Exhausted, cold, and covered from the waist down in the icy mud, Juliet could do nothing more than watch as the world crashed and whirled around her. She tried to squelch the rising panic that was making her heart pound, and her breathing come out in short, shallow pants. Juliet took a deep, bracing breath. With determined will, she buried the overwhelming sense of doom that threatened to paralyze her.
After all she had been through, wouldn’t it just be the most ironic and bizarre thing ever if this is how Juliet met her end? If this is what brought her down? Death by mud, the thought was so absurd and the situation so dire, that for the very first time in her life, Juliet experienced complete and utter surrender. She decided to hand her destiny over to fate and give it up to that higher power that everyone was always talking up.
When the next strong gusts came, Juliet was ready. She pulled back her head, bared out her teeth, and let out a long, powerful, wail. This time when the wind howled at her, Juliet howled back.
And that’s how P.J. found Juliet. Stuck deep in the mud and howling at the moon.
What the hell? P.J. stood frozen to the spot as his mind tried to reconcile what his eyes were seeing. It took him a minute to assess the nightmarish scene. The entire setting was so surreal that P.J. felt like he was caught in an old time creature feature movie. He wiped the rain from his eyes twice before his vision cleared and sent the correct signal to his brain.
“Help me.” Juliet pleaded through a mouth covered in mud. The whites of her eyes were bloodied from the effort of straining to pry herself loose from the quicksand like clay. Juliet’s teeth were chattering, and it seemed like the earth was intent on swallowing her up. She reached out for P.J. with arms that were tired and weak.
Juliet’s desperate plea broke through the raging weather and at once galvanized P.J. into action. He pushed the gun back into his waist band, took off his hat and jacket, and did his best to cover Juliet’s head and body from the storm. The cold, driving rain immediately stabbed into P.J.’s with its icy shards. The pain served to bring home to him how much Juliet must be suffering. He didn’t know how long she had been out here, but he knew with every passing moment that the likelihood of her getting hypothermia was increased tenfold.
The moment P.J. knelt down next to Juliet, he felt the sodden ground shift under him. It took precious long minutes while P.J. and Juliet worked together to try to get Juliet out of that mud. All the while the weather railed against them. As soon as they made some leeway…managed to wiggle Juliet an inch or two one way or the other… the crevice they had created would fill up with the driving rain and swallow up another inch of her.
“Juliet! I’m going to have to go and get something to help get you out!” P.J. yelled against the raging storm. He knew that it was the last thing Juliet wanted to hear, but she wasn’t going to last much longer like this. He could already begin to feel her fading in and out of consciousness. P.J. was going to have to leave Juliet in the black night and freezing mud in order to save her.
“No!! Nononononononno!!!” She wailed like a wounded animal and began to claw at the earth around her. “We can do this. See, look? We can! We can do this! We can!”
P.J. felt horrible about what he had to do, he felt terrible that he would have to leave her, even if only for a few minutes. He had to hand it to her, she had been a real trooper. Juliet had done whatever P.J. had asked of her without question. She had moved at his every demand and followed his every direction. Juliet had expended all of her energy to try and help P.J. as he twisted and turned and pulled painfully at her body in an effort to release her from the mud. But with the soft ground continually shifting beneath his unsteady feet, P.J. just couldn’t maintain enough balance to give himself the leverage that was needed.
All the while the storm raged on. The unrelenting torrents of rain had begun to freeze and turn into sleet. This time when P.J. made another move to free Juliet, his own foot sunk to his ankle and it took a strong effort to pull it out. Juliet seemed to be disappearing before P.J.’s eyes. She had been trapped in the freezing mud too long, she had to be losing a tremendous amount of body heat. He was worried that soon her system would begin to shut down. P.J. was afraid that any moment Juliet might pass out and thus become dead weight. If that happened, he would never be able to get her out by himself. With her car stuck across the road, lines down, and roads washed out
