treating an injured person and figured how to apply these to himself. There was nothing he could do about his head and his neck and his insides until he was able to free himself and get to a first aid kit so these problems would have to wait. He was afraid to do it and it hurt a lot but he managed to roll up the sleeve on his broken arm and he saw that it was broken just in the one place and that it wasn’t bleeding much anymore. The arm could wait along with his head and his insides that were burning. He figured he had to stop the bleeding in his leg before he tried again to free it so he thought about that. It seemed like he was past the point of being able to use pressure to stop the blood from flowing and so he decided he would have to stop it with a tourniquet.
    At the scout meeting where he learned how to make a tourniquet Mr. Frederickson had said that you can usually find a shirt or piece of fabric or rope or something like that on hand that you can use. It turned out that Mr. Frederickson was right because there was a bird’s nest of electrical wire that had been pulled up through the floor of the plane when David’s seat had been ripped out by the crash. So John Parker pulled some of these loose and after he had torn his pants leg away from the site of his injury he wrapped wire around his leg as close to the wound as he could. He tied it in a knot around a piece of metal he found on the floor to use as a handle and then he turned the handle until his leg throbbed with pain and then stopped. After he was done turning he wrapped another piece of wire around his leg to secure the piece of metal serving as a handle and to prevent it from spinning backwards and loosening the pressure. He looked at his work and decided that it looked pretty good. He looked outside through the hole in the plane.
    David, he said.
    David didn’t answer and so John Parker tried again to push his mother’s seat with his mother still in it up off his leg. It lifted a little and the pain came screaming back into his leg but he was able to back himself out a little bit from under the seat before it got too heavy and he had to set it back down. Now it was resting on his knees and this didn’t hurt as much so he left it there for a time and rested and caught his breath. For the first time he thought about the pilot and how he couldn’t see