I must have bit something in my mouth when I was coughing, she thought, and immediately knew better. This had come from deeper inside. The idea scared her, and fright brought the world into sharper focus. She found herself able to think again. She cleared her throat (gently; it hurt too much to do it any other way) and then spat. Bright red. Oh jeez, Louise, but there was nothing she could do about it now, and at least she was clearheaded enough to figure out how to make sure of her direction on the road. The sun had gone down on her right. She turned now until the rising sun was winking through the trees on her left, and immediately saw she was pointed the right way. She didn't know how she could have been confused in the first place.
Slowly, gingerly, like someone walking on a freshly rinsed tile floor, Trisha got moving again. This is probably it, she thought. Today's probably my last chance, maybe even this morning's my last chance. I may be too weak and sick to walk by this afternoon, and if I can get on my feet after another night out here, it'll be a blue-eyed miracle.
Blue-eyed miracle. Was that her mother's or her father's?
'Who gives a rat's ass?' Trisha croaked. 'If I get out of this, I'm going to make up some sayings of my own.'
Fifty or sixty feet north of the place where she had spent that endless Sunday night and Monday morning, Trisha realized she still had her Walkman in her right hand. She stopped and went carefully and laboriously about the task of getting it clipped to her waistband. Her jeans were absolutely floating on her now, and she could see the sharp jut of her hipbones. Lose a few more pounds and I'll be able to model the latest Paris fashions, she thought. She was just wondering what to do with the headphone attachment when a sudden rough rattle of distant explosions split the still morning air-it sounded like a puddle of soda being sucked up through a giant straw.
Trisha cried out, and she was not alone in her startlement; a number of crows cawed, and a pheasant exploded through the brush in a ruffled whir of indignation.
Trisha stood, wide-eyed, the forgotten earbud headphones penduluming at the end of their cord by her scabby, dirty left ankle. She knew that sound; it was the rattle of backfires through an old muffler. A truck, maybe, or some kid's bucket of rods. There was another road up there. A real road.
She wanted to run and knew she must not. If she did, she would blow out all her energy in one burst. That would be dreadful. To faint away and perhaps die of exposure within actual sound of traffic would be like blowing the save when the opposing team was down to their last strike. Such abominations happened, but she would not let it happen to her.
She began to walk instead, forcing herself to move slowly and deliberately, listening all the while for another series of those rattling backfires, or a distant engine, or a horn. There was nothing, nothing at all, and after an hour of walking she began to think she had hallucinated the whole thing. This hadn't seemed like a hallucination, but ...
She topped a rise and looked down. She began coughing again, and more blood flew from her lips, bright in the sun, but Trisha took no notice-did not even put her hand up. Below her the rutted track she was on ended, T- squaring into a dirt road.
Trisha walked slowly down and stood upon it. She could see no tire tracks-it was hardpan-but there were real ruts here, and no grass growing down the middle. The new road ran at right angles to her road, roughly east and west. And here, at last, Trisha made the right decision. She did not turn west for any other reason than that her head had begun to ache again and she didn't want to be walking directly into the sunshine ... but she did turn west. Four miles from where she stood, New Hampshire Route 96, a patched ribbon of hot-top, ran through the woods. A few cars and a great many pulp-trucks used this road; it was one of the latter which Trisha had heard backing off through its ancient exhaust system as the driver downshifted for Kemongus Hill. The sound had carried better than nine miles through the still morning air.
She began to move again, and with a new feeling of strength. It was perhaps forty-five minutes later that she heard something, distant but unmistakable.
Don't be stupid, you've gotten to a place where anything's mistakable.
Perhaps so, but ...
She cocked her head like the dog on Gramma McFarland's old records, the ones Gramma kept up in the attic. She held her breath. She heard the thump of blood in her temples, the wheeze of her breath in her infected throat, the call of birds, the rustle of the breeze. She heard the hum of mosquitoes around her ears ... and another hum, as well. The hum of tires on pavement. Very distant, but there.
Trisha began to cry. 'Please don't let me be making it up,' she said in a husky voice that was now down to little more than a whisper. 'Aw, God, please, don't let me be making that u-'
A louder rustling noise commenced behind her-not the breeze, not this time. Even if she might have convinced herself (for a few cruddy seconds or so) that it was, what about the snapping sound of branches? And then the grinding, splintering sound of something falling - a small tree, probably, that had been in the way In Its way. It had let her get this close to rescue, had allowed her to come within actual hearing of the path she had so casually and carelessly lost. It had watched her painful progress, perhaps with amusement, perhaps with some sort of god's compassion that was too terrible to even think about. Now it was through watching, through waiting.
Slowly, both with terror and with a strange sort of calm inevitability, Trisha turned to face the God of the Lost.
Bottom of the Ninth:
Save Situation
IT EMERGED from the trees on the left side of the road, and Trisha's first thought was: Is that all? Is that all it ever was
Grown men would have turned and run from the Ursus americanus which lumbered out of the last screen of bushes - it was a fully grown North American black bear, perhaps four hundred pounds-but Trisha had been prepared for some awful horror torn from the underside of the night.
There were leaves and burdocks caught in its shiny fur, and held in one hand-yes, it had a hand, the clawed rudiment of one, at least-was a branch from which most of the bark had been stripped. It held this like a woodsy
