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Chapter Five
Diana
I woke up alongside a two-lane road. It wasn’t heavily traveled, which may have been why I woke up at all instead of being dead. I was bruised and sore and a dull thud in my forehead seemed to have its own drumbeat. Every few moments, a car or truck or motorcycle zoomed past, and I cringed back.
I needed to go, somewhere. Must have been somewhere.
Had I been in a car accident, perhaps? That seemed like a strong possibility. But if so, where was my car? Pushing up onto hands and knees, I prepared to stand. I couldn’t just lie here where any car might pull off and strike me. Maybe that had happened already?
I needed help, for sure. A ride, maybe, but I wasn’t sure if someone had hurt me and therefore didn’t want to wave down a passing car. Once upright, I tried hard to think of how I arrived here, but anything beyond the moment I woke up on the shoulder lay shrouded in darkness. I for sure had hit my head. The headache and memory loss were clear indications of that, and when I ran a finger across my forehead, I felt a bump the size of a quail’s egg.
The shirt and shorts I wore were not warm enough for the cooling evening, and in the interest of avoiding a chill to top whatever other injuries I’d suffered, I decided to walk along the road until I came to a house or a store or something. Somewhere I could call…
I had no idea.
And, with no idea who I was or where I’d come from or how I got in this situation, for all I knew, I’d just come from robbing a bank or committing some other kind of crime for which I was a wanted person.
Even without knowing who I was, I didn’t think I had it in me to rob a bank. And if I had, I’d carelessly lost my bag of loot somewhere, but I could very well have been fleeing a mistaken situation.
Gods, having no memory in a strange place was frustrating. As I began to pace, I realized something else. I wasn’t wearing any shoes. The highway was gradually sloping downhill, but I couldn’t see where it ended up because fog was wafting past and obscuring my view more than about twenty feet away.
I walked downhill because I wasn’t sure I had the energy to walk uphill. The sandy shoulder was cool under my feet, and soft, but the aches throughout my body felt each step as a jarring attack on the abused muscles. Still, I had to go on because what other option did I have? I couldn’t just stay where I’d found myself.
The two-lane road soon intersected with a larger highway that seemed to run along above the beach, at least as far as I could tell. The fog had thickened, hiding most of what surrounded me. I turned right, not wanting to cross without being able to see better, but after a half hour or so, it was getting colder and harder to see, and I began to think I’d chosen the wrong direction.
My teeth were chattering when I spotted a light in the distance. Wisps of white floated past it, and I hurried, up, hoping I’d finally found help. At this point, all my initial worries that I might be running from someone or something had faded behind the fear I’d die of exposure first. So when I got close enough to the light for it to give me a little view in both directions, I hotfooted it across and came up on the doorstep of the single house I could make out in any direction.
Not that I could see much…
But I managed to rap on the door before a wave of dizziness passed over me and sent me tumbling to the welcome mat. Conscious, but not doing well at all.
