Chloe was hit with several more dizzy spells, forcing her to stop and rest several times. Donovan stumbled twice, almost falling, and scaring her half to death. She was so afraid he was going to further hurt his leg, shatter the cracked bone so that it pierced the skin or caused him some permanent disability. Both times he managed to catch himself with his crutch.
Her steps slowed to a near-crawl, and she suspected she couldn’t walk a straight line in a sobriety test. The world was doing funny things around her, the lines waving, merging, creating a surreal landscape straight out of a Dali painting. She wasn’t hallucinating—exactly—but she wasn’t exactly coherent, either. She hoped it was a good sign that she was aware of her condition.
“We’re going to have to stop,” Donovan said, sliding his left arm around her. “You can’t go any farther.”
“I can keep going,” she said, staring fiercely at the road ahead.
“Not without collapsing. Come on, we can sit beneath that big tree if it isn’t too muddy.”
She shook her head, irrationally afraid that if she sat down she wouldn’t get up again. “We have to keep walking or we won’t get out.”
“We’ll get out, Chloe.” His voice was unusually gentle. “You just need to rest a little while. And so do I, okay?”
“What time is it?” she asked as he led her toward the tree he’d indicated.
“I don’t know. It’s so cloudy it’s hard to tell. It was about seven when we started walking, and th
e rainstorm lasted maybe an hour—it’s probably around noon.”
“It feels later. Do you think it’s going to rain again?”
He glanced at the sky before turning to help her sit down on the damp moss beneath the tree. “Probably. There were predictions for a lot of rain this week.”
“I know. Grace pointed it out to me several times, asking me how much fun I thought it would be to spend a week of vacation watching rain fall.”
“I’m sure you’d have found something more interesting to do than that.”
He’d kept his voice uninflected, but she bristled a little, anyway. Or she would have, if she hadn’t been so tired and so sick. “Bryan and I were going to talk,” she murmured, leaning her head back against the tree. “Just get to know each other better. That’s all there was to it.”
“You’d have had a nice time. Bryan can be very good company.”
Donovan’s bland tone was starting to annoy her. She decided to let the conversation end before exhaustion and fever made her say something she might regret later.
He didn’t seem to be listening to her anyway.
After their awkward conversation, Donovan seemed impatient to start hiking again. He allowed only a short rest before he asked Chloe if she felt like moving on again. She didn’t, of course, but she struggled to her feet. Donovan believed they were close to rescue, and she had learned to trust his instincts.
The walk seemed to get harder as they pressed on. The ground grew progressively muddier and slipperier as the grass on the packed-dirt trail became sparser. Chloe hoped that meant the road had been used more in that area recently, which could mean they were getting closer to a populated area.
And then the rain began again, this time a slow, misty drizzle that was just heavy enough to make them soggy, chilled and uncomfortable.
Chloe had walked almost as far as she physically could when she heard Donovan growl something incomprehensible—something she was probably better off not asking him to clarify, judging by his tone. Looking forward, she saw what had upset him.
The torrential rains of the past two days had flooded a fast-running section of the stream, causing the roiling, tumbling water to completely cover the road ahead of them. The road had fallen off into a deep ditch dug by previous floods. In late summer, the stream was probably quite shallow here, just enough to give the ATV riders a good splash. Now it might as well have been a river blocking them from the other side of the road.
For several long, silent moments, Donovan stood unmoving, staring at the rushing water as if he could hardly believe he was really seeing it. And then he erupted in fury, slamming his walking stick to the ground and letting loose a string of colorful curses that made Chloe’s eyebrows rise.
So Donovan could lose his composure occasionally. She’d wondered about that. This latest setback was apparently the last straw for him.
She stepped in to soothe him before he hurt himself. “We’ll find a way around it,” she said, laying a hand on his arm.
“There is no way around it. Look at the bluffs we’d have to climb if we go upstream. Or the steep slopes we’d have to descend downstream. Why do you think this road runs where it does? It’s the only relatively level path.”
He’d spoken through clenched teeth, obviously trying to get himself back under control. “Then we’ll wade through it,” she suggested. “We’ll help each other across. It couldn’t be that deep.”
“It isn’t how deep it is, it’s how fast it’s moving. One misstep and we’d be swept downstream.”
“We could wait here, find a place to take shelter until the stream goes down some.”