Breaking out of her own stillness, Trisha took off her other Reebok and knotted the laces of both sneakers together. She hung them around her neck like cuckoo-clock pendulums, debated over her socks, and decided to leave them on as a kind of compromise (as an oog-shield was the thought which actually went through her mind). She rolled the cuffs of her jeans up to her knees, then took a deep breath and let it out.
"McFarland winds, McFarland pitches," she said. She resettled her Sox cap (backward this time, because back-ward was cool) and started moving again.
Trisha stepped from hummock to hummock with careful deliberation, looking up frequently in snatching little glances, setting a landmark and then moving toward it, just as she had yesterday. Only today I'm not going to panic and run, she thought. Today I've got icewater in my veins.
An hour passed, then two. Instead of firming, the ground grew boggier. Finally there was no solid ground at all, except for the hummocks. Trisha went from one to the next, steadying herself with branches and bushes where she could, holding her arms out for balance like a tightrope walker where there was nothing good to hold onto. Finally she came to a place where there was no hummock within jumping distance. She took a moment to steel herself and then stepped into the stagnant water, startling up a cloud of waterbugs and releasing a stench of peaty decay. The water was not quite up to her knees. The stuff her feet were sink-ing into felt like cold, lumpy jelly. Yellowish bubbles rose in the disturbed water; swirling in them were black fragments of who knew what.
"Gross," she moaned, moving forward toward the nearest hummock. "Oh, gross. Gross-gross-gross. Gag a maggot."
She walked in lurching forward strides, each ending in a hard yank as she pulled her foot free. She tried not to think of what would happen if she couldn't do that, if she got stuck in the bottom ooze and started to sink.
"Gross-gross-gross." It had become a chant. Sweat ran down her face in warm droplets and stung in her eyes. The crickets seemed stuck on one high endless note: reeeeeeeee.
Ahead of her, on the hummock which was her next stop, three frogs jumped out of the grass and into the water, plip-plip-plop.
"Bud-Why-Zer," Trisha said, and smiled wanly.
There were tadpoles by the thousands swimming in the yellow-black murk around her. As she looked down at them one of her feet encountered something hard and covered with slime - a log, maybe. Trisha managed to flounder over it without falling and reach the hummock. Gasping, she pulled herself up and looked anxiously at her mud-slimy feet and legs, half-expecting to see bloodsuckers or some-thing even worse squirming all over them. There was noth-ing awful (that she could see, at least), but she was covered in crud right up to her knees. She peeled off her socks, which were black, and the white skin beneath looked more like socks than her socks did. This caused Trisha to laugh maniacally. She lay back on her elbows and howled at the sky, not wanting to laugh like that, like (insane people) a total idiot, but for awhile she couldn't stop. When she was finally able to, she wrung her socks out, put them back on, and got up. She stood with her hand shielding her eyes, picked out a tree with a large lower branch broken off and dangling in the water, and made that her next goal.
"McFarland winds, McFarland pitches," she said tiredly, and started off again. She was no longer thinking about berries; all she wanted now was to get out of here in one piece.
There is a point at which people who are cast upon their own resources stop living and begin merely surviving. The body, with all its freshest sources of energy exhausted, falls back on stored calories. Sharpness of thought begins to dull.
Perception begins to both narrow and grow perversely bright. Things get wiggy around the edges. Trisha McFar-land approached this borderline between life and survival as her second afternoon in the woods wore on.
That she was now moving due west did not trouble her much; she thought (probably correctly) that moving consis-tently in one direction was good, the best she could do. She was hungry but for the most part not very aware of it; she was concentrating too fiercely on keeping to a straight line.
If she started to wander off to the left or right, she might still be in this stinkhole when it started to get dark, and she couldn't stand that idea. Once she did stop to drink from her water bottle, and around four o'clock she drank the rest of her Surge almost without realizing it.
The dead trees began to look less and less like trees and more and more like gaunt sentinels standing with their gnarled feet in the still black water. Be seeing faces in them again pretty soon, she thought. While wading past one of these trees (there were no hummocks for almost thirty feet in any direction), she tripped over another submerged root or branch and this time sprawled full-length, splashing and gasping. She got a mouthful of gritty, silty water and spat it out with a cry. She could see her hands in the dark water.
They looked yellowish and tallowy, like things long drowned. She pulled them out and held them up.