unconsciousness.
When she awakened, more time had passed. On the far side of the sound of traffic, the sun had risen higher in the sky. Gemma Ralston was all too aware of how direct sunlight could ravage her pale skin. In her adult life, she never set foot outdoors without a coating of sunscreen. This time the sun wasn’t hot, but there was no shade from it, either-no protection. Already her bare arm-the little she could see of it-was turning bright pink.
The growing warmth brought with it far worse torments than the possibility of sunburn: flies, swarms of them. They landed on her body. Other than twisting her head back and forth to keep them from landing on her face, she could do nothing to shoo them away. Horrified, she looked at her bare arm and saw a line of ants scrambling across her reddening skin. She couldn’t feel them, but she could see them and knew that soon they would be eating her alive. It was her worst nightmare, but at least she couldn’t feel it. At least not yet. She drifted off once more.
The ringing phone awakened her again. Four rings this time, and then it quit. If only she could reach it and let someone know that she needed help-that she was badly hurt and maybe dying. She had enough of her wits about her to realize that if she were paralyzed, maybe dying was the best idea; better than spending the remainder of her life as a bedridden vegetable. She was terribly thirsty. Her tongue felt swollen. Even if she could have reached the phone, she doubted she’d be able to talk. With that, she drifted off.
When the phone rang yet again, she didn’t bother opening her eyes. There was no point. If she didn’t look, she wouldn’t see the ants and flies that she knew were there. But then a miracle happened. The fog in her head cleared a little. She remembered who had rung the doorbell. Then she heard the sound of something other than the thrum of traffic. It was a male voice, speaking to her.
“Hey, lady,” he said. “Are you okay?”
She opened her eyes. A very tall young man was standing over her. Maybe he was an angel, but squinting up into the sun, which was now high overhead, she saw no sign of wings. He was batting at the flies milling around her and around him. That didn’t make sense. Why would flies bother an angel? Still, the horrified look on his face as he stared down at her spoke volumes. He reached down and brushed something off her. An ant, maybe? She wasn’t sure.
“Help me,” she croaked, but the words came out more as a low moan, completely indecipherable. “Water. Please.”
He backed away from her and disappeared momentarily from view. She was afraid he had abandoned her. “Don’t leave me. Please.”
“You’re hurt,” he said, reappearing above her. “Hold on. There’s a phone here. I’m calling 911.”
She closed her eyes, shutting out the blazing sunlight, but she heard the welcome sound of keys on a cell phone being punched. A moment later, he said, “Crap. No service. I wonder if a text would go through.”
There was more key punching-lots of key punching. “Okay,” he said. “I texted 911. They’re coming. Can you hang on? I’ve got some water in the car. I’ll go get it.”
Gemma wanted to feel it in her throat, to taste it with her tongue; but more than water, more than anything, she didn’t want to be left alone. Before her rescuer walked away, she tried her best to tell him what she remembered, but she could feel herself drifting away again. Maybe this time there would be no coming back.
4
Even without a hard copy in hand, A.J. followed his father’s directions with no problem. Once he turned off the freeway, he had to cross a cattle guard, and before he could turn onto the nameless dirt track, he had to get out of the car, open a metal-framed gate, drive through, and then close it again. Once on the far side of the gate, he began measuring off the six tenths of a mile.
The road was narrow and rough in places but drivable, even in the Camry. Garbage tossed out on the shoulders-beer cans, mostly-testified that it was a party spot, the kind of place favored by kids A.J.’s age to do their illegal drinking and smoking, probably all kinds of smoking. Truth be known, now that he and most of his friends had cars at their disposal, A.J. had done a modest amount of desert-style partying himself, not enough to get in trouble, as long as they didn’t get caught, but enough so that he recognized the landscape markers for what they were.
He had covered almost the entire six tenths of a mile when the narrow road widened out into a small clearing. Obviously, the area had long been used as an illegal dump, with abandoned rusting appliances and a collection of rotting furniture scattered here and there in the rocky dirt. Because this was the first wide spot in the road, A.J. decided to park and then walk the rest of the way. There might not be a place to pull off properly when he reached his destination.
He stopped next to the rusted hulk of what had once been a turquoise dishwasher. Remembering James’s none too subtle warning about the possibility of being followed, A.J. got out of the car and stood for a while, listening and watching the road behind him. All he heard was the low grumble of traffic roaring down I-17 half a mile or so away. Between there and the turn-off, there was no telltale plume of dust that would have revealed a vehicle tailing him to the appointed place. Only when he was sure he was unobserved did he open the trunk and pull out the shovel he had stowed there. That was when he heard an unexpected noise-the shrill jangling of a cell phone, ringing somewhere nearby.
The hair prickled on the back of A.J.’s neck. With his heart hammering in his chest, he realized that whoever his father had been worried about most likely hadn’t followed him here. They must have learned about the destination well in advance, and they were already here, waiting for him to show his hand. His first panicky thought was to ditch the shovel. He quickly pushed it out of sight under the back of the car, then straightened up and looked around. At first he saw nothing. There were no other vehicles, but if someone were watching him, he had no intention of walking closer to the original target and giving away the location of the critical boulder. Instead, shoving his shaking hands deep in his pockets, he sauntered as casually as he could manage in the opposite direction.
That was when he saw what looked like a lump of rags lying next to a burned-out hulk of a sofa with springs sticking out in every direction. At first he thought the pink he was seeing was a swath of material of some kind, like a long, thin scarf. It was only when he edged closer that he realized he was looking at a person, and the length of pink was actually a terrible sunburn on her long bare leg.
She lay so still, breathing so shallowly, that at first A.J. thought she was already dead. Dried blood from a wound on her chest had burned black in the sun, with flies and ants both feasting on the appalling mess.
“Hey, lady,” he said. “Are you okay?”
To his surprise, a pair of green eyes fluttered open in the sun-blistered face. He reached down and brushed a single ant from her dried, cracked lip. Disturbed by his arrival, a cloud of frenzied flies swooped into the air. She made an awful sound of some kind, something he couldn’t understand. Looking around, he noticed the cell phone lying just beyond the reach of her outstretched fingers. He grabbed it up. It was all he could do to make his fingers dial the emergency number. When he punched send, however, the NO SERVICE notice showed up on the screen. There was enough of a signal for the phone to ring, but not enough to place a call.
A.J. remembered someone telling him once that text messages sometimes went through when voice calls wouldn’t. He tried texting 911. Almost immediately, a text response appeared on the screen: “911. What are you reporting?”
Typing with shaking fingers made for a slow, cumbersome process. It took a lot longer than it would have taken to say where he was and describe the situation, but eventually, he made it work. Only when the operator told him that help was on its way did he turn his attention back to the stricken woman. He explained to her that an ambulance was coming. It worried him that she couldn’t seem to move at all. The heartbreaking noises she made weren’t words, but he realized that she had to be terribly thirsty.
“I’ve got some water in the car,” he told her. “I’ll go get it.”
He was gone for only a matter of seconds-the time it took for him to race back to the Camry, retrieve the half-empty bottle of water he had left on the car seat, and make his way back. She needed water. Now wasn’t the time to wonder if she’d object to drinking from a bottle with his germs on it. By the time he returned to her side, however, he could tell it was too late for water.
She tried to say something. “Dennis.”
