Part 2/3 - Lost

Part one

Hours later she woke freezing cold and feeling as if the world was tipping on its axis.  Jumping up she’d fallen back to the ground the stars above her head spinning madly.  Then without warning all of the stars winked out of sight.

Suddenly there was nothing, not even the feeling of the hard pan beneath her nothing other than the inky blackness which seemed to press upon her from all sides. It felt as if she had suddenly gone blind deaf and dumb in an instant.

She groped about with her hands and for a moment she felt something, but pulled back with a cry….it had been slimy and hot, something completely alien to her and somehow dangerous. 

Just as quickly as she’d withdrawn her hand she reached out again, even that strange feeling had been better than this….this nothing…..

Groping wildly she began to flail as panic took over, how could there be nothing, nothing to see, to feel, to hear, to even smell.  She screamed into the darkness realizing even as she screamed that she could not hear herself that the sound was only from inside her own head.

She continued screaming silently for what may have been only minutes but felt like hours before she was able to force herself to stop, realizing that if she didn’t do it soon she would never be able to.

She was breathing hard and yet even straining as hard as she could she could not hear the noise of her own breath, but she could feel it.

She focused on that feeling the only feeling she had left, counting slowly with her eyes closed. She reached one hundred and slowly opened her eyes and yet she still saw nothing. She felt a sudden itch on her nose and realized with a start that she couldn’t reach up and scratch her nose because she had no hands. Did she have a nose?

She felt panic rising again and fought it trying to stay calm and think after all it seemed to be the only option open to her.  Think or go crazy.  Her thoughts swirled madly searching desperately through her life’s knowledge for some point of reference which would help her get out of this mess. 

Her mind suddenly grasped upon an old lesson from Sunday school when they had been taught about purgatory.  She seemed to recall it had been described as being trapped in nothingness.  Was this the afterlife then? Had something killed her without her sensing it and now she was doomed to spend the rest of her life (existence?) as whatever this was?

She floated in the blackness considering the possibility arguing with herself, praying to the god she hadn’t spoken to since those childhood days of Sunday school.  Desperate to stay calm she began singing old songs in her head to distract herself from the growing sense of unease and terror griping her mind. Why hadn’t she stayed with the car!

An image of her body lying in the desert came to her mind unbidden. She saw the sun rising and the vultures circling over head.  She saw small coyotes and other desert creatures inching slowly to where she lay and begin to pick at her body.  She saw a vulture dip its head over her own and rise up with an eyeball, her eyeball, swinging from a long piece of sinew in its beak.

Great waves of disgust and despair coursed across her mind wiping away all other thought and panic once again took over. Before long she was again silently screaming into the void surrounding her.    

Without warning she felt a soft thump against her back and her eyes flew open. She was laying on the hard desert surface the stars above her head.  She jumped up staring around in confusion as the first hint of the sun reached the horizon.

Part 1/3 - Lost

The sun began to rise and Joelle heaved a sigh of relief.  Although far from out of danger with the sun coming up over the horizon her situation suddenly felt much better than it had in the darkness.

After all she wasn’t really lost she’d had a bit of bad luck is all. She had set out from her hotel to meet up with an old friend and had barely driven out of town before realizing she had made a wrong turn.

She’d decided to turn around when the hunk of junk car she’d rented decided to lurch forward and stall.  Unfortunately it had lurched at the edge of the narrow roadway while she was turning and it had gone sliding nose first into the ditch. She probably would have been able to back the car out of the ditch but it had refused to start up again.

She tried for nearly an hour before deciding to give up and walk back.  She would have called a tow truck but ever since she’d arrived her phone had been acting erratically and now it didn’t even want to turn on. She’d only been driving for ten minutes anyways how far could she really have gone?    

She could see the ridge which marked the edge of the valley the town sat in and it hadn’t looked all that far away even if maybe she’d been driving 15 or 20 minutes rather than 10 before turning back.

She’d started out fine, better than fine really.  There had been a bunch of water bottles in the trunk and she had taken those as well as anything else that might be useful to her including the first aid kit. She’d even had her umbrella which she’d opened up to shade herself from the desert sun.

It hadn’t taken her long to realize how hard walking across the hot ground was going to be and several times she had turned back towards the car wondering if maybe she should just stay with it.  Even if no one passed by accident she’d spoken with her friend on the phone just before leaving and her friend was bound to get people looking for her when she didn’t show up after a few hours.

Eventually she walked just a little bit too far to change her mind.  Just as she’d decided that walking really had been the wrong choice the sun started going down and without it glinting off the roof of the car she couldn’t quite make out where it had been. She thought she saw it for a moment but without any footprints on the hard pan and each bit of brush and cactus looking exactly the same as the next she couldn’t be sure. 

She could be sure where the ridge was though and so she decided to keep going.

As it had gotten darker she’d begun to stumble. What from a distance looked like a solid flat expanse was actually rather uneven sometimes even dropping off several feet at a time.  After falling headlong off of one of these drops Joelle realized trying to walk in the dark wasn’t only useless but dangerous.

So she’d scooted back until she rested against the mini cliff she’d just fallen over and leant back determining that it would be best to stay put for the night.  More tired from walking all day than she’d realized, she had pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt and fell asleep in just a few minutes.