For Sale or Swap - Alyssa Brugman [49]
I could end up walking around in circles until I die of thirst. They'll never find me, she thought. Her bones would be discovered one day, years from now, by some random park ranger setting bandicoot traps.
'Mustn't panic,' she said, swallowing. Her mouth was so dry all of a sudden. The day was really warming up now. The cicadas were shrieking at full throttle. For a few seconds they all chirped in time, and it was so high-pitched and loud that it almost sounded like a low thrumming in the middle of her brain.
Shelby crashed through the bush, breathing heavily. A branch thwacked her in the mouth and she could taste the grittiness from the leaves. She closed her eyes and kept moving forwards, crossing her forearms in front of her face. Her shin hit an arching tree limb and it ached. She tried to step over the branch, but didn't lift her foot high enough and tripped. Her hand clipped a narrow eucalyptus trunk on the way down and it scraped some skin off her knuckles.
I'm panicking, she thought. She scrambled back to her feet and moved forward again, more carefully this time. She was so thirsty. Each breath sent hot dry air down her throat, and she felt as though it would crack like the clay bottom of a dry creek bed.
All she needed to do was keep heading downhill. At the bottom of the gully was the creek, and once she found that she would be able to follow it, or at least have a drink. Her mother had told her she shouldn't drink from it because it was full of industrial runoff and nasty bacteria, but Blue used to slurp it up all the time and he survived. Besides, she was sure that even nasty bacteria couldn't be as bad as this horrible parchedness.
Got to go downhill.
The undergrowth was so compact that it was hard to tell which way was down, but as she made her way through it, she sensed the slope beneath her feet.
She heard a buzzing motor again and stopped, cocking her head to the side. It sounded much closer this time and moving, so definitely a trail bike. She staggered faster towards the sound. She pushed through a particularly thick stretch of trees, with sappy-smelling needles, and on the other side she found herself on a trail – a proper, sandy, human trail.
She listened for a moment for the bike, and looked along the trail, but there was no sign of it. I imagined it, she thought. It was a noise mirage.
Shelby sat down to inspect the angry red welts and grazes up her arms. Some of the scratches had formed little beads of blood. None of them were too serious, but now that she was sitting still they started to sting. She rolled up the leg of her pants to examine her shin.
It had already turned a puffy grey-blue that would make an impressive bruise the next day.
She looked up and down the trail again. The gully was long, but it was finite, bordered on all sides by houses. If she followed a proper human trail then she would eventually end up on a street, or else in someone's back yard. She had been heading left for so long that it was probably the closest to civilisation, but it was also the furthest away from home. The idea of walking again made her feel exhausted.
Her eyes were sore and she rubbed them. She was so tired and all her muscles ached. When she got home she would stretch out in bed and sleep for the whole day, and half of tomorrow – right after she had eaten ten hot dogs, and drunk two litres of water in one go.
The trail bike burbled and blurted further down the hill. It's real after all, she thought. It seemed so close now that Shelby decided to see if it headed along this trail. If it didn't pass this way in five minutes then she would walk. Five minutes' rest sounded like heaven. She stretched her legs out in front of her. The back of her pants was caked in sand, and when she eventually stood up she would probably look like a schnitzel, but Shelby didn't care.
Five minutes passed, then ten, and just as she was about to get up and brush herself off she saw the bike approaching along the trail. When it was about ten metres away it