The silence that followed the crash was more terrifying than the explosion itself. It was a thick, suffocating blanket of white noise and the smell of burning aviation fuel. My world was tilted at a forty five degree angle, the cockpit of the helicopter buried deep in a snowdrift that had been our only mercy.
I blinked, the copper taste of blood filling my mouth. My head throbbed with a rhythmic, stabbing pain, but my body didn't care about the pain. It only cared about the small, limp weight pressed against my side.
"Toby?" I croaked, my voice sounding like it was being pulled through gravel. "Toby, baby, wake up."
I struggled against the seatbelt, the mechanism jammed by the twisted metal of the fuselage. My fingers were already going numb in the sub zero air leaking through the shatt
