The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(53)

Trisha stood where she was for three minutes or more, looking down at the little radio-tape player with her fever-bright eyes. Throw it away or keep it? Throw it away or keep it? What's your decision, Patricia, do you want to stick with the waterless cookware or go for the car, the mink coat, and the trip to Rio? It occurred to her that if she were her brother Pete's Mac PowerBook, she'd be throwing up error messages and little bomb icons all over the place. She was startled into a laugh at this image.

The laughter almost immediately turned into coughing.

It was the worst bout by far, doubling her over. Soon she was barking like a dog with her hands planted just above her knees and her hanging hair swaying back and forth in a filthy curtain. She somehow kept her feet, refusing to give in and fall, and as the coughing fit was tapering off, she real-ized that she ought to clip the Walkman to the waistband of her jeans. That was what the clip on the back of the case was for, wasn't it? Sure, you bet. What an El Dopo she was.

She opened her mouth to say, Elementary, my dear Watson - she and Pepsi sometimes said that to each other -  and when she did, something wet and warm came slobber-ing out over her lower lip. She wiped up a palmful of bright red blood and looked at it, her eyes widening.

I must have bit something in my mouth when I was coughing, she thought, and immediately knew better. This had come from deeper inside. The idea scared her, and fright brought the world into sharper focus. She found herself able to think again. She cleared her throat (gently; it hurt too much to do it any other way) and then spat. Bright red. Oh jeez, Louise, but there was nothing she could do about it now, and at least she was clearheaded enough to figure out how to make sure of her direction on the road. The sun had gone down on her right. She turned now until the rising sun was winking through the trees on her left, and immediately saw she was pointed the right way. She didn't know how she could have been confused in the first place.

Slowly, gingerly, like someone walking on a freshly rinsed tile floor, Trisha got moving again. This is probably it, she thought. Today's probably my last chance, maybe even this morn-200 ing's my last chance. I may be too weak and sick to walk by this afternoon, and if I can get on my feet after another night out here, it'll be a blue-eyed miracle.

Blue-eyed miracle. Was that her mother's or her father's?

"Who gives a rat's ass?" Trisha croaked. "If I get out of this, I'm going to make up some sayings of my own."

Fifty or sixty feet north of the place where she had spent that endless Sunday night and Monday morning, Trisha realized she still had her Walkman in her right hand. She stopped and went carefully and laboriously about the task of getting it clipped to her waistband. Her jeans were absolutely floating on her now, and she could see the sharp jut of her hipbones. Lose a few more pounds and I'll be able to model the latest Paris fashions, she thought. She was just won-dering what to do with the headphone attachment when a sudden rough rattle of distant explosions split the still morning air - it sounded like a puddle of soda being sucked up through a giant straw.

Trisha cried out, and she was not alone in her startle-ment; a number of crows cawed, and a pheasant exploded through the brush in a ruffled whir of indignation.

Trisha stood, wide-eyed, the forgotten earbud headphones penduluming at the end of their cord by her scabby, dirty left ankle. She knew that sound; it was the rattle of backfires through an old muffler. A truck, maybe, or some kid's bucket of rods. There was another road up there. A real road.

She wanted to run and knew she must not. If she did, she would blow out all her energy in one burst. That would be dreadful. To faint away and perhaps die of exposure within actual sound of traffic would be like blowing the save when the opposing team was down to their last strike. Such abom-inations happened, but she would not let it happen to her.

She began to walk instead, forcing herself to move slowly and deliberately, listening all the while for another series of those rattling backfires, or a distant engine, or a horn. There was nothing, nothing at all, and after an hour of walking she began to think she had hallucinated the whole thing.

This hadn't seemed like a hallucination, but...

She topped a rise and looked down. She began coughing again, and more blood flew from her lips, bright in the sun, but Trisha took no notice - did not even put her hand up.

Below her the rutted track she was on ended, T-squaring into a dirt road.

Trisha walked slowly down and stood upon it. She could see no tire tracks - it was hardpan - but there were real ruts here, and no grass growing down the middle. The new road ran at right angles to her road, roughly east and west. And here, at last, Trisha made the right decision. She did not turn west for any other reason than that her head had begun to ache again and she didn't want to be walking directly into the sunshine... but she did turn west. Four miles from where she stood, New Hampshire Route 96, a patched rib-bon of hot-top, ran through the woods. A few cars and a great many pulp-trucks used this road; it was one of the lat-ter which Trisha had heard backing off through its ancient exhaust system as the driver downshifted for Kemongus Hill. The sound had carried better than nine miles through the still morning air.

She began to move again, and with a new feeling of strength. It was perhaps forty-five minutes later that she heard something, distant but unmistakable.

Don't be stupid, you've gotten to a place where anything's mis-takable.

Perhaps so, but...

She cocked her head like the dog on Gramma McFar-land's old records, the ones Gramma kept up in the attic.