Save Me by Sharon Sala

Author:Sharon Sala [Sala, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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LAINIE HAD FALLEN asleep in the night and woke in daylight, burning with fever. Her lips were cracked, and her mouth and throat were so dry she didn’t have spit to swallow. She knew enough about the human body that she was severely dehydrated, and if she didn’t keep drinking water, her organs would begin shutting down.

She could hear the water in the nearby creek, and getting to it today was her only goal. But when she raised up on her elbow to push the branches aside, the pain that shot up the back of her neck and head was so sharp and sudden that, for a moment, she thought she’d been shot.

“That hurt,” she muttered, as she pushed past the pain and started crawling.

But the twenty yards from her shelter to the water might as well have been miles. By the time she got there, her arms were trembling. She went belly down at the water’s edge and drank until she could hold no more, and then she ducked her face into the flowing stream over and over, trying to cool the fever, until she finally gave up and crawled the rest of the way into the creek.

The water was barely knee deep, but she floated on her belly to a partially submerged rock. Using it for an anchor, she wrapped her arms around the projection above the water and held on, letting the cold mountain water be the ice bath she needed.

She was still hanging on to the rock when a possum waddled out of the underbrush and went down to the water to get a drink. The irony of her fighting to stay alive, side by side with a little possum simply quenching its thirst, was a most perfect analogy of life. After it moved back into the underbrush, Lainie began the painful journey of getting herself out of the creek.

By the time she reached the bank and began to crawl up the slope and back to her shelter, she was exhausted. She pulled the branches back around herself, and as she did, realized she’d lost a sock in the creek, then accepted that it no longer mattered. Exhausted beyond words, she rolled over into a ball and closed her eyes. The last thing she remembered was feeling her clothes beginning to dry, and thinking how hungry she was.

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