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“What does that mean?” Mark frowned.
“I don’t know,” Luke shrugged. “I’ve never seen it do this before. For some reason, his is moving fast, in circles at times. Look.” He turned his phone around for all to see and sure enough it was.
“I’m calling Desi,” Kim said. Walking to the counter she picked up her phone and made the call. It wasn’t a shocker to anyone when the call went straight to her voicemail.
Ben immediately phoned the police station. If both his and Luke’s apps were right, not only was Abbi needing to be found, but so was Luke and Desi...
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“ITHINK WE BETTER CALLyour family at least,” Desi gasped for breath as she collapsed next to Lane on the grassy bank of a small pond.
They had been making good time when with no warning the ground they’d been walking on slipped right out from under their feet. Down into a gully full of water, that thankfully it hadn’t been deep. But then suddenly water came crashing out of nowhere, knocking them off their feet. If Lane had to guess, it carried them downstream at least a quarter of a mile from where they currently were, the drainage pond. That meant, they were nowhere near his mother or his bike.
“C’mon.” Lane nudged her. “We can’t stay here. We need to get a move on. It’s going to be getting dark soon and with us being wet, that won’t be a good thing.”
They hadn’t walked more than ten feet when Desi could feel the muddy earth sucking at her shoes. After all the rain they got it was too unstable to be traipsing through the bush. She hurried to catch up to him and said, “Call your family, now! Or I’m calling the police...”
Lane stopped dead in his tracks. “Fine, give me your phone...mine is dead.”
She looked at his open hand, then looked him in the eyes. “I don’t have it...”
“What?!”
“You heard me! You woke me up in the middle of the night. My cell phone was the last thing on my mind.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose he nodded. “Okay... that’s fine, we will just get my bike and head back to the village.”
By the time they found his motorcycle, darkness had fallen and with it the temperature.
Lane took the backpack off and sat it down on the ground. Opening it he unzipped a pocket that he’d put his keys in the night before. Walking over to his bike, he unlocked one of the saddlebags and pulled out a survival kit from within. “We can’t ride the bike when it’s this cold when we are soaking wet. We are staying again for the night. This time I’ll build a fire.”
Desi sat heavily on the fallen tree trunk. Her ass would be bruised in the morning because of it but she didn’t have the energy to make a peep. She was exhausted, starving and freezing. She’d been looking forward to crawling back into her bed and staying there for a week.
Lane had been kicking himself in the ass ever since they surfaced from the raging water. Desi could have died, and it would have been his fault for insisting they go it alone. He cast a worried look in her direction. “Can you hold this?” he said, holding out the flashlight to her. “Desi?”
She took it from him without a word, turned it on and pointed it at the ground. That’s when Lane saw her face in the glow from the light. Taking hold of her hand, he directed it towards her face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”
She had a bruise on her cheekbone the size of a fist.
Lane got busy and added more rocks to the fire ring he’d made that morning, making it larger.
Desi raised a shoulder and shook her head slightly. “I didn’t know...”
“There’s no swelling but it’s going to hurt like hell come tomorrow I imagine.”
“Hopefully not,” she groaned, her teeth chattering. “I’m a hurting unit already.”
Tossing logs into the ring, he added a receipt and takeout napkins from a fast-food place he found in the saddle bag then lit them with matches from the survival kit. Within a few minutes the fire was going strong. Lane found the perfect branch to suspend the pot from to boil some water, ripping it off the tree, he shoved it into the ground and hung the pot from it’s handle. Pouring a bottle of water into it, he turned the branch so that the pot hung above the flames. He didn’t know about Desi, but he was starving.
“Here, eat this.” He handed her some beef jerky and a pack of trail mix, along with a bottle of water. Turning, he dug into the kit to see exactly what he’d packed inside months ago.
Desi ripped open the jerky and started gnawing on it like a dog on a bone. “You know what I find strange?”
Lane glanced at her. “What?”
She motioned a hand towards the kit and said, “How prepared you are...like did you pack all of this up last night before you woke me?”
He chuckled. “No. Some of the food in the backpack, yes. Everything else, including this,” he pointed to the kit. “I packed when I made plans to travel after the wedding.”
