Kendra felt cold despite the warm afternoon.
“Who went down?”
“The lady.”
“What did she look like?”
But Adeline was already tugging against her seat belt.
“Mommy, please.”
Kendra hesitated for perhaps three seconds.
Then parental logic collided with the possibility, however small, that her daughter had actually seen something she had missed.
“Stay here.”
Adeline shook her head immediately.
“Absolutely not. Stay in the car.”
Kendra grabbed her phone and stepped outside.
Traffic was light.
She walked toward the guardrail and looked down the slope.
From this angle, she could see farther between the trees.
Still nothing.
Then something reflected sunlight.
Metal.
Far below.
Kendra narrowed her eyes.
A black shape lay partly hidden beneath weeds.
Too large for ordinary debris.
Her pulse quickened.
She climbed over the guardrail.
“Hello?”
No answer.
She took several careful steps downhill.
Grass gave way beneath her shoes.
“Can anybody hear me?”
A bird startled from a nearby branch.
Then she saw it.
A motorcycle.
Black.
Heavy.
Lying almost on its side among crushed weeds twenty yards below the road.
“Oh my God.”
Kendra grabbed her phone.
Then heard gravel behind her.
She turned.
Adeline was climbing over the guardrail.
“Adeline!”
The girl dropped awkwardly onto the grass.
“I told you to stay in the car!”
“He’s down there.”
“Get back—”
Adeline ran downhill.
Her pink skirt bounced around her knees.
“Adeline!”
Kendra hurried after her, slipping once and catching herself against a sapling.
The motorcycle became clearer.
One side was badly scraped.
The front wheel had twisted against a stump.
There was no fire.
No obvious fuel spill.
But something else lay beyond it.
A man.
Kendra’s anger vanished.
The biker had come to rest against the base of a grassy embankment nearly thirty feet from his motorcycle.
He was in his late fifties.
Maybe sixty.
Gray hair swept back from a deeply weathered face.
A thick gray mustache blended into a short beard.
His black leather jacket had been torn along one shoulder.
One boot pointed at an unnatural angle to the slope, though his leg itself did not appear grotesquely injured.
His eyes were closed.
“Sir?”
Kendra dropped beside him.
“Can you hear me?”
No answer.
She pressed two fingers against the side of his neck.
She was not medically trained beyond a basic first-aid course required years earlier at work, but she felt something.
Pulse.
Weak.
Rapid.
“Thank God.”
Adeline came around the other side.
Kendra snapped:
“Stay back.”
The little girl ignored her.
She knelt beside the biker.
“Adeline, I mean it.”
“He’s scared.”
“He’s unconscious.”
“No.”
Adeline reached toward him.
Kendra caught her wrist.
“Don’t touch him.”
The child looked offended.
“He needs to know we came.”
Kendra dialed emergency services.