just experienced.
Coherent thought seemed to have fled. I could only lie there, my brain repeating, Oh, my God, oh, my God, over and over again until the words didn’t have any meaning left.
A man’s voice then, soft and yet strong, echoed in my mind. Very good, Blake. I hoped you would be this responsive.
My eyes flared open, and I looked wildly around the room, trying to see who was speaking. But it remained empty. As far as I could tell, I was the only occupant.
“Who are you?” I demanded. My voice sounded harsh, rough. “Where am I?”
Your questions will be answered, but not tonight. Rest now.
And although the last thing on my mind should have been sleep, I closed my eyes. Darkness descended, and the room with its glowing ceiling and alien sex toys faded away.
“You all right, Blake?”
I untied the bandanna knotted around my neck and lifted it to blot some of the sweat on my forehead. A few feet away, Roger Clancy, my supervisor at the arboretum, leaned on a spade and shot me a look of some concern.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Not enough sleep, I guess — a friend of mine had sort of an emergency last night, and I had to run out to help her.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes,” I told him, because to say anything else would have only prompted more questions. “It was just a late night, and it’s a hot morning.”
Which was mostly the truth. It might have been only a little past ten, but temperatures had already hit almost ninety degrees, on their way to 105, maybe higher. Most of the time, the heat didn’t bother me too much, since I was used to working in it, but after getting only a few hours of sleep, I wasn’t exactly at my best.
To my relief, Roger didn’t push it. He was around thirty years older than I, in his mid-fifties, and he could handle the heat better than anyone I’d ever met. And since he was also extremely no nonsense, I knew he wouldn’t ask any more questions. My personal life was just that, and as long as it didn’t interfere with my work, he didn’t care what I did with it. Roger was a no-drama llama, and he expected the people who worked with him to be the same.
What I definitely wouldn’t tell him was that I honestly didn’t know what had happened to me the night before. Some sort of weird fainting spell, although in general, I was healthy as a horse and had never experienced even momentary dizziness, let alone the sort of episode that would leave me on the side of the road with my head against the steering wheel and absolutely no recollection of how I’d gotten there. I vaguely remembered having some kind of trouble with my truck, but I’d gotten out and walked around the vehicle, checking on the tires, and had found nothing wrong with it.
When I’d climbed back inside and turned on the engine, the clock on the dashboard told me it was nearly five in the morning. Had I really been parked on the side of Highway 60 for almost three hours? Wouldn’t someone have come along and seen the truck, stopped to make sure I was okay?
Apparently not, which was probably just as well. I’d tried to send Jessica a text, but I didn’t have any cell reception in the spot where I’d pulled over. Continuing to Tempe after so many hours had passed didn’t seem like a very good idea, so I’d turned around and gone home. Once I was safely inside my house, a barrage of texts hit my phone, all of them from Jessica, all of them increasingly frantic. At the end, though — a little after four — she’d sent a final text. Hope UR OK. Texting Skylar.
Not too surprising that Jess would reach out to Skylar when I went MIA. She was always rescuing stray animals and making batches of chicken soup for sick friends, and she was the only one in our group of friends besides me who hadn’t completely lost patience with Jessica.
At any rate, I knew I didn’t have to beat myself up too badly, since Jess was in safe hands. I texted her back, saying, Sorry. Car trouble & no reception. Glad you’re w/Skylar.
And after that, I’d gone to bed and slept for an entire hour before my alarm woke me up. No wonder I felt like utter hell.
Somehow, though, I survived the rest of