“What don’t I understand?”
“Sharren—Sharren has taken a keen interest in you.”
“That’s kind of her.”
“If you don’t eat something after she told me to feed you, she’s going to give me hell.”
“Well, we can’t have that.”
Evan seemed relieved as he led me to a chair. I slipped off my sports jacket, folded it, and set it on an empty chair across from me before sitting down.
“Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
True to his word, he returned within minutes with a stein of beer.
“Drink this,” he said.
It sounded more like a command than a request. I took a sip. Evan smiled.
“I’ll be right back with your sandwich,” he said.
I took another sip of beer, then another. It had a slightly bitter taste but altogether wasn’t bad. I wondered if it had been brewed in South Dakota like Ringneck. I would have to ask Evan when he returned, I told myself. I drank until the glass was half empty, then balanced it on my knee, telling myself that I would finish it with my sandwich. I closed my eyes …
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I opened my right eye. It was daylight, and I was lying on my stomach on the ground and staring at a plant I couldn’t identify. I raised my head slightly and attempted to open my left eye. The lid was clotted with blood and remained closed. I touched my cheek just below the eye and winced. It was swollen, the skin taut and painful. I explored gently with my fingers. No shattered cheekbones, no broken eye socket—so I had that going for me. After some effort, I managed to roll onto my back. I rubbed the dried blood out of my left eye and opened it. The sky was vivid blue and cloudless. I tried to sit up. I felt a deep pain in my left side, clutched my ribs, and sagged back down. A sudden chill gripped my entire body; my teeth began to chatter violently; I felt nauseous. I waited until the symptoms subsided and tried sitting up again, twisting as I did, leaning on my left forearm, using my right hand for support. My head throbbed, and I had a nasty taste in my mouth. With some effort, I managed to kneel. The dirt beneath my knees was dry and hard-packed. Around me were more of the unidentified plants. They had narrow stems about seven inches high with thin, flat leaf blades and short bristles at the top. There were tens of thousands of them, and they stretched to the horizon. The horizon seemed to be a hundred miles away in all directions.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Holding tight to my ribs, I managed to stand. If anything, it made the horizon seem farther away.
“This is very bad.”
If you were to put me on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Jeopardy, or any of the other TV game shows that test your knowledge, I would probably fail miserably. On the other hand, if you gave me a little context by, oh, I don’t know, abandoning me on a prairie in the middle of nowhere, suddenly I’d be able to access all the pertinent information stored in my head. It’s like my grasp of languages. I studied French for seven years yet can barely speak a word unless I’m on a beach in Martinique or a boulevard in Paris, and then I can speak it quite well. I don’t know why my brain works that way, it just does. I tell you this so you’ll understand why, at that precise moment in time, I knew exactly how much trouble I was in.
The Great Plains consist of four hundred and seventy-five thousand square miles of barely populated land, of which over half are range and pasture land, and I seemed to be stuck in the very middle of it. ’Course, a hundred and fifty thousand of those miles are in Canada. I didn’t know where I was, but it wasn’t Canada.
How would you know? my inner voice asked.
I examined my wristwatch. It was 8:32 a.m. …
How do you know it’s morning?
The sun is rising …
How do you know it isn’t setting?
Dammit, it’s morning. The sun is rising.
All right. Relax. Take a deep breath.
I did, and immediately felt a stabbing pain in my left side that caused me to clutch my ribs again. Once the pain lessened, I coughed up some phlegm and spat on the ground at my feet. The saliva seemed clear to me.
What does that tell you?
I’m not bleeding inside.
Oh, yeah, like you would know.
I went back to my watch. It was 8:34 a.m. I knew for a fact that I had been in Libbie at four fifteen. That meant I was just over four hours away from where I was. Figure a vehicle traveling at seventy miles per hour out of town, and forty miles an hour over this rough terrain, at the very most I should be about two hundred twenty-five miles from Libbie.
Which tells you what?
I’m not in fucking Canada!