Walk until Charlie had lost all sense of time and direction, until she was staggering like Frankenstein's monster through the tangled growth that covered the forest floor, until she wished her poor abused feet were once again numb as they were bruised and pricked and stubbed by countless rocks and sticks and brambles and who knew what else underfoot. Walk up a slope that was growing ever steeper. Walk until she was gasping with every breath she took, until the muscles in her legs ached, until she was ready to collapse with exhaustion. The only good thing she could say about all that walking was that it was probably keeping her from freezing to death. The temperature was in the forties, the wind was strong enough to intermittently shower them with dislodged pine needles, and the water weighing down her wet clothes seemed to have turned into about two tons of icy slush. "Do you have any idea where we're going?" "Maybe." He didn't even glance back, just strode relentlessly on. He was in his stocking feet, too, his boots hawing been lost to the river just as hers had been, but if his feet were being systematically tortured he gave no sign of it.
