by Linda Warren
Great, now she was hearing voices. More specifically, Monica’s voice.
That was all she needed, to get heatstroke out here, Kim thought in exasperation. Next, she would start hallucinating.
Damn it, she should have held out. There had to be some other story on Stan’s docket, something she could have worked on that was a lot closer to home than this. Union-Post Publishing owned a theater magazine, didn’t it? Stan could have easily sent her to do some puff piece on the new theater season that was coming next fall. Anything other than this Sagebrush Cowboys Save Troubled Teens thing he wanted her to write.
With every passing minute, she grew more irritable.
She should have stood her ground and dug in. Now it was too late and she was stuck out here. Stuck going to some stupid town called Farewell, or Forever, or Four Miles From Nowhere—
Kim’s eyes widened as she stared at the small rectangular screen on the dashboard that had, until a moment ago, been her GPS monitoring unit.
Except now it wasn’t.
It wasn’t anything.
The screen had gone blank. Desperate, Kim hit the blank screen with the heel of her hand, trying to make it come around. It remained blank.
That was what she got for renting a compact car, she upbraided herself.
Trying to figure out what to do, she pulled the car over to the side of the road—although if she just kept on going, what was the difference? she asked herself. It wasn’t as if she’d hit anything. There was nothing for her to hit in either direction, not even a rabbit, or snail, or whatever animals they had out here in the forgotten desert.
With the car idling, Kim shifted in her seat and pulled her purse back onto the passenger seat. Her purse had lunged onto the floor when she’d pulled over a bit too suddenly, spilling, she now saw, its entire contents onto the floor of the car. Everything was in a jumbled heap.
Swallowing a curse, she pulled it all together and deposited it back into her purse—all except for her cell phone. That she took and opened. She swiped past a couple of screens until she found the GPS app that had come preinstalled on her phone.
Despite the fact that she’d lived her entire life in San Francisco, she still managed to get lost on a fairly regular basis and she had come to rely rather heavily on her phone’s GPS feature.
A feature which wasn’t pulling up, Kim noticed angrily as she stabbed over and over again at the small square image on her phone. When the image finally did enlarge, the words below it irritatingly informed her that it couldn’t find a data connection and thus, the very sophisticated feature on her phone containing all the latest bells and whistles wasn’t about to ring any of its bells or blow any of its whistles, at least not now. Not until its lost signal was suddenly restored.
“Damn it, I really am in hell,” Kim declared, looking around.
There were absolutely no signs posted anywhere to tell her if she was going in the right direction or even if she was going around in circles. For all she knew, she wasn’t even in Texas anymore.
The dirt road was too dry and hard to have registered her tire tracks, so she had no idea if she had traveled this way before.
“I could be going around in circles until I die from dehydration out here, and nobody’d know the difference—not even me,” she lamented.
Why had she ever said yes to this horrible assignment?
For two cents, she’d turn around and go back—except that she had no idea if turning around actually meant that she was going back. Maybe if she turned around, she would eventually wind up driving into this town she didn’t want to go to?
Damn it, she was confusing herself.
Feeling panicky, Kim looked around the interior of the pristine vehicle to see if there was anything packed in one of the side pockets that could help her.
After foraging around, she discovered an old folded map tucked into the side of the rear passenger door, but when she opened it, she found that the map did her no good. A product of the digital age, she had absolutely no idea how to actually read a map.
She was going to die out here, Kim thought, tossing the map aside. She was going to die out here and most likely, no one would ever even find her body.
She still stubbornly didn’t regret not going to her parents for money. If she had to die, she would die rebellious and proud.
What did it feel like, she wondered, baking to death inside a low-end economy car? Maybe she should have rented something more high-end, like a Mercedes or a Jaguar. If it was going to wind up being her casket, then maybe—
A flash of something on the hill in the distance caught her eye.
Kim sat up, trying to focus as a glimmer of hope surfaced.
Was that a hallucination, or—?
Copyright © 2015 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
ISBN-13: 9781460388471
Texas Rebels: Quincy
Copyright © 2015 by Linda Warren
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