Shelter.
That was what I needed for now. Once the storm passed, I could deal with the next step.
As I began walking in search of someplace to ride out the storm, a thought occurred to me. It was probably stuff you only saw on TV, but I was desperate. I began tearing little pieces of fabric from my white T-shirt and sticking them on tree branches every twenty feet or so. By the time I found what appeared to be a large outcropping of rocks near a small stream, half of my T-shirt was gone. The rain had long since seeped through my clothing and the resulting chill started to feel like it was penetrating my very bones. The wind had also picked up in between the lightning and the thunder, so the rain felt like ice hitting my face and my eyes and ears started to hurt.
The panic I’d been trying so hard to stave off started to consume me. This had been one of my greatest fears about living on a ranch when I’d been a kid. I'd read stories of people getting lost in the woods and their remains being found days, months, even years later. Some had died of exposure, others of wild animal attacks. I'd never ventured far from the ranch unless I was with someone else, namely Xavier. And we hadn't done much more than go to a stretch of river just a few hundred yards from the house that I’d lived in.
I wanted to kick myself for being such a fool and allowing my emotions to overrule common sense.
The rocks didn't provide much shelter, except from the biting wind. It was at least something. I sat down against one of the larger boulders and wrapped my arms around myself after drawing my knees up to my chest. My hope was that I could keep some of my body warmth from dissipating completely. As the minutes passed and the remaining daylight disappeared, I took out my phone and held it against my chest. I had plenty of battery, but I knew that I still needed to conserve it, so running the flashlight constantly wasn't a good plan, even though that was exactly what I wanted to do.
I'd never been overly afraid of the dark, but being out in the dark during a dangerous storm in the Wyoming wilderness wasn't exactly the same as a darkened bedroom. I was glad when the rain began to lessen a bit and the thunder moved on, but that just meant I could start to hear the forest come alive with sounds I couldn't identify. I knew there were wolves, bears, and mountain lions in these woods, and that alone nearly had me climbing to my feet and trying to just outrun everything.
It was Xavier's voice that cut through the fear in my head. I didn't care why it was his voice I chose to hear. I just cared that I wasn't alone anymore.
Don't panic, Brooks.
I nodded as if he were actually before me saying the words. I took in deep breaths to try to calm myself and imagined how the man would have yelled at me for being foolish enough to just walk off into the woods completely unprepared. His anger would have come from a place of fear, of course. I sighed and had to remind myself that wouldn’t ever happen. The Xavier I'd known as a kid didn't exist… maybe he never really had.
The man I’d met a few days earlier didn't care if I lived or died. If anything, he'd be glad that I wasn't around anymore. Uncle Curtis, of course, would be devastated. My mother would blame herself. My father… yeah, no reason to go there.
As my body began to feel strangely warm again, I considered getting up and trying to make my way back down the mountain, but my body wouldn't respond to the new commands I was sending it. The rain had begun again and the thunder had returned, but strangely, I wasn't as afraid.
I was just really tired.
So I closed my eyes even though there was a tiny voice in my head telling me not to close my eyes. Xavier’s voice still.
The next time I became aware of myself, I was laughing.
"Tell me what's so funny, Brooks," I heard Xavier say.
I figured there was no harm in telling Dream Xavier what I'd been thinking. "You," I murmured. "Covered in pi." I giggled again and realized it probably wasn't okay for a grown man to be giggling, but it was what it was. I was probably dying; maybe I was dead already.
So what did it matter? If I wanted to giggle, I was going to giggle. "But not pie pie," I explained. I felt my body shifting and moving, but I didn't remember having gotten up. I still felt warm, so I guessed it was okay. And that ugly fear I'd been feeling before I’d fallen into this delicious dream state was gone. So there was that.