Eighth Inning

A FEW MINUTES LATER, Trisha got up. She walked along the road another hour, until the dusk was thick around her. Off in the west, for the first time since the day she got lost, she could hear thunder rumbling. She would want to get in under the thickest clump of trees she could find, and if it rained hard enough she would still get wet. In her present mood Trisha hardly cared.

She stopped between the old wheelruts and was beginning to unshoulder her pack when she saw something ahead in the gloom. Something from the world of people; a thing with corners. She resettled her packstraps and crept toward the right side of the road, peering like a person who has grown nearsighted but is too vain to wear spectacles. In the west, thunder rumbled a little louder.

It was a truck, or the cab of one, rearing out of the matted undergrowth. Its hood was long and nearly buried in woods ivy. One wing of the hood had been flung up, and Trisha could see there was no engine inside; ferns grew where it had been. The cab was dark red with rust, tilted to one side. The windshield was long gone, but there was still a seat inside. Most of its upholstery had rotted away or been chewed away by small animals.

More thunder, and this time she could see lightning shiver inside the clouds, which were advancing rapidly and eating the first stars as they came.

Trisha broke off a branch, reached through the open space where the crank-out windshield had been, and beat at the seat's stuffing as briskly as she could. The quantity of dust which rose was amazing-it came drifting out through the windshield cavity and window-holes like mist. Even more amazing was the flood of chipmunks that came boiling up from the floorboards, squeaking and fleeing out through the lozenge-shaped rear window.

"Abandon ship!" Trisha cried. "We've hit an iceberg! Women and chipmunks fi-" She got a lungful of the dust. The resultant coughing fit wracked her until she sat down heavily with her beating-stick in her lap, gasping for a clear breath and half in a faint. She decided she wasn't going to spend the night in the cab of the truck after all. She wasn't afraid of a few leftover chipmunks, not even of snakes (if there were snakes in residence, she guessed the chipmunks would have moved out long since), but she didn't want to spend eight hours breathing dust and coughing herself blue. It would be great to sleep under an actual roof again, but that was too high a price to pay.

Trisha made her way through the bushes beside the truck cab and then a little way into the woods. She sat down under a good-sized spruce, ate some nuts, drank some water. She was getting low on food and drink again, but she was too tired to worry about that tonight. She had found a road, that was the important thing. It was old and unused, but it might take her somewhere. Of course it might also peter out as the streams had, but she wouldn't think about that now. For now she would allow herself to hope the road would take her where the streams had not.

That night was hot and close, the humid edge of New England's short but sometimes fierce summer. Trisha fanned the neck of her grimy shirt against her grimy neck, stuck out her lower lip and blew hair off her forehead, then resettled her hat and lay back against her pack. She thought of digging out her Walkman and decided not to. If she tried listening to a West Coast game tonight, she'd fall asleep for sure and trash whatever was left of the batteries.

She reclined further, turning the pack into a pillow, feeling something which had been so solidly gone that its return seemed miraculous: simple contentment. "Thanks, God," she said. In three minutes she was asleep.

She woke up perhaps two hours later, when the first cold drops of a drenching thundershower found their way through the forest's overlacing and landed on her face. Then thunder cracked the world open and she sat up, gasping. The trees were creaking and groaning in a strong wind, almost a gale, and sudden lightning flashed them into stark news-photo relief.

Trisha struggled to her feet, brushing her hair out of her eyes and then cringing as more thunder banged. . . except it was more of a whipcrack than a bang. The storm was almost directly overhead. She would shortly be drenched, trees or no trees. She grabbed up her pack and blundered back toward the dark, tilted hulk of the truck's cab. Three steps and she stopped, gasping in the wet air and then coughing it out, hardly feeling the leaves and small branches that spanked her neck and arms in the gusty wind. Somewhere in the forest a tree fell over with a rending, splintering crack.

It was here, and very close.

The wind changed direction, spattering her with a faceful of rain, and now she could actually smell it-some rank wild odor that made her think of cages at the zoo. Except the thing out there wasn't in a cage.

Trisha began moving toward the truck cab again, holding one hand up before her to ward off whipping branches and the other clapped to the top of her Red Sox cap to keep it on. Thorns tore at her ankles and calves, and when she came out of the sheltering woods to the edge of her road (so she thought of it, as her road), she was instantly drenched.

As she reached the driver's door of the cab, which hung open with vines twisting in and out through its socket of window, lightning flashed again, painting the whole world purple. In its glare Trisha saw something with slumped shoulders standing on the far side of the road, something with black eyes and great cocked ears like horns. Perhaps they were horns. It wasn't human; nor did she think it was animal. It was a god. It was her god, the wasp-god, standing there in the rain.

"NO!" she screamed, diving into the truck, unmindful of the dusty cloud that puffed up around her and the upholstery's rotting, ancient smell. "NO, GO AWAY! GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE!"

Thunder answered. Rain also answered, drumming down on the cab's rusty roof Trisha hid her head in her arms and rolled over on her side, coughing and shivering. She was still waiting for it to come when she fell asleep again.

This sleep was deep and-as far as she could remember-dreamless. When she awoke, full daylight had returned. It was hot and sunny, the trees seemingly greener than they had been the day before, the grass lusher, the birds twitting away in the depths of the woods more complacently happy. Water rustled and dripped from leaves and branches; when Trisha raised her head and looked out through the tilted glassless rectangle where the old truck's windshield had been, the first thing she saw was sunlight glaring from the surface of a puddle in one of the road's ruts. The glare was so brilliant that she raised a hand to her eyes, squinting. The afterimage hung in front of her even when the real thing was gone: reflected sky, first blue, then a fading green.

The truck's cab had kept her quite dry despite its lack of glass. There was a puddle on the floor around the ancient control pedals and her left arm had gotten wet, but that was pretty much it. If she had coughed in her sleep, it hadn't been hard enough to wake her up. Her throat felt a little raw and her sinuses were plugged, but those things might improve once she got out of the damned dust.

It was here last night, You saw it.

But had she? Had she really?

It came for you, it meant to take you. Then you climbed into the truck and it decided not to, after all, I don't know why, but that's what happened,

Maybe not, though. Maybe the whole thing had just been the sort of dream you could have when you were halfawake and half-asleep at the same time. Something brought on by waking up to a full-fledged thunderstorm, with lightning flashing and the wind blowing a gale. A situation like that, anyone might see stuff.

Trisha grabbed her pack by one slightly frayed strap and wriggled backward through the driver's side doorhole, raising more dust and trying not to breathe it in. When she was out, she stepped away (still wet, the cab's rusty-red surface had darkened to the color of plums) and started to put her pack on. Then she stopped. The day was bright and warm, the rain was over, she had a road to follow ... but all at once she felt old and tired and zero at the bone. People could imagine things when they woke up suddenly, especially when they woke up at the height of a thunderstorm. Of course they could. But she wasn't imagining what she was seeing now.

While she slept something had dug a circle through the leaves and needles and underbrush surrounding the abandoned truck cab. It was perfectly clear in the morning light, a curving line of wet black earth in the greenery. Bushes and small trees which had been in the way had been torn out by the roots and thrown aside in broken pieces. The God of the Lost had come and drawn a circle around her as if to say, Stay clear-she is mine, she is my property.