CAITLIN SAT WITH her back against the inner wall of the Bone Tree, staring at Tom’s motionless face. She’d recoiled in horror upon first recognizing the corpse as Penn’s father. But then, realizing that he might be the last person she would ever see, she’d placed her hand on his cheek and murmured a prayer. As she did, she realized Tom could not have been dead long, because his cheek was not yet cold.
Then he breathed on her wrist.
At first she jumped back in terror, but then she understood what that breath meant. Leaning over the body, she spoke Tom’s name, shook him, then pinched his cheek, hard—but nothing brought him around. His breaths were faint and frighteningly far between. He might be so close to death that he could not be revived—even by doctors. That would explain why he hadn’t stirred during the gunfire.
Caitlin knew she needed to attend to her own injury, but the terrible truth was that without Tom’s knowledge and skill, she wouldn’t live more than a few minutes. The pain in her chest had begun to drive out all thought when an obvious realization struck her.
Tom is diabetic.
If he’d been dumped here without food, he might have gone into diabetic shock. Low blood sugar could send a diabetic into a coma . . . even kill them. And if Tom had gone hours without sugar—
Shifting her body painfully, Caitlin dug her hand into her pants pocket, searching for the peppermints she and Jordan had stolen from the Lusahatcha sheriff’s office.
She had one left.
Her hands shook terribly as she unwrapped the cellophane, but she finally got it out. Since Tom was unconscious, she forced his mouth open and pushed the peppermint between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He might choke on the candy, but she could address that if it happened.
If she was right, then that sugar was his only hope.
The next minutes passed with the slowness of a nightmare. Tom did not move or make a sound. Caitlin, by contrast, grew steadily more agitated. She stared down at the hole in her chest, which she’d exposed by removing her jacket and shirt. It was so small, the skin hardly puckered around it, though a little distended rim of flesh had begun to swell under a slow but steady flow of blood. As best she could tell, the bullet had grazed the lower left edge of her sternum and passed between two ribs, entering her chest just below her bra. She hadn’t known whether the slug had passed through her body entirely until she’d gotten her shirt off and seen that its back was free of blood.
The bullet was still in her chest.
Caitlin knew enough anatomy to understand that her heart, lungs, and several major blood vessels might lie in the path of that chunk of lead. Yet she was still alive and conscious. For the first couple of minutes after Harold fled, breathing had become a little easier. But now it seemed harder to fill her lungs with each passing breath. The pressure in her chest felt like the flat of someone’s hand pressing down on her sternum, harder and harder.
She checked her cell phone for the hundredth time: still no reception.
I’ve got to get outside this tree, she thought, with a last hopeless look at Tom. I’ve got to find a signal. . . .
With a supreme act of will, she packed her phone into her jacket, then managed to flex her thighs hard enough to slide her back up the inner wall of the tree and get to her feet. Using the wall as a brace, she slid her way around to the crack in the trunk and turned sideways. She’d planned to marshal her strength for a few moments, but as soon as she was at a right angle to the crack, she fell through, crashing to the ground with an impact that blacked out her vision for a few seconds.
“Unnghh,” she groaned, feeling tears on her face. “This is bad.” Even as she said this, a thought went through her mind. What would Jordan do?
“Jordan wouldn’t be here,” she said. “TSTL, that’s me. Too Stupid To Live.”
She rolled onto her stomach, reached into the pocket of her fallen jacket, and pulled her phone up to her face. The LCD still read NO SERVICE. Fighting back panic, she looked around the tree.
The rain had stopped.
All she saw were more cypress trees jutting from the black water, the largest of them standing on tufts of earth. Between the trees, an endless mere stretched into the distance. She couldn’t walk through that water, and she hadn’t the strength to swim it. Even if she had, she’d seen enough alligators during the ride in to know that slogging through a swamp trailing blood wasn’t a good idea.
You have to climb, said a voice in her head. Get high enough, and your phone will find a tower. . . .
“I can’t climb,” she wailed with self-disgust. “I can’t even walk.”
It wasn’t a matter of will. The pain in her chest was so intense that she’d be lucky to stand again.
There are people nearby, she thought. Within gunshot range. Fire the bullet you have left and hope to attract attention. This idea wasn’t completely stupid, except for the fact that she’d left her pistol back inside the tree. If I can’t get out of here on my own, then I have to stay alive until somebody comes for me. Terry will call someone eventually.
Caitlin thought back to a night two months ago, when she’d been trapped in a building with another woman and death seemed certain. She’d summoned extraordinary strength that night, and done things most people wouldn’t have been able to do. The police and paramedics had told her that. She was a survivor; she’d proved it in spades. But somehow the bullet in her chest made a mockery of all her confidence. A tiny lump of lead fired from a plinking gun, a child’s rifle. But a plain old .22 could kill you if it hit a vital organ or artery.
The bullet, she thought in a haze of confusion. That’s my problem.