Snakes, Rattlers, and High Rollers

by: jewel of athos

Note: So I finally decided not to be lazy and type my FFN penname on a Psych story instead of my Psychfic name :p lol. This fic goes out to the wonderful Spencer05 over on Psychfic for her birthday; my PF roomie and one of my very best friends there. She asked for "Shawn kidnapped, ditched in a desert, with a snake bite, and delirious". And...over the course of the fic, I'm trying my best O:) lol. Enjoy!! :D

~*~*~*~*~*~

Prologue – Thursday, 3:30pm

"Now, Shawn, I want you to listen to me." Shawn groaned.

"Come on, Dad. Do we have to do this now?" Henry nodded.

"Yes, Shawn, we do. What if the snake that bit you had been poisonous, what would you have done?"

"I don't know..."

"Exactly, you don't know. But you will. Come here..."

Shawn slowly lifted his head from the hot desert sand, and stared into the tiny golden eyes of the snake weaving its thick body in front of his face. He couldn't remember what kind of snake it was, but he was pretty sure that it was poisonous. Licking his lips, he started to inch back away from it with agonizing slowness, so that he wouldn't startle it into striking.

"First of all, if you know it's a poisonous snake, or even if you're not sure, you want to try to stay real calm and quiet. You don't want to make any sudden moves or noises and scare it, because scared snakes bite. And keep in mind that they're almost always more scared of you than you are of them."

"Not if you're Indiana Jones," Shawn muttered.


"Well you're not Indiana Jones, are you? Listen, another thing that you want to do is you want to keep your face as far away from those fangs as possible. You don't want him to bite any part of you, but if he does, you want him to bite you on your arm or your leg, where it's easiest to get the poison our or at least contain it by making a tourniquet. You can't tie up your face."

He finally managed to get his body turned so that he was laying on his back, with his feet the closest thing to the snake instead of his head. Slowly, he started to crab-crawl away from the creature as fast as he could manage in his condition without scaring it by his movement or accidentally screaming. Inch by painful inch, he moved away.

"You wanna try and move as fast as you can without startling it, and get as far away from it as possible..."

BOOM! It sounded like a gunshot, but it could have just been the heat playing with his senses. But what had made the noise hardly mattered to the snake. It struck.

"Ah!"

Pain. Burning pain, crawling up his calf. Tears of agony and dizziness blurred his eyes, and he couldn't see the snake anymore. He couldn't tell one thing from another in the mass of swirling colors in front of his eyes. But wherever it had gone, the snake didn't strike again.

"Alright, now if you do get bit, you want to keep the poison from going to your heart, so you don't want to move a lot; that makes your blood flow faster. What you'd want to do is you'd want to take something---a piece of rope or cloth or whatever---and tie it tightly around your arm or leg directly above and below the wound. That'll help contain the poison."

Shawn dragged himself backwards until he bumped into a rock that he remembered passing the moment before he had collapsed. He managed to sit up and lean his back against it, gasping for breath. After resting for a moment, he started tearing long strips off of his shirt. When he'd made several, he rolled up the leg of his jeans that the snake had bit through and made a clumsy attempt to tie the strips in place, his vision still swimming.

"What do you do after that?" Shawn asked, rubbing his bandaged hand nervously. "I mean, if you're all alone wherever you are?"

"Well, if you're near enough to a phone or any people, you'd either call 911 or ask someone else to do it for you. And if the bite is in a place you can reach with your mouth, you cut an X over it and suck and spit over it to try to draw the poisoned blood out."

"What if it's like, someplace I can't really reach?"

"Then you learn to be flexible pretty darn quick while you're waiting for the ambulance."

"But what if there's no one around to help, like, you're in the middle of nowhere or something?" Henry raised an eyebrow.

"Son, you'd better hope you never get bit by something poisonous stuck out in the middle of nowhere."

"Gah!" Shawn gasped in pain, and his trembling fingers lost the knot. Choking on a curse, he fumbled for the ends of the cloth to re-tie it. Oh, gosh, it hurts!

~*~*~*~*~*~

Note: So there is the prologue :). Thoughts so far? Oh, I don't actually know a whole lot about snake bites; what I wrote, I learned from books. So...fair warning :p lol. Thank you for reading!! One more chapter will be up in a little while, and more will come soon!! :D