My Short Story - Lost in the Desert
Word Count: 2661
This came from a dream of mine I had while I was married.
“Where the hell is my husband?”
“He’s still on the helicopter ride, Ma’am,” the snotty little blonde replied. It was a lie though. For one, helicopter rides do not last more than thirty minutes… an hour tops. It had been two hours. For another, I did a circle around the property looking in each direction, waiting for any type of sound from them in the last hour. Nothing! And I told this blonde bitch as much.
“I want my husband now, if you can’t get him here, you take me to him,” and she scurried off, I presumed, to find out the answer. Although, I was being a bitch, so she could be trying to escape my wrath.
The reason I wasn’t with him, was because I didn’t do helicopters. They were scary and bumpy, and I preferred the solid ground. I went on one on our honeymoon in Hawaii, and it was gorgeous, at least what you could see through the scratched and foggy windows. But the chopper felt like it was going to fall out of the sky the entire time, and I spent the entire time on it thinking, here I was on my honeymoon and I’m going to die before I can even enjoy it! Yeah, it was definitely not fun.
My husband, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. Which is why we were here, he wanted to see the desert of Arizona from above. I told him to find a place that offered rides and he could go up. We were on our way to Colorado for a vacation, but decided to side trip it to Arizona, because we both always wanted to see the desert. But the moment we came into this building I got the strangest feeling. I tried to talk him out of it, the people looked sketchy, but he wouldn’t listen. He just told me I was being too superstitious. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t? But these people scared me to my very bones. I watched as the woman walked towards me from a back office somewhere.
“Ma’am, we’ve spoken to the pilot, they should be back within twenty minutes.” I nodded then walked outside.
The building looked like an old used car lot, with lots of windows that spanned the length of it. It was on a patch of dry desert, located right off the highway. There weren’t even paved parking lots, just sand, which is probably why the car lot wasn’t there anymore. Or it could be the fact that this wasn’t the main highway through Arizona, and traffic was nonexistent. Either way, I never heard one car the entire time I was out here. It was like we were in the Bermuda Triangle or something, or an episode of The Twilight Zone. I could almost hear the announcer of the show say “They turned down the wrong highway into another dimension, and now were stuck, in The Twilight Zone”. I smacked my forehead. Maybe I was being superstitious; I just couldn’t shake that nagging feeling in the back of my head.
I paced up and down the street for thirty minutes, waiting for the sound of the helicopter blades as it neared, but there was nothing. No sound but the wind whipping the sand around my feet. I walked a beeline straight to the woman again, raised my eyebrows and placed my hands on my hips.
“What’s your excuse this time?”
“Ma’am, the pilot just called us back, he had to set down, there is a cut in his fuel line. I am driving out there with more fuel and a repair kit, would you like to come with me? It is about two miles out in the hot desert, but seeing as you’re impatiently waiting for your husband, I’ll take you out there and then bring the both of you back, if you’d like?” She said impatiently with as much disdain as she could muster.
“I’d like,” I respond equally sarcastic.
So I patiently waited as she grabbed her supplies and we headed out in a jeep. It wasn’t the comfiest of rides, quite bumpy in fact. The jeep was your basic Army style jeep, with no top, and completely open to the elements. In fact, it had nothing in the way of amenities. No radio or air conditioning to speak of. It was completely stripped and bare. I tried to concentrate on the direction we were headed, as well as where we just came from. I was never good at directions, so I had to pay special attention.
“Do you know where they are?”
“Yes, I have a GPS locator on them,” was her short and snarky response, and I wouldn’t have asked anything else for the rest of the ride, had the jeep’s engine decided not to sputter and die.
“What now?” At this point, I was getting really perturbed, and my superstitions stepped it up a notch.
“Oh, we are always having problems with this jeep,” she looked at her GPS device and stared out in their supposed general direction. “They are just about a mile up the way, you stay here and I’ll go deliver the stuff and head back with your husband, ok?”
“Why don’t I go with you?” I asked, not trusting this woman.
“Oh it’s ok, this happens all the time. Plus, the terrain is really rocky; if somebody got hurt it would just make things worse.”
“Should we call somebody?”
“Cell phones don’t work out here, there are no cell towers. But they are only about a mile out, right on the other side of that hill. I’ll be there and back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
So I sat there and waited. How long did it take a person to walk two miles? It couldn’t take more than an hour at the most. So I sat in the jeep, the sun beating down on me, and tried to patiently wait. It felt like about an hour later, so I pulled out my phone and looked at the time. Sure enough, it was. I tried to get a signal, but my phone just beeped at me as the call failed and ended. I decided to wait a little bit more. Thankfully I brought some water with me, and I sipped on that slowly. There was no telling how long I was going to be out here.
After another thirty minutes I decided to make the trek up the hill and see if I could spot the helicopter. I reached the top of the hill and peered out. It was nothing but flatland, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing except sand and cactus, for miles. There was no helicopter, and she was gone. She couldn’t have made it all the way across that in just the short time she’d been gone. Something was up, and I was determined to find out what.
I walked back to the jeep, grabbed my water bottle, and started walking towards the office building. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of miles, so I paced myself. The midday heat was dry thankfully, not like the moist heat in Florida, at least I could breathe in this. However, it was still summer, and at least a hundred degrees. I walked past so many different types of cactus, some I had never seen before. The only cactus we have in Florida is what you’d buy at maybe a Home Depot or Wal-Mart. Little potted cactus that had flowers on them. I never really understood how a person could think these were all that pretty. And as I walked past them now, trying to avoid getting pricked by one, I acquired a healthy hatred for them. Considering that some were actually poisonous, and I didn’t know which ones were, I tried my best to stay several feet away from them.
I could see the building in the horizon and quickened my pace. I was so glad that I paid attention to the direction of the sun and the landmarks as we were driving out. As I came upon the back of the building I heard nothing and wondered why it was so quiet. When I made my way around to the front of the building, I noticed all the cars were gone. They must have gone to lunch or something. So I walked to the front door and tried to pull it open. Locked, but how could that be. I peered into the window and saw that everything was gone. Every couch, chair, desk, all of it was gone.
“That’s impossible!” It just couldn’t be. This kind of setup only happens in movies, it didn’t happen in real life, did it? I tried knocking on the door, just in case somebody was inside, to no avail. I looked around for anything that I could use to break the window. I found a rock and hefted it in my hand. It was about a pound, so hopefully it would work. I chucked it at the large window that spanned from the ceiling to the floor, and watched as it shattered into thousands of shards. Thankfully, I did play a little baseball when I was younger, and I was happy with my toss. I gently stepped through the broken window, after I had made sure all the large pieces had fallen to the ground. My shoes crunched on the chunks of glass, and I gingerly walked over them. I looked around the completely desolate building, only to find that every piece of decoration, every potted plant and every painting on the wall, all of the décor that had been there several hours ago, was gone. It was completely barren, just like this horrible desert.
I wiped the sweat from my brow and took another sip from my water bottle. The water was almost gone, so I figured I could refill it in the bathroom. I walked into the bathroom and quickly made my way to the sink. I was looking forward to running some cool water over my head and down my body. But unfortunately my luck would run out, for as I turned the knobs nothing but air came out. Unbelievable! What on earth did we do to these people? We were just two nobodies on a vacation that we couldn’t afford, what on earth could we offer to these people?
If it was city water I could have found the switch and turned it back on, but unfortunately it was in the middle of a wasteland, so I was pretty sure the water supply came from a well, and I had no clue how to work that. I grew up in suburbia; I wouldn’t even know what to look for, or where to find it. So I tried looking for a kitchen or refrigerator somewhere. I found the kitchen, but the refrigerator was completely empty. I remembered that we had some water in the car, and I fumbled in my pocket for the keys.
I didn’t want to leave the immediate area, just in case my husband came back, but I was getting scared and I needed to find help. So I popped the trunk of the car, grabbed a bottle of water, sat in the front seat, and drank half the bottle in one gulp. This desert air was drying me out, and I needed to find my husband and get the hell out of here. I turned the ignition, and it didn’t even make a sound. The battery was completely dead. I knew that was impossible, we had just bought the battery before the trip, because we didn’t want to take a chance. So as I popped the hood, I look down to find the battery completely gone.
How was that even possible? I had the keys the entire time. This went from accidental, to probable, to definite in a matter of seconds. I tried to give the benefit of the doubt, even after I found the building completely vacant, but now I knew without a doubt that this was a set up, and both my husband and I, were in trouble.
I had left my purse in the car before going out on the jeep, and so I grabbed it from the car, dumped out everything I didn’t need, and filled it with the remaining few bottles of water. I had a feeling I was going to need it. I chugged the last half of my bottle and threw it into the car, grabbed another full one from the back, and closed everything up and locked the doors. I looked both ways down the highway and figured I better walk back the way we came from. There had to be cell towers out here somewhere, I just needed to find one. And so I started walking.
I lost track of time. I didn’t know how long I was walking, but the sun had gone down and been down for awhile. Every so often I would pull out my cell to check for a connection, but it was futile, and I had no choice but to continue walking. By the next morning I had gone through over half of my water supply, and was nowhere near a tower, and no closer to finding my husband.
I was starting to get desperate. My lips were cracked and bleeding and blisters had already formed in between my toes and on the bottoms of my feet. Every step was filled with pain, and elicited moans from my mouth. After the sun came up it steadily grew worse. Sweat caked my body, and I was well past the beginning stages of hyperthermia. The fatigue, cramps, and exhaustion started several hours ago, and the heat was only going to intensify it. I tried to ration my water, but I was so thirsty I ended up gulping the last bottle. If I didn’t get help soon, I was going to heat stroke. That was not a pleasant way to die. I had already experienced heat exhaustion several times in my life, and so I knew the warning signs.
I continued to walk down the asphalt, what choice did I have? The sun rose higher and the heat spiked. I walked until I could walk no more. As I fell to my knees, the last thought on my mind, was how much I loved my husband. I landed against the pavement, face plastered to the blistering tar blacktop, and with that I fell into the abyss.
I later learned that if I had just walked the other way, there was a gas station about five miles up the road that could have called the police for me. But it wouldn’t have mattered, my husband was already dead. As I lay in the hospital, the Sheriff’s Deputy explained how he found me, and where he found my husband’s body, he did his best to convey his sorrow. The people were gone, no trace of them left, and the police and FBI were completely baffled. They couldn’t explain what happened, and only told me that I was lucky to have survived. I didn’t feel lucky.
After they left the hospital room, I grabbed a syringe that the nurse had left on the bedside table. She forgot something and went to retrieve it, and I took the opportunity to fill the syringe with air and shove it into the IV. It wasn’t going to be a nice death. I imagined an air embolism would be quite painful, but the will in me to live without my husband, was gone. I would not live without him. So as the pain wracks my body and I start to lose consciousness, I realize that the Deputy was wrong. The body that they had recovered was not that of my husband, because my husband came into the room the exact second that my heart faltered.
