Chapter Seven
Abigail
The next forty-eight hours were an agonizing lesson in the limits of the human body.
Trapped inside the nylon walls of her tent, Abby watched the progression of the sun by the shifting shadows it cast across the canvas.
The heat was oppressive, heavy and stagnant.
By midday, the tent transformed into an oven, forcing her to drag her sleeping pad out beneath the meager shade of a nearby pine tree, where she lay practically motionless, swatting at horseflies and listening to the cicadas scream.
Her knee throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache, a constant reminder of her vulnerability.
Thanks to the mysterious guardian angel’s supplies, the angry red heat of infection had retreated, replaced by the deep, ugly purple of a severe bruise and the tight pulling sensation of healing skin. The antibiotics were working.
But they were also making her incredibly nauseous, a side effect exponentially worsened by the fact that she was running out of water.
She stared at the clear plastic bottle resting in the dirt beside her. Two inches of water left. Maybe four good swallows.
Abby closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the rough bark of the pine tree.
In the forced stillness of the last two days, with nothing to distract her, the memories she had driven across three states to escape had finally caught up.
They played behind her eyelids in a looping, uninvited highlight reel.
She saw the glass-walled conference room on the forty-second floor.
She saw the faces of the senior partners, expectant and impatient.
She saw her ex-fiancé, David, sitting two chairs down, aggressively tapping his one-thousand dollar Mont Blanc pen against his legal pad.
David, who had treated their upcoming wedding like a corporate merger.
David, who had told her just the night before that she was "overreacting" to the eighty-hour work weeks and the chest pains she had been experiencing.
“You’re a machine, Abby,” he had praised her once, pouring her a glass of overpriced wine. “Nothing stops you.”
Until it did.
She remembered the exact moment her lungs had simply locked.
She remembered the PowerPoint slide blurring into a wash of meaningless colors, the ringing in her ears, and the terrifying certainty that if she didn't leave that room immediately, she was going to die right there in her designer pencil skirt.
She had stood up, walked out of the building without a word, got into her car, and basically drove until the skyscrapers were replaced by mountains.
She only stopped for ten minutes at her apartment to haphazardly pack a bag.
She wasn't a machine. The machine was broken. Out here, she was just a fragile organism that needed water to survive.
Abby opened her eyes. The sun was beginning its slow descent, the worst of the midday heat breaking.
She looked toward the slope that led down to the creek.
It was a hundred yards of uneven terrain, littered with exposed roots and slick pine straw.
Two days ago, it was a thirty-second walk.
Today, it looked like summiting Everest.
"Come on," she whispered, her voice cracking, dry as parchment.
She rolled onto her hands and her uninjured knee, dragging her injured leg behind her until she reached a sturdy, fallen birch branch she had set aside the day before.
Using the trunk of the pine tree for leverage, she forced herself upright, tucking the branch under her arm like a rudimentary crutch.
The pain in her knee flared sharply, protesting the sudden shift in gravity. She gritted her teeth, grabbed her empty water bottles, and took a step.
The journey to the creek was a blur of exhausting, hyper-focused effort.
Every step required calculation. Place the makeshift crutch.
Shift the weight. Drag the bad leg. Find the next foothold.
Sweat poured down her face, stinging her eyes, and her breath tore in ragged gasps through her parched throat.
When she finally reached the muddy bank, her good leg gave out from the strain.
She collapsed onto the moss, dropping the crutch, her hands sinking into the cold mud.
She didn't care. She uncapped the filtration straw, shoved it directly into the rushing current, and drank until her stomach ached with the icy shock of it.
She sat back, wiping the mud and water from her chin, her chest heaving. She filled the three plastic bottles, her hands quaking from the exertion.
The water was a triumph, but as she looked back up the steep, root-tangled slope toward her camp, the reality of her situation hit her with crushing force. She couldn't make this trek twice a day. The antibiotics required food, but her appetite was completely gone, and her supplies were dwindling.
She was surviving, but she was slowly, inevitably losing the war of attrition.
Tears of pure, unadulterated frustration welled in her eyes. She angrily wiped them away, smearing mud across her cheek. She tucked the water bottles into the waist of her pants, grabbed her birch branch, and began the agonizing climb back to the tent.