She had no cell phone.
She was a five-mile hike from the car.
If there was any kind of emergency communication system hidden in this desert, Samantha had no idea where it was.
“What the heck do people do when something like this happens?” she muttered to herself as she continued trudging, shrugging off the panic and forcing away the thoughts about how if she couldn’t manage to think of something,she and Nick would both likely be stuck in the canyon until at least the next day, if not longer than that. If Nick wasn’t dead by now, he’d surely—
“I’m sure there’s some kind of alert system or something. And I’m sure I’m the onlyperson to ever come out here who doesn’t know about it.”
Eventually, she arrived at taller, brushy vegetation and recognized it as the dry creek bed. She slowly turned a circle or two as her gaze scanned her surroundings for the rock piles. She finally spotted the split in the trail as well as the three piles and followed the trail that Nick had mentioned led through the center of the canyon.
She started down it feeling pretty blind. She had no idea what to look for or what to expect other than the eventual “maze of boulders.”
She didn’t know how long the hike to the boulders would take. Or how long the hike through the boulders would take.
“I wonder if this maze is like a real maze, where it’s hard to figure out how to get to the end,” she said to nobody. “Maybe I’m about to get trapped somewhere too. Or maybe I’ll fall off a boulder. Or what if a boulder falls on me?”
She allowed herself to laugh out loud at a mental picture of herself being squashed flat like a cartoon character. Her laughter grew a bit hysterical until she was cackling like a madwoman.
It wasn’t that funny. Nothing about any of this was funny.
And yet, here she was, laughing wildly and traipsing alone through the desert in an attempt to rescue a guy that she hadn’t known a week yet. A guy who wasn’t even her boyfriend, but whom she’d spent six days childishly musing about being the person she could see herself spending the rest of her life with. A guy who’d literally fallen off a cliff while he was standing not six feet away from her. A sweet, considerate, funny, wonderful guy who—realistically—had probably died right in front of her mere minutes ago.
Her laughter was abruptly displaced by a single solitary sob that choked its way out of her so she coughed a few times and shook her head, then wiped the sweat out of her eyes. At least, she told herself it was sweat.
“Don’t go there, Samantha,” she scolded herself. “You won’t know ’til you know, and you won’t know ’til you get through that boulder maze. Right now, you need to focus.”
The creek bed became more brushy and—just to make the situationthat much better—she noticed the bushes were chock full of thorny branches.
“Good thing he convinced me to get these pants,” she muttered as she pushed her way through the bushes. The thorns snagged at the pants and caught on her shirt while they scratched little cuts into her face, arms, and hands that stung from her salty, sweaty, dirt-covered skin.
She lost track of time as she wove through the brush and eventually noticed she’d reached a sparse area. She peered ahead and saw looming rock walls.
“The boulder maze,” she said with a relieved sigh. Relief at what, she didn’t know. Probably that she felt more reassured that she was heading the right direction.
The creek bed seemed to lead her to a path below a stone arch of sorts, which had obviously been carved out by millions of years of rushing water. A pretty neat phenomenon. The whole boulder maze was pretty cool. Although, it would have been a cooler experience if she wasn’t desperately trying to get to a potentially dead—
“Stop it, Samantha!”
She ducked under the arch and scrambled through the boulders. Some parts were a tighter squeeze than others, but nothing unmanageable. Eventually, she arrived at a minefield of smaller boulders. They were by no means small,but they weren’t as massive as the ones making up the maze. The stones became gradually smaller and eventually she found an area that was flat and open in random places, with various bushes of shrubs and cacti growing out of the ground and the walls.
She gasped.
“Flat and open!” she shouted as she began tearing around the bushes, gaze darting back and forth between the walls that now seemed sky-high. “Nick! Where are you?”
And finally, right around one of the bushes, she found him.
As she got closer, he appeared to be in better shape than she’d expected, with only large scrapes on his arms and a few scratches on his face and neck, but then her gaze landed on his legs.
The left was bent at the shin in a totally unnatural angle; the right consisted of what she guessed was his shin bone, snapped in two and stabbing through his pant leg.
She allowed herself one second to cover her mouth in horror at the brutal nature of his injuries. If he managed to survive this, she was almost positive he’d never walk again.
After regaining her calm state, she kneeled down next to him and placed her ear on his chest, bracing herself, and truthfully not expecting to hear anything.
And yet, there it was.
Slow, but steady. A distinct heartbeat and a subtle rise and fall of his chest.
