Insidious Threats by Melissa F. Miller

Author:Melissa F. Miller [Miller, Melissa F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940759968
Published: 2023-05-22T18:30:00+00:00

23

The crappy little town with the amazing apple pies was further from the airport than Amanda had estimated. Or she’d gotten lost in those freaking dormant cornfields as she’d thwacked through dead cornstalks. Or both.

She guessed she’d been running for well over two hours. Maybe three. There was every likelihood she was going in circles. She hadn’t passed by the shed at the farm where she’d first sought shelter, which was encouraging. But then again, she hadn’t seen any other structures either, and every field looked identical to the last.

She stumbled across a gully and sat down heavily on a tree stump to catch her breath. Raw blisters had formed on her big toes and rubbed against her socks with every stride. Her warm thigh-length coat had been more than sufficient for her short trips outside the hotel and office building yesterday, but it wasn’t up to the job today. The cold had seeped into her bones so thoroughly that she no longer shivered.

Is it possible to be too cold to shiver?

The entirety of her survival experience had come from a wilderness leadership program her parents had shipped her off to one summer when she was in high school. She had a vague memory of the stages of hypothermia and thought the lack of shivering might be a sign that she was moving from the first stage to the second. Or she could be entirely wrong.

Pie.

She really wanted that pie. She could taste it. The promise of mouth-watering apple pie had become her new primary goal. Forget starting a new life, free of Leith Delone and his skeletons. She wanted pie.

Just another fifteen minutes, she promised herself as she massaged her sore feet through her socks. If she didn’t come across the town after fifteen minutes, she’d take shelter in the first spot she found. Even if that meant digging a hole and crawling into it. She was pretty sure she’d seen that in a movie.

If Amanda hadn’t been experiencing symptoms of moderate hypothermia, she would have had the mental acuity to remember that confused thinking was, like the cessation of shivering, a symptom of moderate hypothermia. But how does a person recognize a decline in her own cognitive ability? If she’d realized her situation, she’d have appreciated the irony of it.

Instead, she trudged, zombie-like, down another hill and up a crest. She thought she heard the rumble of trucks driving at speed, and hope flickered in her chest. A few moments later, she spotted the tall, lighted sign for Erma’s Diner towering over a long low aluminum-sided structure.

She raised her fist in triumph and whooped. From its perch in a bare tree, a fat crow squawked in response. Amanda’s body reached deep into some reserve that it should have exhausted hours ago and produced a final glucose-fueled burst of energy. She laughed as she sprinted down the hill and out of the field.

When she reached the berm along the side of the highway, she stopped and stared across at the diner to confirm that it was really real.

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