And there was the multi-tool in the sand close by! Oh, thank God.
It was time to stand up, get going. Wobbling slightly, he got to his feet. He was so hot.
Okay. Now what?
For a long time, Julian wandered through the desert wilderness, the untrammeled rattlesnake weed and poison hemlock, through the low-lying, burned-out coyote bush. He was desperately thirsty. He should’ve drunk from the river when he’d had the chance. He stopped walking.
What river?
He peered into the hazy distance for a few minutes. He must have imagined it when he was trapped under the rocks, a mirage of water for men lost in the desert. He distinctly remembered dipping his feet into a stream, but his socks and boots weren’t wet. They weren’t even damp.
Julian kept circling what looked like the same pair of cacti, the same eucalyptus, kept doubling back, tripling back, over this hill and the next, toward the sun, away from the sun. Nothing made any difference. In every direction, it was the same sparse foliage, the same low shrubland. He found a spray of pink live-forevers, a wildflower weed. It had succulent stems. In seconds he sucked out all the liquid inside them. It wasn’t nearly enough. He searched for more, but there weren’t any.
He found a rotting sheep carcass. He stuck his multi-tool inside and maggots exploded out. He thought blood would drain from his body through the hole in his head. Revulsed, he vomited up the bile in his gut. His head wound bled anew.
His mind wasn’t focusing on the terrain because it was anxiously trying to remember something. Something about ice or mountains or both or death. Was it ice and death? He was supposed to know something, maybe about a coming avalanche? Tell someone something.
He sucked the salt from his dirty hands, and then looked at his right hand and thought, wait, I have all my fingers?
It must be heat stroke. Under the brutal sun, for a moment Julian thought he wasn’t supposed to have all his fingers.
He was dying of thirst. Literally dying.
Julian tried to hold on to the tenuous thread of landslide memory, he really tried. But life took over.
As he wandered in the heat and dust, he forgot the ice and the mountains; he forgot about someone else’s death, because his own was looming so near.
And soon Julian couldn’t even remember that he was supposed to remember.
He was having another problem, one that needed to be addressed immediately, or soon it would become his only problem, and then he wouldn’t have any. His head was hurting so bad, it was making him blind. The blood had dried but the skull felt so tender and swollen that Julian had a flashing worry that maybe it was more than just a cut, that maybe it was a more serious head injury. Like a fractured skull. He dismissed the thought. He couldn’t afford a more serious injury out here by himself in the open country.
Disoriented, he sat out his confusion on a boulder and played with the multi-tool, opening and closing all its instruments, trying to think. A straight-edge knife, a serrated blade, a saw, wire cutters, a bottle opener, a pair of scissors, a flathead, a Phillips, a flashlight, a pen, a titanium toothpick, a sewing needle. Thinking was difficult, the brain like midday concrete. To cool himself down, Julian cut off the legs of his pants and then flensed the cotton twill into long strips, tying the ends together to create one long rope. Did he need a rope? What if the head was throbbing because the brain was swelling? Could he have some intra-cranial bleeding, a hematoma maybe? If the pressure from the hemorrhage got to be too much, he would pass out. Maybe he could use the titanium toothpick to find his dura mater through the opening in his cracked skull, puncture the membrane, release some of the pressure on his brain.
Oh, God, he was having a sun stroke. To think he could perform brain surgery on himself.
Yet he had to do something.
His ears were ringing, his eye movement impaired. He couldn’t count down from a hundred and didn’t know not only where he was but where he was supposed to be. The rocks bashed his head in good. He couldn’t stand up. He tried to motivate himself with quotes from Muhammad Ali. The boxer hated every minute of training. But he forced himself not to quit. Suffer now, Ali said, and live the rest