The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(12)

Trisha backed up and got to her feet, then continued to make her way through the bushes toward the sound of run-ning water. She was starting to feel tired now, her legs aching, but she thought she was basically okay. Afraid, of course, but not so badly as before. They would find her.

When people got lost in the woods they always found them.

They sent out planes and helicopters and guys with blood-hounds and they hunted until the lost person was found.

Or maybe I'll kind of save myself. Find a camp in the woods somewhere, break a window if the door's locked and there's no one home, use the telephone...

Trisha could see herself in some hunter's cabin which hadn't been used since the previous fall; she could see camp furniture covered with faded paisley dropcloths and a bearskin rug on the board floor. She could smell dust and old stove ashes; this daydream was so clear she could even smell a trace of ancient coffee. The place was empty but the telephone worked. It was one of the oldfashioned ones, the handset so heavy that she had to hold it in both hands, but it worked and she could hear herself saying: "Hello, Mom? This is Trisha. I don't know exactly where I am, but I'm all r - "

She was so absorbed in the imaginary cabin and the imaginary phone call that she came close to falling into a small stream that emerged from the woods and cascaded down the rubble-strewn slope.

Trisha grabbed at the branches of an alder and stood looking at the stream, actually smiling a little. It had been a crappy day, all right, tres crappy, but her luck finally seemed to be turning and that was a big hooray. She walked to the edge of the slope. The stream spilled down it in a foamy rush, here and there striking a bigger rock and kicking up spray that would have held rainbows on a sunny afternoon.

The slope on both sides of the water looked slippery and unreliable - all that loose wet rock. Still, it was also dotted with bushes. If she started to slide, she would grab one of those as she'd grabbed the alder at the edge of the stream.

"Water leads to people," she said, and started down the slope.

She descended sideways, in little hops, on the right side of the stream. At first she was all right even though the angle of the slope was steeper than it had looked from up above and the broken ground shifted under her sneakers every time she moved. Her pack, of which she had hardly been aware up until now, began to feel like a large, unstable baby in one of those papoose carriers; every time it shifted she had to wave her arms to keep her balance. She was all right, though, and a darn good thing, because when she paused halfway down the slope, her propping right foot actually buried in loose rock below her, she realized she couldn't climb back up anymore. One way or the other, she was bound for the valley floor.

She got moving again. Three quarters of the way down, a bug - a big one, not a minge or a mosquito - flew into her face. It was a wasp, and Trisha batted at it with a cry. Her pack shifted violently to her downhill side, her right foot slipped, and suddenly her balance was gone. She fell, hit the rock slope on her shoulder with a tooth-rattling thud, and began to slide.

"Oh shit on toast!" she cried, and grabbed at the ground.

All she got was a strew of loose rock that slid along with her and a sharp jab of pain as a broken chunk of quartz cut her palm. She snatched at a bush and it came out by its stupid shallow roots. Her foot struck something, her right leg bent at a painful angle, and she was suddenly airborne, the world revolving as she did an unplanned somersault.

Trisha came down on her back and slid that way, legs spread, arms waving, screaming in pain and terror and sur-prise.

Her poncho and the back of her shirt pulled up to her shoulderblades; sharp pieces of rock tore snatches of skin from between them. She tried to brake with her feet. The left one struck a jutting outcrop of shale and turned her to the right. That put her into a roll - first on her stomach and then onto her back and then onto her stomach again, the pack digging into her, then pitching upward each time she went over. The sky was down, the hateful broken scree of the slope was up, and then they swapped places - swing your partner with a dosey-do, everybody change.

Trisha went the final ten yards on her left side with her left arm stretched out and her face buried against the fold of her elbow. She thumped against something hard enough to bruise her ribs on that side... and then, before she could even look up from her arm, a needle of pain drove into her just above her left cheekbone. Trisha shrieked and jerked to her knees, slapping. She crushed something - another wasp, of course, what else - even as it stung her again, even as she opened her eyes and saw them all around her: yellow-brown insects that looked weighted down in the tailsection, plump ungainly poison factories.

She had slid into a dead tree standing at the foot of the slope about twenty-five feet from the brawling streamlet. In the dead tree's lowest fork, just at eye-level to a little girl who was nine but tall for her age, was a gray paper nest.

Agitated wasps were crawling all over it; more were flying out of a hole in the top.

Pain needled the right side of Trisha's neck, just below the bill of her cap. Another sting lit up her right arm above the elbow. Screaming, in a total panic, she bolted. Something stung the back of her neck; something stung the small of her back, above the waistband of her bluejeans, where her shirt was still pulled up and the plastic poncho hung in tatters.

She ran in the direction of the stream without any thought or plan or intent; it was just that the ground there was rela-tively open. She wove her way around the clumps of bushes, and when the underbrush began to thicken she bulled through it. At the stream she stopped, gasping for breath, looking tearfully (and fearfully) back over her shoulder. The wasps were gone, but they had done plenty of damage before she had managed to outrun them. Her left eye, close to where the first one had gotten her, was swelled almost shut.