Chapter 1

The first thing the young girl saw when she opened her eyes was a long line of the biggest ants she had ever seen parading past her prone form lying crumpled in a heap in a filthy but rock-free corner of an empty field right next to a ribbon of deserted black highway.

She had to blink a few times to get the blur out but her vision system seemed in good working order and other than an overall feeling of bruises not yet blossomed, she didn’t have any sharp pains in her head or torso and her extremities all seemed to be functioning as God intended.

It made her laugh at her own stupidity.

Her mind was like a blank blackboard but she remembered what ants were and that they were unwanted at picnics and she knew that all of creation was the work of God, but she couldn’t even remember who she was and what she was doing out in the desert with no socks and no shoes and an annoying broken nail. She did know she had a nail clipper in her purse, but there was no purse to be seen in any direction.

At least her panties were in place and she didn’t have any recollection of being interfered with by dangerous strangers. She didn’t know why the thought of dangerous strangers seemed to dominate her thinking process. It appeared to be a major concern with her and more important than even finding out who she was and what she was doing in this Godforsaken place out in the sticks.

Of course, the black strip of highway was far too hot to walk on barefoot and the thought of walking on the sharp little rocks and uneven ground all around her was a non-starter for her tender little toes. Fortunately, when she stood up, she noticed a wisp of smoke rising from a depression just off the road.

Sure enough, there was a wreck at the bottom.

Her heart was beating a bit faster as she sort of skidded and crawled down to the bottom.

The first thing she saw was the bodies of two overweight middle-aged men in the front seat. They had made the ultimate wrong decision to not use their seatbelts and had suffered the consequences.

The pretty young girl walked in a clockwise circle around the still smoking conveyance and noted that tilted up on one side, the two top wheels were still turning alerting her to the fact that the assumed accident had just recently happened. Most importantly, she didn’t recognize the car or the occupants and could only come to the obvious conclusion that she had been thrown from the thing when it flew erratically off the highway at a high speed. Two things hit her brain at the same time. The first was her extreme good fortune to still be alive and the other was that her shoes were sitting undisturbed in a cactus bush right next to the open rear door.

Once she had her shoes back on, the girl was thinking a lot more logically even though she still didn’t remember a single thing about what had happened in this isolated place suited for ants and snakes but not young girls in need of water.

Both of the bodies were beginning to smell bad but she searched their pockets and found two guns, a long thin, pointed knife, a pair of wallets with oodles of cash money and no identification. The second man had a ring with a shiny diamond and she slipped that into her skirt pocket because her shattered memory reminded her it was valuable and might come in handy if she needed money to stay out of trouble.

A woman’s purse was in the back seat and she made the assumption it was hers because there was a nail clipper in the bottom and an identification card with a terrible photo that informed her she was Patricia Smith of Portland, Oregon. Apparently, she was eighteen years old and didn’t have any moving violations against her name at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The address was a Post Office Box and she knew instinctively it probably was not in current use.

She had to use the crowbar to force the trunk open because the key had snapped off in the ignition when the accident threw both men into the dashboard with fatal force. All she could think about was that she didn’t feel like a “Patricia” at all and that she hoped there was a suitcase or more information inside the trunk to tell her who she was and what she was doing driving around with a couple of goons that were about as ugly as a guy could possibly get in their pre-accident condition.

There was no suitcase and the trunk was stuffed with a combination of pornographic videos and erotic books that seemed to use the word “fuck” in almost every sentence. She looked at the faces on the videos dreading the possibility her face would stare back at her in guilty shame. Thankfully, she didn’t see her face anywhere and she gave up the fruitless search knowing her concerns should be on finding water and not on other matters.

It only took “Patricia” slightly less than an hour to come to the conclusion that her best course of action was to continue walking down on the side the road hoping to find water for her parched throat. There had been absolutely no traffic for the entire hour and she was anxious to get away from the scene of the accident thinking that she might be blamed for the entire affair and she had not the slightest inkling about how to explain the circumstances. Before she left the scene, she took time to hide the guns, the knife, the wallets minus the cash, and the videos and books inside an animal’s little cave like den and blocked the entrance with rocks that looked almost natural in their resting place. It was an instinctive move and one that she could not explain even to herself walking gingerly on her shoes made more for attracting male attention than striding down a dusty highway in the glare of the midday sun.