"Shut up," she said wearily, "just shut up, you stupid mean bitch." But of course the stupid mean bitch was right.
Trisha turned back in the direction of the sun - it was now orange - and began walking again. She was becoming actively frightened of her thirst now: if it was this bad at eight o'clock, what would it be like at midnight? Just how long could a person live without water, anyway? She couldn't remember, although she had come across that particular fun fact at some time or other - she was sure that she had. Not as long as a person could go without food, any-way.
What would it be like to die of thirst?
"I'm not going to die of thirst in the darn old woods...
am I, Tom?" she asked, but Tom wasn't saying. The real Tom Gordon would be watching the game by now. Tim Wake-field, Boston's crafty knuckleballer, against Andy Pettitte, the Yankees' young lefthander. Trisha's throat throbbed. It was hard to swallow. She remembered how it had rained (as with her memory of sitting on the end of her bed and putting on her socks, this also seemed like a long time ago) and wished it would rain again. She would get out in it and dance with her head back and her arms out and her mouth open; she would dance like Snoopy on top of his doghouse.
Trisha plodded through pines and spruces that grew taller and better spaced as this part of the woods grew older.
The light of the setting sun came slanting through the trees in dusty bars of deepening color. She would have thought the trees and the orange-red light beautiful if not for her thirst... and a part of her mind noted their beauty even in her physical distress. The light was too bright, though. Her temples were pounding with a headache and her throat felt like a pinhole.
In this state, she first dismissed the sound of running water as an auditory hallucination. It couldn't be real water; it was too darned convenient. Nevertheless she turned toward it, now walking southwest instead of due west, duck-ing under low branches and stepping over fallen logs like someone in a hypnotic trance. When the sound grew even louder - too loud to mistake for anything other than what it was - Trisha began to run. She slipped twice on the carpet of needles underfoot, and once she ran through an ugly little pocket of nettles that tore fresh cuts on her forearms and the backs of her hands, but she hardly noticed. Ten minutes after first hearing that faint rushing noise, she came to a short, steep drop-off where the bedrock emerged from the thin soil and needle carpeting of the forest floor in a series of gray stone knuckles. Below these, brawling along at a healthy clip, was a brook that made her first one seem like no more than a drip from the end of a shut-off hose.
Trisha walked along the edge of the drop with perfect unself-consciousness, although a misstep would have sent her tumbling at least twenty-five feet and likely would have killed her. Five minutes' walk upstream brought her to a kind of rough groove from the edge of the forest into the gully where the stream ran. It was a natural flume, floored with decades of fallen leaves and needles.
She sat down and hooked herself forward with her feet until she sat on top of the grooved place like a kid sitting on top of a slide. She started down, still sitting, dragging her hands and using her feet as brakes. About halfway down she started to skid. Rather than trying to stop herself - that would most likely start her somersaulting again - she lay back, laced her hands together behind her neck, closed her eyes, and hoped for the best.
The trip to the bottom was short and jolting. Trisha whammed into one jutting rock with her right hip, and another struck her laced-together fingers hard enough to numb them. If she hadn't put her hands over the top of her head, that second rock might have torn open her scalp, she thought later. Or worse. "Don't break your fool neck" was another grownup saying she knew, this one a favorite of Gramma McFarland.