Women and chipmunks fi - " She got a lungful of the dust.
The resultant coughing fit wracked her until she sat down heavily with her beating-stick in her lap, gasping for a clear breath and half in a faint. She decided she wasn't going to spend the night in the cab of the truck after all. She wasn't afraid of a few leftover chipmunks, not even of snakes (if there were snakes in residence, she guessed the chipmunks would have moved out long since), but she didn't want to spend eight hours breathing dust and coughing herself blue.
It would be great to sleep under an actual roof again, but that was too high a price to pay.
Trisha made her way through the bushes beside the truck cab and then a little way into the woods. She sat down under a good-sized spruce, ate some nuts, drank some water. She was getting low on food and drink again, but she was too tired to worry about that tonight. She had found a road, that was the important thing. It was old and unused, but it might take her somewhere. Of course it might also peter out as the streams had, but she wouldn't think about that now. For now she would allow herself to hope the road would take her where the streams had not.
That night was hot and close, the humid edge of New England's short but sometimes fierce summer. Trisha fanned the neck of her grimy shirt against her grimy neck, stuck out her lower lip and blew hair off her forehead, then resettled her hat and lay back against her pack. She thought of digging out her Walkman and decided not to. If she tried listening to a West Coast game tonight, she'd fall asleep for sure and trash whatever was left of the batteries.
She reclined further, turning the pack into a pillow, feel-ing something which had been so solidly gone that its return seemed miraculous: simple contentment. "Thanks, God," she said. In three minutes she was asleep.
She woke up perhaps two hours later, when the first cold drops of a drenching thundershower found their way through the forest's overlacing and landed on her face. Then thunder cracked the world open and she sat up, gasping.
The trees were creaking and groaning in a strong wind, almost a gale, and sudden lightning flashed them into stark news-photo relief.
Trisha struggled to her feet, brushing her hair out of her eyes and then cringing as more thunder banged... except it was more of a whipcrack than a bang. The storm was almost directly overhead. She would shortly be drenched, trees or no trees. She grabbed up her pack and blundered back toward the dark, tilted hulk of the truck's cab. Three steps and she stopped, gasping in the wet air and then coughing it out, hardly feeling the leaves and small branches that spanked her neck and arms in the gusty wind. Somewhere in the forest a tree fell over with a rending, splintering crack.
It was here, and very close.
The wind changed direction, spattering her with a faceful of rain, and now she could actually smell it - some rank wild odor that made her think of cages at the zoo. Except the thing out there wasn't in a cage.
Trisha began moving toward the truck cab again, hold-ing one hand up before her to ward off whipping branches and the other clapped to the top of her Red Sox cap to keep it on. Thorns tore at her ankles and calves, and when she came out of the sheltering woods to the edge of her road (so she thought of it, as her road), she was instantly drenched.
As she reached the driver's door of the cab, which hung open with vines twisting in and out through its socket of win-dow, lightning flashed again, painting the whole world pur-ple.
CHAPTER 14
In its glare Trisha saw something with slumped shoulders standing on the far side of the road, something with black eyes and great cocked ears like horns. Perhaps they were horns. It wasn't human; nor did she think it was animal. It was a god. It was her god, the wasp-god, standing there in the rain.
"NO!" she screamed, diving into the truck, unmindful of the dusty cloud that puffed up around her and the uphol-stery's rotting, ancient smell. "NO, GO AWAY! GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE!"
Thunder answered. Rain also answered, drumming down on the cab's rusty roof. Trisha hid her head in her arms and rolled over on her side, coughing and shivering. She was still waiting for it to come when she fell asleep again.
This sleep was deep and - as far as she could remem-ber - dreamless. When she awoke, full daylight had returned.
It was hot and sunny, the trees seemingly greener than they had been the day before, the grass lusher, the birds twitting away in the depths of the woods more complacently happy.