Billie and Brandon: Untamed

20

"Maggie, you alright?" Ezra asked, violently coughing when the rancid stench of rotting flesh trailed up his nose and smacked him in the face.

There was a groan to his left, and Maggie sat up amidst the corpses, holding her arm with a wince of pain.

"I think I dislocated my shoulder."

He crawled over to her, trying to keep from landing on his face on some of the dead bodies in the way.

"Let me see it?"

She turned so her shoulder was facing him so he could see it, and Ezra tore her sleeve, tugging the rest down so he could see the injured shoulder better. There was a slight indentation where her shoulder should have connected with the joint. The skin was bruised and a little purple from the skin being stretched uncomfortably. He pressed lightly against the indent, but she had no reaction.

Ezra nodded, "Oh yeah. You definitely have a dislocated shoulder."

"Is there any way you could put it back in?" she winced again, "I can hear the bones grinding against each other. I know this doesn't sound right."

"It'll be sore. But yeah, I can set it back in place." Ezra took hold of her arm, "Brandon used to get these all the time when he was learning to fight."

He bent her arm at the elbow and then rotated it out so the forearm was facing him. Maggie closed her eyes tightly in discomfort as he slowly straightened her arm up over her head. With a pop and slight crunch of bone scraping and connecting, her shoulder snapped into place, and she took in a sharp breath, grunting at the pain. Ezra tore off a shirt of one of the less decaying bodies and fashioned it into a sling, carefully wrapping Maggie's arm so it was supported by her neck and shoulders.

"Thank you Ezra." she said in relief, "It doesn't feel as bad anymore."

He helped her stand up carefully on the slope and looked around. There were bodies everywhere, littering the ground and covering the entire slope. Ezra suspected their landing had been less brutal because of that fact, though he'd definitely ended up with some part of a limb in his mouth when they had hit the ground, and it had been very unpleasant.

"Where's the horse?" Ezra asked, looking around in confusion.

"Long gone. Scampered off as soon as we fell off his back." Maggie responded, patting her night dress, trying to remove some of the dirt and dust that had collected on it, "I think he was injured."

Ezra figured. They had touched down very roughly, before being jolted out of the saddle and quite literally thrown into the piles of carcasses, tumbling down quite a long ways before they had come to an ungraceful stop. He'd thankfully landed on his back, which had diminished some of the impact, but adrenaline had been coursing through his veins when they fell. Who knew what he'd rattled or could have broken?

"So...I have to ask." Ezra said curiously, "How did you know we weren't going to die if we fell into Death Valley."

"When I first moved here years ago, my husband fell into Death Valley. I thought he had died, but a while later, he called out my name and told me to come down. So I did." She chuckled softly, "The first drop was just straight cliff, but it petered out into a slope."

She turned around and pointed to the drop they had just made. "See that? By the way the cliff is makes it difficult for anyone to really see that it's not just a straight cliffside."

Ezra nodded, finding it intriguing that he had never noticed that before. They weren't anywhere near the top though, and he didn't think they would be able to climb back up. Not with Maggie's busted arm, anyway.