Heather Brown - Hitchhike wife

"No, no," I sobbed, "I can't go back! I just can't do it!"

I dropped to the ground, throwing the gun aside and beating the sand with my fists.

But when my tantrum was over, I was still in the same place, just as hot and miserable and lost as ever. Turning east again, I crawled forward, dragging the gun along behind me.

If I hadn't had the liquid from the waterhole and Prospectin' Charlie's cum, I'd have perished before the day was out. As it was, I was still moving forward by the time the sun went down. As darkness fell, I gave in to fatigue for the second time in twenty-four hours on the desert, sleeping once again in a bed of binding sand. This time there were no dreams, just the bleary fog of exhaustion.

I don't know how long I slept, but when I awoke, it was still dark. Night in the desert was even spookier than the daytime. You could see forever in the dark sky. The universe seemed expanded by a billion times when I saw it in the clear desert air, the black sky infinitely dotted by twinkling stars.

I lay on my back, looking up at the sky, trying to decide what to do next. The stars were mesmerizing, their attraction constantly riddling my thoughts so I got nowhere with my plans.

Finally, trying to force myself to think, I sat up and shook my head, pressing my fingers to function, but with no answers forthcoming, I was distracted again. This time it was the meeting of the horizon and the sky that caught my attention and held it.

Right at the point where the sand ended there were a pair of lights, twin stars hanging low in the sky. There were millions of stars in the sky, but these two were somehow different. Not only were they hugging the horizon, they seemed closer to earth than the others. Was it my imagination, or were they slowly but surely growing larger?

I turned away, trying not to be hypnotized through useless star-gazing. When no rational thought came, and I gave in to my curiosity and looked back, the twin stars seemed bigger than ever.

I shook my head trying to deny the apparent phenomenon. But when I looked once more, the two stars were even bigger.

Yes, I wasn't imagining it, they were getting bigger. The thought seized me that they were meteors, burning through space towards me. I'd wind up as ashes at the bottom of a crater. Some scientist would wind up looking at me through a microscope.

Scooting across the sand like a sand crab, I tried to avoid the apparent path of the racing stars. But wherever I threw myself, they were always heading straight at me. Finally I just gave up and lay in a heap, sobbing, "No, no, this can't be happening to me!" my rationality shot to pieces.

I don't know how long it took for the tears to stop. Like everything wpt my crying made the sand stick to me, and eventually I had to sit up and wipe my face off. As I did so, I couldn't help but see the twin stars gleaming in front of me, the biggest things in the sky.

But after a couple of minutes of continuous staring, I saw that they weren't in the sky at all! They were halfway down the horizon. Moving in a straight line across the sand.

They were the headlights of a car. I'd found the highway!

My hope renewing my energy, I clambered to my feet and used the shotgun to help me poke my way through the sand towards the direction of the advancing headlights. The highway turned out to be not more than fifty feet from where I'd been lying, invisible in the darkness. I'd have noticed it before, but there was no traffic at all. The headlights I saw must have belonged to the first car passing by in hours.

As the car got closer, suddenly panic hit me. How would the driver see me in the pitch black? He was probably going at least eighty or ninety miles an hour. He wouldn't notice me at all. If I ran out in front of him, he'd just run over me.

I propped myself up wearily on the shotgun and thought about what to do. Then, as my hand slipped from the stock onto the cool metal of the barrel, it came to me. The gun. I'd stop him by shooting one of his tires out. And pray he had a spare.

I dropped to the sand, lying at an angle from the road so the illumination of the advancing headlights would give me a brief light for my target. I figured I'd only get one shot, and it would have to be at close range because I was firing a shotgun.

Now the headlights were growing perceptibly by the second. When I'd first seen them, they must have been miles and miles away, visible from the horizon in the unpolluted desert sky. I could hear the whine of the engine. The dimensions of the car started to form. I could see a white top.

I cocked the hammer and trained the barrel towards the path of my growing target. Just when I could see the outline of the head of the driver and a passenger, the tires became visible below.

The barrel twitched in front of me as I squeezed the trigger. The night suddenly filled with the explosion of escaping buckshot.

I expected to hear the blam of a ruptured tire. But, instead, the air filled with the curdling screech of rubber skidding against the pavement. I saw the car swerving all over the road and shrieked, "Oh, my God, I've killed somebody!"

I expected the car to roll over and erupt into flames. Instead, it suddenly came to a squealing stop and doors slammed.

While I was still trying to figure out what was happening, another explosion filled the air and something whistled over my head. I screamed as I realized that it was another gunshot. Whoever had been driving the car was still alive and was answering my fire.

"All right, this is the Highway Patrol," a hard voice called across the sand. "Throw down your gun and come out. We know you're out there. You'll never get away. Tomorrow we'll be combing this area with helicopters."

I was frozen with fright. No matter what I did, it would be viewed as being wrong. If I took a false step, I'd probably be shot, and there didn't seem to be anything available but false steps.

The way it turned out, I didn't have time to make any decisions, which probably saved my life. If I had been anything but paralyzed and had moved a muscle, I might have been filled full of holes. As it was, the Highway Patrolman sneaking around in back of me didn't have an excuse to drill me and just shoved the cold nose of his revolver into one of my kidneys, telling me to drop the shotgun if I wanted to live.

"Well, well, Honeycutt," he called to the other one up on the road as he marched me towards the highway, "lookee what we got here. A Goddamn naked sniper." Then he leaned forward, jabbing the gun in farther, whispering hotly in my ear, "Tell me, little girl, how come you don't like the Highway Patrol? We're your friends. Seems like you went to a lot of trouble to come out here in the desert and try and kill us when the cities are crawling with regular cops you couldn't miss. Now what you got against us Smokies?"

By the time he'd prodded me to the road, I saw how dumb I'd been. If I'd waited just a second more, I surely would have seen that the white top of the car was coordinated with the tell-tale black bottom of a state patrol car, and that the occupants were wearing Smoky the Bear hats.

On the top of the patrol car the dome light was now swirling bluely. The gold badge painted on the side door glimmered eerily in the glowing light from above. Next to the car a tall Highway Patrolman stood gawking with a smoking pistol in his hand.

"Jesus Christ, Lambert," he said, "you didn't tell me it was a naked sniper with tits and a pussy. This must be a fuckin' mirage."

"Down, boy, down," the one behind me said to his partner. "Mirages are only in the daytime. Tits and pussy or not, this little bitch just tried to blow us sky-high. Now keep your dick down and help me frisk her."

"With pleasure," he said, holstering his gun and rubbing his hands together. "No telling what she might have hidden in the nooks and crannies of a body like that. A broad's body's got a lot of places to hide things."