At last I awoke, face down, still trussed up and burlap-behelmed, and still in a vehicle, which was now traveling quite fast on what sounded like a highway. Of course I had no idea in which direction we were heading. I knew Texas was big enough that we could still be in the state, but I also had no idea how long we'd been on the move, We could be headed for, or already in, Mexico, or Oklahoma, or New Mexico, or…. I was sure we were already quite far from the Willow City Loop, whose meadows my companions and I had been admiring and enjoying. Was I alone here or supervised? I sure didn't need supervision; I couldn't even roll over. I lay still and listened. I didn't hear breathing or stirring.
Then something did move: a heavy object slid into the left side of my neck, It had an edge but it only nicked me. I was grateful then not to be hit in the throat, which was slightly exposed to the right. Who knew, though, what might slide next, perhaps to my right? Maybe what should slide was me. I pulled my knees up and tried to rock myself back into a sitting position. That was a bit too ambitious. I pushed my stomach forward until my legs were nearly straight, and thus inched my way along until my head touched an object with a smooth surface. I made like an inchworm one more time and was able to slide my face up the side of the object, which could have been a large cardboard box. It is not easy to slide burlap but I managed to get my chest against the box and rock back, sitting on my knees. Now what? The sack's drawstring was half choking me. I tried swallowing hard several times to see if I could loosen it. The effect was minimal. I worked my hands as best I could to loosen the rope that was chafing my wrists, but got nowhere. I couldn't even begin to free my legs, especially now that I was kneeling. If only I could see what had slid into my neck. A nice sharp edge would be so helpful! But of course, I could not see anything, my arms were useless, and a sudden stop would send me flying, possibly to be injured.
I wasn't ready quite yet to give up. Leaning my chest back against the box, I dragged my knees against it too and tried to rock back on my heels while maintaining contact with the box. I was afraid of falling backwards and being in a worse situation than before. All I could do was stretch my torso while pushing with my heels. I even used my chin, as best I could. Suddenly my chin had something to rest on: the top of the box! As I slowly pushed myself into an awkward standing position I hobbled to the left of the box, where I found the edge to be smooth, and then to the right, which was rougher. I lowered myself to where I could rub the sack's drawstring against the edge of the box, which scraped my throat as much as it scraped the string, as the latter was tight against my skin. I tried swallowing hard again, rubbing, swallowing, wincing but keeping at it, until suddenly the string broke, snapping back against my throat. It was all I could do not to cry out, as much in surprise as in pain. Quickly I worked the now-unsecured sack against the edge of the box until I had freed my face from the foul thing. It was still stuck to the back of my head, caught in my hair, but I wasn't worried about that. Now I could look around and see what resources might be available.
That thing whose edge had hit my neck was a shovel. I didn't want to think about what its intended use could be. Supporting myself on the box, I turned toward the shovel, noticed a shorter box not far from it, managed to sit down on that and used my feet to drag the shovel to where I could stand it up – a tricky maneuver to be sure, and I failed many times. Again and again it fell over before I could secure it between some other boxes. I decided to try another approach. I got the shovel's handle turned toward me, lifted my feet slightly and got that handle above my bonds, slipping it through my legs and hopping until I was standing right at the blade. I turned toward the box, dragging the shovel with me. I got the shovel to stand up almost straight. The handle pressed itself into my hands and I took ahold of it. I worked it up and down against the rope binding my ankles until it broke. Then I drew the shovel upward until the blade could be worked against the rope at my wrists. That required me to turn my back to the box once more. As soon as my hands were free I tore the sack off of my head, pulling my hair, and felt the left side of my neck; my hand came away a bit bloody. I wiped my hands together and picked up the shovel. While I was doing this, the van, as it turned out to be, stopped, and I fell forward onto the shovel, then used it to right myself quickly.
I heard two car doors slam. I flattened myself against a wall near the tailgate and lifted the shovel, intending to smack my captors as they came for me. I heard two male voices, one of which I'd heard before, but couldn't make out what they were saying. The voices got more distant and I thought, oh good, they're not coming back here to check on me, or haul me out and kill me and use this shovel to bury me. When I couldn't hear their voices anymore, I opened the tailgate and was half-blinded by the sudden sunlight. I estimated that it was late morning. (Nyssa, Tegan and I had been enjoying that meadow in the early afternoon.) The U-Haul van that had taken me so far from my friends was parked in the driveway of a small house on a street full of closely set small houses. I had no idea where I was but I was determined to be as far away from that van and from my captors as I could get on foot without being apprehended, as fast as ever I could.
As soon as I had cleared two houses past the one whose driveway I was escaping, I cut through someone's lawn to get off that street and out of sight. I zigzagged across lawns, changed streets, ran a bit in the open and then ducked between houses, until I began to feel as if I were not mere seconds away from recapture.
In front of a grocery store I found a bank of phone boxes and from the white pages within the first one I determined that I was in Phoenix. I also found two nickels and a quarter in the coin return, so I checked the coin returns of the other phones and found two dimes, a paper clip and a hard candy. I suppose I should have been hungry but I wasn't; I left the hard candy behind but pocketed the dimes and the paper clip. I poked my fingers into the coin returns of some vending machines in front of the shop but was too wary of going into that brightly lit establishment to check out the vending machines within. At any rate I found no more change.
Not long after that I came upon the I10 and took a moment to calculate the time and thus which direction was east. I crossed the highway, started to walk eastward and stuck my thumb out any time it had a chance of being seen. When I spotted a U-Haul van in the distance I did flatten myself on the ground behind a billboard, and then I had a pang of regret so sharp that both of my hearts ached. Why hadn't I at least checked to see if the keys were in the van from which I'd escaped? I could have driven it away, leaving my captors inconvenienced if not stranded, and just driven as far as its store of gas allowed. I still feel bad about that.
It was dark by the time I was picked up, just shy of Tempe, having walked, at first quite rapidly but soon just dragging, about 11 miles. A family of seven stopped their bright blue Dodge Coronet and let me squeeze into the back seat with their three hefty teen-aged boys, who glared at me all the way to San Antonio, a 13-hour drive during which we only stopped to relieve ourselves at gas stations or truck stops, where at least I was able to get water. Two plump younger boys sat in the wayback and passed sandwiches and cans of fizzy drink to their older brothers and to their portly parents, who took turns driving all night and clearly were not on speaking terms. No one offered me a sandwich or a fizzy drink and I didn't ask, for fear of being ousted. (I think they expected me to contribute towards gas, but were too proud to come right out and ask for it; all I had, at any rate, were the coins and lone paper clip I'd found at pay phones, plus the rope that had bound me, a few lengths of ordinary string, an alarm clock, a book about wildflowers – in Mandarin – the TARDIS key and a cricket ball.) The children in the wayback and whichever parent was not driving at any given moment slept most of the time and the teens glared in near silence, so the ride was at once tense and tedious. Afraid to fall asleep, pinned as I was in the midst of all that angst, I mentally replayed every chess game I had ever won against K9, and then every game I had lost to him.
I was glad to be let off at the junction of US87, where I stuck my thumb out once more and walked northward. I was under no illusion that I could walk 87 miles in one go, or at all, not that I realized exactly how far from the TARDIS I still was, but I couldn't just stand there, could I?
On the other hand, I was walking in my sleep.