She tried to tell herself not to panic. Tried to tell herself that making it so she couldn’t breathe was only going to make things worse. She leaned back and tried to steady herself. Tried to normalize her breathing. There was a rock digging into her back, and she wiggled her toes, just to prove to herself that she could.
She didn’t think she was horribly injured, she was just pinned.
Vaguely, she remembered the story about the guy who had to cut his own arm off to escape a similar situation.
She was not feelingthat desperate yet.
The very idea of having to get that desperate made her start to panic again. Her heart was racing.
She tried to calm down. She thought about innocuous things. About yarn. She tried to imagine her crochet pattern.
Then she found her mind wandering back to Zane.
What had he been doing when she’d gone up to his place, and he came walking out of the woods shirtless?
Detective work. She loved a good detective show. Usually, that included solving murders, but she could solve for shirtless Zane as well. His hair had been wet. She was reasonably sure. He didn’t have his hat on his head. He was holding it in his hand. Maybe he’d been holding his shirt too, and she hadn’t noticed? Maybe it had been in the hat. Which meant maybe he had it when he went where he was.
Maybe there was a creek back there? There was a river that ran through the Painted Ridge Ranch, maybe it went all the way through Zane’s property. That would stand to reason.
So maybe he had been bathing himself.
This was really stupid. She was maybe dying, half buried in a mudslide, and she was thinking about Zane. Naked.
But then, why not think about it? Why not fully indulge herself? It was distracting anyway.
And it was either that or get panicky again. Start to think about how she might die here.
Overdramatic. That’s very overdramatic.
Yes, it was. She didn’t think this was a life-or-death situation.
Did peoplerealizethey were in life-or-death situations? Or did their bodies go into shock?
What if she were actually gravely injured, and her body was blocking it out? She knew that bodies did things like that. That they tried to protect you from reality. So that you could survive.
Okay. She was going to try to think about Zane again. Naked. In the river, moving his hands over his bare chest.
Maybe a bar of soap in his hand? A washcloth? He hadn’t had any of those things with him that she’d seen, but…
Did his cabin have running water?
Her thoughts stopped making quite so much sense, but at least it stopped raining. It was getting dark, though.
Very dark.
She started to struggle against her prison again, and she could feel the dirt sucking down beneath just as it had the first time she’d tried to break free, but now that some of her adrenaline had worn off, she could think.
It was suction. You couldn’t pull directly against something with tight suction like this, you had to break the seal.
She let out a harsh breath.
Okay. So there was nothing she could do if people didn’t find her tonight. And what if they didn’t find her? That meant that getting out of this impossible situation was the first order of business. She found a little surge of energy and started to experiment with what happened if she moved differently. If she didn’t try to pull herself up, but try to wiggle herself incrementally back through the sucking mud, then maybe she could get some momentum.
She was almost sure she’d managed to move herself an inch.
Bolstered by that, she began to move slowly, realizing that struggling only pulled her down further. Like quicksand.
Yes. Like quicksand. She had been given to believe the quicksand would be a pretty big problem all through her growing-up years but then had never encountered it outside of a cartoon. But she knew the physics of it. When you struggled against it, then it only pulled you down deeper. Which was what had been happening to her lower body. She had beensinking into the soft ground, the rocks piling on top and pushing her deeper.
