The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(25)

The stream began to spread again, and for fifteen minutes or so (this was around noon) she allowed herself to hope that it wasn't going to peter out after all. Then she realized it was also growing more shallow; it really wasn't much more than a series of puddles, most dulled with pond-scum and hop-ping with bugs. Ten minutes or so later her sneaker disap-peared through ground that wasn't solid at all but only a deceptive crust of moss over a soupy pocket of mud. It flowed over her ankle and Trisha drew her foot back with a little cry of disgust. The quick hard yank pulled her sneaker halfway off her foot. Trisha uttered another cry and held onto the trunk of a dead tree while she first wiped her foot with snatches of grass and then put her sneaker back on.

With that done she looked around and saw she had come to a kind of ghost-woods, the site of some old fire. Ahead (and already around her) was a broken maze of long-dead trees.

The ground in which they stood was swampy and wet. Ris-ing from flat pools of standing water were turtleback hum-mocks covered with grass and swatches of weeds. The air hummed with mosquitoes and danced with dragonflies.

Now there were more woodpeckers tackhammering away, dozens of them by the sound. So many dead trees, so little time.

Trisha's brook wandered away into this morass and was lost.

"What do I do now, huh?" she asked in a teary, tired voice. "Will somebody please tell me that?"

There were lots of places to sit and think about it; tum-bles of dead trees everywhere, many still bearing scorch-marks on their pallid bodies. The first one she tried, however, gave beneath her weight and sent her spilling to the mucky ground. Trisha cried out as dampness soaked through the seat of her jeans - God, she hated having her seat get wet like that - and lurched upright again. The tree had rotted through in the damp; the freshly broken ends squirmed with woodlice. Trisha looked at them for a moment or two in revolted fascination, then walked to a second downed tree. This one she tested first. It seemed solid and she sat on it warily, looking out at the bog of bro-ken trees, absently rubbing her sore neck and trying to decide what she should do.

Although her mind was less clear than it had been when she woke up, a lot less clear, there still seemed to be only two choices: stay put and hope rescue would come or keep mov-ing and try to meet it. She supposed that staying in one place made a certain amount of sense: conservation of energy and all that. Also, without the stream, what would she be going toward? Nothing sure, and that was for sure. She might be heading toward civilization; she might be heading away from civilization. She might even get walking in a circle.

On the other hand ("There's always the other hand, sugar," her father had once told her), there was nothing to eat here, it stank of mud and rotting trees and who knew what other gross stuff here, it was ugly here, it was a bummer here. It came to Trisha that if she stayed here and no search-98 party came before dark, she would be spending the night here. It was an awful idea. The little crescent-shaped clear-ing had been Disneyland compared to this.

She stood and peered in the direction the stream had been tending before it petered out. She was looking through a maze of gray tree-trunks and lacings of dry jutting branches, but she thought she could see green beyond them. A rising green. Maybe a hill. And more checkerber-ries?

Hey, why not? She had already passed several more clumps of bushes loaded with them. She should have picked them and put them in her pack, but she had been concen-trating so hard on the stream that it just hadn't occurred to her to do so. Now, however, the stream was gone and she was hungry again. Not starving (not yet, at least), but hun-gry, sure.

Trisha took two steps forward, tested a patch of soft ground, and watched with profound misgivings as water promptly seeped up around the toe of her sneaker. Was she going in there, then? Simply because she thought she saw the other side?

"There could be quicksand," she muttered.

That's right! the cold voice agreed at once. It sounded amused. Quicksand! Alligators! Not to mention little gray X-Files men with probes to stick up your butt!

Trisha gave back the pair of steps she had taken and sat down again. She was gnawing at her lower lip without real-izing it. She now hardly noticed the bugs swarming around her. Go or stay? Stay or go?

What got her going ten minutes or so later was blind hope... and the thought of berries. Hell, she was ready to try the leaves now, too. Trisha saw herself picking bright red berries on the slope of a pleasant green hill, looking like a girl in a schoolbook illustration (she had forgotten the mud-pack on her face and the snarled, dirty spout of her hair).

She saw herself picking her way to the crest of the hill, fill-ing her pack with checkerberries... finally reaching the top, looking down, seeing...

A road. I see a dirt road with fences on both sides... horses grazing... and a barn in the distance. A red one with white trim.

Crazy! Totally bazonka!

Or was it? What if she was sitting half an hour's walk from safety, still lost because she was afraid of a little goo?

"Okay," she said, standing up again and nervously re-adjusting the straps of her pack. "Okay, berries ho. But if it gets too gross, I'm going back." She gave the straps one final tug and started forward again, walking slowly over the increasingly wet ground, testing each step as she went, detouring around the skeletal standing trees and the fallen tangles of deadwood.

Eventually - it might have been half an hour after start-ing forward again, it might have been forty-five minutes -  Trisha discovered what thousands (perhaps even millions) of men and women before her have discovered: by the time it gets too gross, it's often also too late to go back. She stepped from an oozy but stable patch of ground onto a hummock that wasn't a hummock at all but only a disguise. Her foot went into a cold, viscous substance that was too thick to be water and too thin to be mud. She tilted, grabbed a jutting dead branch, screamed in fright and vexation when it snapped off in her hand. She fell forward into long grass that hopped with bugs. She got a knee under her and yanked her foot back. It came with a loud sucking plop, but her sneaker stayed down there someplace.