13 – Despair

Chloe is shocked and gazes into the mist and listens intently. Can it be true or is this her wild imagination? Did they really tumble over the edge and survived?

“Chloe... hloe... oe... ”

Her heart jumps. There it is again! It’s Lyle’s voice that echoes from the cliffs. She inhales deeply and yells on top of her voice.

“Lyle!” She listens to the echoes and feels endlessly thankful for the service they provide.

“Chloe... hloe... oe...”

He lives! What about Zoey? It’s only Lyle who screams. Why is she silent? She’ll have to use only basic words to communicate with him due to the echoes that mix and confuse messages.

“Zoey ..?”

The cliffs echo her question and she listens with bated breath. Lyle cleverly answers in single words with silences in between after the echoes subsided. Chloe anxiously listens to every word she can decipher.

“Help... Abyss...Hang... on... mer... cy... Zoey... bad... Hurry... Help...”

Then silence follows. She yells back: “Going... get... help...”

Like a lunatic Chloe rushes to the Cooper and jumps in. Almost immediately after she turns the starter she moves off with tires screaming. She knows she must drive as soon as possible to where she will have a signal and calls for help. Her family is hanging helplessly over a perilous abyss. Something must have stopped their descent but it must have been a terrible experience. And furthermore, they have been hanging there throughout the icy cold night! She hopes Zoey is still alive! Maybe she is just unconscious.

Chloe changes gears and rapidly works the clutch while she travels hopelessly too fast around the first sharp bends. With intensive concentration, she dares almost too much because of the precarious situation of her family. She must control herself but finds it difficult and races ever faster while the revolutions sing high in her ears and the tires squeal around the bends. Her heart jumps to her throat when she takes a few sharp, blind bends too fast and lands on the gravel on the other side of the tarmac. Luckily there is no traffic from the opposite side. I must stop at being so reckless, she warns herself. But on the other hand, there is an urgency that frantically spurs her on: ‘Zoey... Bad... Hurry... “

Chloe received the Cooper on her birthday and doesn’t know it well, but she handles beautifully thus far. Tony taught her racing tips because the farm has a few dirt roads where you can overdo things with little consequences if you use special techniques. She has however never gunned the Cooper so recklessly and can’t anticipate what the car will do when she overexert. She usually prefers back wheel drive because you can use the force of the engine to drift the rear end out when the front breaks away. With front-wheel drive it is another story when the nose starts to break away when you go into a bend too fast and lands on the shoulder of the road. With the front-wheel drive Cooper, she lands on the wrong side of the road frequently when she takes it too fast.

Again she takes the next bend too fast. She drifts over to the wrong side of the road. She gets a scare when she sees a BMW coming towards her and then misses it by inches. She hears how the motorist angrily blows his horn to indicate his dismay but by then she is already taking the next bend.

She is now luckily nearing the end of the pass. With yelling tires, she shoots out of the bend but with horror she sees a Beetle right in front of her and right in her way. Wildly she swerves and misses the Beetle within a hair’s breadth, but is still hopelessly going too fast for the hairpin bend in front.

Her heart is now thumping in her chest and she knows she is not going to exit the bend normally because the nose is starting to break away.

“Oh no, Chloe! Are you going to crash this car and leave them in the lurch? Why do you drive so fast?”

She has no choice but to throw the backside to the other side as Tony taught her on the farm. She must succeed or write the car off. She bites on her teeth and yanking the steering left and right, she pulls the handbrake quickly but cautiously. Then she puts her foot down on the accelerator and feels the momentum pushing forward. It prevents her from spinning out of control. She is on the edge of winning or losing her control in the bend. Her jaw is sore from tension and gritting her teeth. If something now comes from ahead it will be catastrophic because she is on the edge of the tarmac on the wrong side of the road.

Then she shoots out on the straight road at the end of the mountain pass. She is still on the wrong side of the road and a car is coming. They are heading for a head-on collision. She must get the Cooper back to her side. She let the handbrake go very cautiously and the Cooper responds beautifully and she pulls the Cooper back into her lane inches before they crash into each other. She once again guns the Cooper on the straight while the other motorist angrily disappears up the pass.

Chloe sighs relieved and scolds herself. She was hopelessly too reckless. She could have had several accidents in the pass.

“How could you, Chloe? Don’t ever take such chances again, you silly ass!”

She sees an open place along the road ahead and aims to pull off but the speed is still too high. The Cooper wobbles over the rough terrain and she must pump the brakes to prevent wild spinning and even overturning. The Cooper skids over the ground and disappears in a cloud of dust so that she sees nothing but dust around her.

Even before coming to a complete standstill, she grabs her phone and calls Richard. Relieved she exhales noisily when the phone’s dialing tone tells her that she has a signal.

His voice sounds unnaturally calm when he answers: “Good morning, Richard Jordaan of the Mountain Valley boarding school. How can I help you?”

She feels as if her voice is running away with her. She scarcely takes time to breathe between her sentences.

“Richard, Chloe here; this is an emergency! I pulled over at the end of the mountain pass on this side and found a signal. Lyle and Zoey went over one of the highest cliffs near the peak and are hanging at mercy from yesterday afternoon. Your number is in my phone’s memory. Can you help me to get help as quickly as possible so that we can save them before they tumble down into the abyss?”

“What, Chloe, what are you talking about? How is this possible? Take it slowly. You are going too fast for me and I don’t understand.”

“You can see their brake marks all the way from the bend down to the spot where they went through the wall and over the edge. I yelled out of desperation and against all logical thinking from the top and heard the echoes of my voice. By Jove, I heard Lyle’s voice echoing through the cliffs when he called back. Please, Richard, you must believe me. Lyle yelled that they are alive, but just!”

“Okay, Chloe, calm down. He really answered your call? They must have been extremely lucky and surely had in time got strangled somewhere. Maybe they had luckily bumped into trees on a ledge of a cliff.”

Chloe hits the steering wheel out of frustration while she screams and tears running down her cheeks.

“Richard! Richard! Listen to me! Their lives hang on a thread! We must do something quickly. I feel so helpless and desperate. We are wasting time! Who can help? We are wasting time! We are wasting time! Help me!”

She bursts into tears and cries shamelessly.

“Chloe, calm down! Listen to me, Chloe. Luckily you phoned the best person you could have. Listen, I can help you. I assure you, you've got the right person to help you immediately.”

Chloe stops crying and grabs onto the little hope his words are bringing and she answers in a soft voice like a small girl that needs her father’s help.

“What do you mean, Richard, how are you going to help?”

“I’ll phone my son in law, Tyrell, directly. He is the leader of a rescue team of mountaineers that usually go out and retrieve corpses from the mountainside in the pass. I’m your shortcut to help. Calm down. There is hope. Just hang in there, my girl.”

Shocked she yells: “Corpses!”

“Sorry, Chloe, it was the wrong word but never before has someone survived an ordeal like this. I’ll phone him immediately. Just wait there. He’ll probably phone you directly with questions and instructions. So, don’t use your phone. He’ll need information”

Relief comes over Chloe and some of the cropped up tension drains from her.

“Thanks, Richard, I’ll wait for his call.”

~*~*~

Tyrell phoned and she told him where they went over the cliff. He ordered her to stay put because it is dangerous to stop near the peak, but she insisted to go up and wait for the rescue team and to show them the right spot. She yelled at Lyle and was relieved that he was still alive. He yelled back they must hurry up because Zoey’s condition was serious.

Later she saw the helicopter hanging like Tyrell told her but it flew away. Tyrell explained earlier that rescue by the helicopter’s cable could be prohibited by wind, mist, fuel, height or accessibility and that the rescue mission might be impossible from the air. Later no traffic passed and she realized that the pass had been closed. Tyrell and his team of paramedics arrived and with ropes they went over the edge.

Later on, the helicopter returned and she saw how they evacuated Lyle and Zoey one by one in special stretchers and how they were hoisted into the chopper. Then the helicopter flew away.

Anxiously she waited to hear what their conditions were and later on Tyrell arrived and told her that his team was back safely. Zoey’s life hangs on a thread after they had to give her emergency treatment but she’s still alive. Lyle is full of cuts and suffers from freezing and has bruises and probably cracked ribs but his life is not in danger. The helicopter took them to the hospital in her town. Chloe immediately drove down the pass.

The sunset looks so serenely while Chloe drives back. She earlier phoned Hayley and asked her to inform Leo and Ronnie. She now whispers to herself: “Hang on, Zoey and Lyle, my lovies, hang on! You are the last of my family. I just can’t lose you.”

Chloe thinks back with gratitude in her heart to the brave Tyrell. She smiles when she remembers how he took her in his arms while she cried her heart out. She pushes her car phone’s button to say thanks once again to Richard. When she brings Lyle to school one day in the future, she’ll visit him and thank him face to face and she will bring along huge presents for him and Tyrell.