She alternately called and listened, listened and called. She would have been stunned to learn that her mother and brother were still locked in their argument and did not know, even yet, that Trisha was missing.
She walked faster and faster, waving at the swirling clouds of minges, no longer bothering to skirt clumps of bushes but simply plowing straight through them. She listened and called, called and listened, except she wasn't listening, not really, not anymore. She didn't feel the mosquitoes that were clustered on the back of her neck, lined up just below her hairline like drinkers at happy hour, guzzling their fill; she didn't feel the noseeums caught and wriggling in the faint sticky lines where her tears were still drying.
Her giving way to panic wasn't sudden, as it had been at the feel of the snake, but weirdly gradual, a drawing in from the world, a shutting down of outer awareness. She walked faster without minding her way; called for help without hearing her own voice; listened with ears that might not have heard a returning shout from behind the nearest tree.
And when she began to run she did it without realizing. I have to be calm, she thought as her sneakered feet sped past the point of jogging. I was just in the van, she thought as the run became a sprint. I don't know why we should pay for what you guys did wrong, she thought, ducking - barely - a jut-ting branch that seemed to thrust itself at one of her eyes. It scraped the side of her face instead, drawing a thin scrawl of blood from her left cheek.
The breeze in her face as she ran, tearing through a thicket with a crackling sound that seemed very distant (she was unaware of the thorns which ripped at her jeans and tore shallow gouges on her arms), was cool and strangely exhilarating. She pelted up a slope, now running full-out with her hat on crooked and her hair flying behind her - the rubber-band which had held it in a ponytail was long since lost - hurdling small trees which had fallen in some long-ago storm, topping a ridge... and suddenly there was a long blue-gray valley spread out before her with brazen granite cliffs rising on the far side, miles from where she was. And directly in front of her nothing but a gray shimmer of early summer air through which she would fall to her death, turning over and over and screaming for her mother.
Her mind was gone again, lost in that white no-brain roar of terror, but her body recognized that stopping in time to avoid going over the cliff-edge was an impossibility. All she could hope to do was redirect her motion before it was too late. Trisha swerved to the left, and as she did her right foot kicked out over the drop. She could hear the pebbles dislodged by that foot rattling down the ancient rock wall in a little stream.
Trisha bolted along the strip where the needle-coated floor of the forest gave way to the bald rock marking the edge of the cliff. She ran with some confused and roaring knowledge of what had almost happened to her, and also some vague memory of a science fiction movie in which the hero had lured a rampaging dinosaur into running over a cliff to its death.
Ahead of her an ash tree had fallen with its final twenty feet jutting over the drop like the prow of a ship, and Trisha grabbed it with both arms and hugged it, her scraped and bloody cheek jammed against the smooth trunk, each breath whistling into her with a shriek and emerging in a terrified sob. She stood that way for a long time, shuddering all over and embracing the tree. At last she opened her eyes.
Her head was turned to the right and she was looking down before she could stop herself.
At this point the cliff's drop was only fifty feet, ending in a pile of glacial, splintery rubble that sprouted little clumps of bright green bushes. There was a heap of rotting trees and branches, as well - deadwood blown over the cliff's edge in some long-ago storm. An image came to Trisha then, one that was terrible in its utter clarity. She saw herself falling toward that jackstraw pile, screaming and waving her arms as she went down; saw a dead branch punching through the undershelf of her jaw and up between her teeth, tacking her tongue to the roof of her mouth like a red memo, then spearing into her brain and killing her.
"No!" she screamed, both revolted by the image and ter-rified by its plausibility. She caught her breath.