Water rustled and dripped from leaves and branches; when Trisha raised her head and looked out through the tilted glass-less rectangle where the old truck's windshield had been, the first thing she saw was sunlight glaring from the surface of a puddle in one of the road's ruts. The glare was so brilliant that she raised a hand to her eyes, squinting. The afterimage hung in front of her even when the real thing was gone: reflected sky, first blue, then a fading green.
The truck's cab had kept her quite dry despite its lack of glass. There was a puddle on the floor around the ancient control pedals and her left arm had gotten wet, but that was pretty much it. If she had coughed in her sleep, it hadn't been hard enough to wake her up. Her throat felt a little raw and her sinuses were plugged, but those things might improve once she got out of the damned dust.
It was here last night. You saw it.
But had she? Had she really?
It came for you, it meant to take you. Then you climbed into the truck and it decided not to, after all. I don't know why, but that's what happened.
Maybe not, though. Maybe the whole thing had just been the sort of dream you could have when you were half-awake and half-asleep at the same time. Something brought on by waking up to a full-fledged thunderstorm, with light-ning flashing and the wind blowing a gale. A situation like that, anyone might see stuff.
Trisha grabbed her pack by one slightly frayed strap and wriggled backward through the driver's side doorhole, rais-ing more dust and trying not to breathe it in. When she was out, she stepped away (still wet, the cab's rusty-red surface had darkened to the color of plums) and started to put her pack on. Then she stopped. The day was bright and warm, the rain was over, she had a road to follow... but all at once she felt old and tired and zero at the bone. People could imagine things when they woke up suddenly, especially when they woke up at the height of a thunderstorm. Of course they could. But she wasn't imagining what she was seeing now.
While she slept something had dug a circle through the leaves and needles and underbrush surrounding the aban-doned truck cab. It was perfectly clear in the morning light, a curving line of wet black earth in the greenery. Bushes and small trees which had been in the way had been torn out by the roots and thrown aside in broken pieces. The God of the Lost had come and drawn a circle around her as if to say, Stay clear - she is mine, she is my property.
Top of the Ninth
TRISHA WALKED all that Sunday with the low, hazy sky beating down on her. In the morning the wet woods steamed, but by early afternoon they were dry again. The heat was immense. She was still glad of the road, but now she wished for shade, as well. She felt feverish again, and not just tired but outright exhausted. The thing was watching her, pacing her through the woods and watching her. The feeling didn't leave her this time because the thing didn't leave her. It was in the woods to her right. A couple of times she thought she actually saw it, but perhaps that was only the sun moving through the tree-branches. She did not want to see it; she had seen all that she wanted to in that single flash of lightning the night before. The fur of it, the enormous cocked ears of it, the hulk of it.
The eyes, too. Those black eyes, big and inhuman. Glassy but aware. Aware of her.
It won't leave until it's sure I can't get out, she thought wearily. It's not going to let that happen. It's not going to let me get away.
Shortly after noon she saw that the puddles in the road-191. ruts were drying up and replenished her water supply while she could, straining the water through her hat and into the hood of her poncho, then pouring it into the plastic bottles.
The water still had a hazy, dirty look, but such things no longer caused her much concern. She thought if woods-water was going to kill her, she probably would have died when it first made her sick. What did concern her was lack of food. She ate all but the last few nuts and berries after fill-ing her bottles; by breakfast tomorrow she would be scrounging at the bottom of the pack, as she had scrounged for the last few potato chips. She might find more stuff alongside the road, but she wasn't hopeful.
The road went on and on, sometimes fading a little and sometimes clarifying for a few hundred yards. For awhile bushes grew up on the crown between the ruts. Trisha thought they were blackberry bushes - they looked like the ones from which she and her Mom had picked hatfuls of fresh sweet berries in the Sanford toy woods, but it was a month too early for blackberries. She also saw mushrooms, but did not trust any enough to eat them. They weren't in her mother's field of knowledge, nor had they studied them in school. In school they had learned about nuts and not taking rides from strangers (because some strangers were nuts), but not mushrooms. The one thing she was sure of was that you would die - and horribly - if you ate the wrong kind. And skipping them was really no big sacrifice.
She now had little appetite, and her throat was sore.