To the reader:
All sexually active characters are age eighteen or older.
Text length: 6000 words (approximately 10 book pages)
My buddy Craig couldn't get away from his family duties that Saturday evening, so I was out hunting jackrabbits alone in the sagebrush hills above my folks' farm. When I say 'above' I mean twenty miles north, up on the ridge, where if you went another twenty miles farther, you'd end up in another small, uninhabited, sagebrush valley on the far side of the ridge, like the valley where our farm had been eighty years ago during frontier times.
Not much happened up there on that ridge most of the time. In late spring some years, somebody ran sheep up there, but not this year. Mostly it was just dusty, dirt roads, sagebrush overgrowth, with maybe a coyote or two. When I say 'roads,' I mean two wheel-tracks with cheatgrass growing to oil-pan polishing height between. No gravel, no pavement, only dust and more dust. But, rabbits liked the area well enough to keep hunting them interesting.
I looked at my watch to see if time, along with the dusk, had gotten as late as I felt. Tired, and not many shots at rabbits, so the evening had been pretty much a bust so far. Another hour—hopefully with some better shooting luck—then I'd head home to get a decent night's sleep in prep for some studying tomorrow for one of my JC class' final exams.
Something flashed in my truck's headlights as the road nosed into a small wash; maybe a coyote? When I wrestled my vision back from the right side, I got a good look at the dirt track ahead. What was that? It looked like a discarded mattress lying cattywompus on the road's center hump, an old mattress, maybe with sheets wrapped around an old pillow or two. Well, some people did occasionally use this area for dumping things they didn't want to pay disposal fees for at the County Dump. Okay, I'd have a look, so I wrenched the truck to a stop rather than running off the road, around through the sagebrush, back onto the road and on the other side of whatever this was.
As I got closer, though, that lump in the road looked less like an abandoned bed mattress, and more like something my eyes and brain couldn't figure out. I lurched to a second halt, my headlights now hinting that was a human body ahead. I think it was the light-skinned leg sticking out at an unexpected angle that brought me to that conclusion. What the hell?
In a moment I was out of my cab and clearing shredded rags and other stuff off her. Yes, it was a human body, but what was it doing up here, twenty miles from anything and everything, and not wearing much but a lot of scrapes and bruises? What had happened to her? Clothes all torn up, her scratched and bleeding aplenty?
I put my ear to her mouth to see if she was breathing. Yes, maybe. What next? I checked my cell phone, but this was back in the days when a cell-phone coverage chart of our area looked like a pin-cushion map with most of the pins missing. No hope there.
Next? Well, Clay old buddy, you had First Aid in high school shop class didn't you? What did you learn to do about a victim who's not breathing? She already lay on her back, so the old 'check their airway for obstruction, then lift them by their belt around their middle' seemed the best choice. But she had no belt, so a rope from my truck had to make do.
I gave her a good heave, arching her back, so her lungs would expand as the class instructions said they would. If you asked, though, I'd have said her chest was great without me helping it to expand. I settled her back down against the road's dirt and again listened at her mouth for breathing.
Again, another 'maybe.' I heaved her up with the rope again, and this time as I eased her back down, she coughed. Good sign. So, what about mouth to mouth? I tipped her head back and gave her the 'kiss of life,' a good lungful shoved into her mouth with her nose pinched shut. She coughed again, with more strength this time, then twisted her head to one side. Even a better sign!
"Hey," I said, pulling her face back so it looked at me. "What happened to you?"
"I don't know," she mumbled, weak, barely getting the sound past her lips.
"Yes you do. Now wake up!"
"Please, no. Don't do that to me anymore."
"What?"
"Shoot me with that stuff."
"I didn't shoot you with anything. I just found you lying here in the road, and not breathing much." Right then I was wishing I had filled my waterbag before heading up here in the evening dusk this summer evening. But I hadn't, so I had nothing to help rinse her throat clear of whatever was making her voice croak so much, and nothing to give her a cold splash on the face to bring her more to consciousness.
In all this commotion, I failed to realize a hissing sound came from the direction of my truck. When I looked that way, the vehicle seemed to be taking on a front-right-corner-low list. Yep, sure enough. One of these knife-sharp, pointed basalt stones I'd quandaried about driving over, had found a thin spot in my front tire and poked through. Shit! I hated changing tires, particularly in such places as out here in this almost dark sagebrush, so I tried to keep good tires on my truck so I didn't get stuck that way. And of course, like most people, having confidence in my running tires, I seldom checked the pressure in my spare. So there I was: Out in the dark, a hole in my front tire, a flat spare tire, twenty miles from help, my hunting buddy Craig out of the picture with family occupations, in a 'no reception' area that held no promise of cell phone reception improving without a long walk, and a half-dead woman lying in the cow-path ahead of me.
"Well, Clay," I mumbled to myself. "Figure it out, boy! You're almost a year into college and if you can't figure out how to handle this, then drop out of college and find yourself a ditch-digger job somewhere, because you're too dumb to earn a college degree."
I walked back up the road from my truck to where she lay, not a lot less disheveled than she'd been when I found her.
"Hey, come on, you," I said while shaking her again.
"I don't want to. Just let me lie here and die. That stuff you shot me with's making me feel icky like I want to throw up."
"I didn't stick a needle in and shoot you with anything."
"Well, if you didn't who did?"
"You should know. You were the one who got stuck."
"Yeah, I'm stuck with you, a bully-boy who dopes up freshman girls at parties so he and his friends can fuck them."
"You've been raped?"
"Is that what it's called when you dope a girl up, bring her out here in this sagebrush and a dozen of you fuck her? I think that would qualify as rape."
So, I suppose that explained the condition of her clothing and the scrapes pretty much all over her body.
"So tell me what happened."
"Why should I? You already know." Her voice held onto her slurred, drunken tone that hadn't relented one bit.
"Well, you better get it through you head. I didn't dope you up or stick you with anything. I just came along, found you, and helped you get breathing again. Whoever stuck you full of whatever it was, did that long before I found you." I figured, from her bloody scrapes, maybe she'd been out here a day or two, or maybe longer.
"I don't think so. You did it, Then you and your friends raped me. Was I fun? I hope not. I hope you feel at least as bad as I do. Why don't you shoot yourself with that needle, then you can feel as icky as me. I'm going to hate you when this stuff wears off, and when it does, I'll get even."
