ISABELLA YANKS HARD on the snake, tearing its fangs out of her arm. She flings its body against the rocky ground with a smack. She grabs the stone she used to kill it and begins bashing the creature’s head with all her remaining strength.
She realizes she’s screaming.
In anger.
In pain.
In defiance of the fact that she knows she’s going to die.
When the snake’s skull is no more than a bloody pancake, she hurls the rock out into the canyon and sobs into her hands. She examines the bite marks in her forearm, two red punctures the size of pencil lead, with the flesh swelling around them.
Already she can feel the effects of the poison. Nausea rolls through her body in waves. Her breathing shallows. She blinks her eyes, her vision suddenly blurry.
The sun is setting, filling the western horizon with an orange glow. She wants to simply lie down next to the water and close her eyes.
Let death take her.
No, she thinks. I will fight to the end.
She doesn’t bother trying to eat the snake. That would waste too much time. Instead, she resumes her days-long crawl downstream. The creek has been flowing through a sandstone canyon, with the land only now beginning to flatten out. In the falling darkness, the desert air cools her feverish skin. A numbness overtakes her pained limbs. The earth underneath her keeps tilting with vertigo, threatening to dump her sideways.
But she pushes on.
Time slips by in a blur.
She wonders if she’s already dead. Is this the afterlife? Crawling through a dark desert for all eternity. She collapses onto her back and stares at the stars spinning above her in a whirlpool.
Go ahead, Death. I’m ready.
She blinks her eyes and the sky turns bluish—she’s lived to see another sunrise. But she knows it will be her last. Her labored breathing drowns out the only other sound, the faint trickle of water.
She thinks she hears a vehicle on a road but knows her mind must be playing tricks on her. When she hears it again, she rolls onto her stomach and pushes herself up to look around. The sun is rising, filling the landscape with light. A blurry boxy shape glides across the horizon, glinting in the sunlight.
“Help!” she screams. “Help me!”
The car keeps on going. Out of sight.
She hobbles forward. She retches, although nothing comes up.
The road is too far. She focuses on a boulder ten feet away. Just make it to that rock, she tells herself. Then when she gets there, she picks out a cluster of cacti as her new goal. Then a yucca plant. Piece by piece, she chips away at the distance.
Until finally she spots the raised berm of a roadway and a corrugated metal cylinder carrying the stream underneath.
Just make it there, she tells herself. And when she does, she crawls onto the warm blacktop and lies on her back on the center yellow line. Overhead, a hawk circles.
She closes her eyes. She has no fight left.
Screeching brakes pull her from unconsciousness.
“Oh, my God,” a woman says. “Is that the missing Indian girl from the news?”
A man dribbles water into her mouth. Isabella coughs it up. Then gulps more.
“Not too much,” he says. “You don’t want to throw up.”
Time slips forward and other cars have stopped. Paramedics are there. A police officer.
As strong arms lift her onto a stretcher, a cop asks, “What happened? Where have you been?” The voice urges her that if someone abducted her, the more she could tell them right now, the more likely they would be able to find the person responsible.
“They did this to me,” Isabella mutters, barely audible.
“What?”
“I can’t believe they did this to me,” she says, and begins to sob.
“Who?” the cop asks.
“You don’t know?” she says, looking at the cop’s confused expression.
The officer’s hand is poised over a notebook, ready to write down whatever she tells him.
But Isabella thinks of what she’s been through—and those responsible—and she decides in that moment to never speak of what happened.
Not to anyone.
No matter what.