The Dangerous Doors of Shannon Anderson

Chapter Eleven

My knee dashed against a sharp stone as I fell, and I was sure my patella had cracked in half for how badly it hurt. I wanted to throw up, I wanted to faint, I wanted to see if my ankle bone was sticking out of my leg like it felt like it was.

It wasn't. I rolled over on my back in the mud and let the rain wash over me, thinking that drowning would be a reasonably comfortable escape from the pain. A moment later Fritz was scooping me off the ground - no small feat with a fatty like me - and running back into the jungle. He didn't make it very far before he had to put me down.

"Climb on my back," he said.

"I can't," I sobbed. I couldn't even stand up.

"Yes, you can." He gave me a hand up, then crouched down so I could get onto his back. My ankle felt like it was on the verge of bursting, my knee felt like it already had.

With me as secure as I was going to get riding Fritz piggyback, he ran through the forest and the rain, dodging roots and mud slicks and low hanging branches with the agility of someone who had done this before. My joints jiggled horribly with every step Fritz took, sending fresh waves of awful throbbing pain up and down my leg every time. I had never been into sports, so all my worst injuries were the result of set building accidents: fingers smashed by hammers, gnarly splinters, staple gun wounds. But this was easily the worst pain I had ever experienced. This had to be what Nancy Kerrigan felt like after Tonya Harding took that crowbar to her kneecap, and my ankle was messed up to boot.

At last Fritz started to slow, but through the driving rain and blinding pain it was impossible to tell if we had reached our destination or if Fritz was just getting tired.

I should have known he wasn't getting tired. At the base of an exceptionally enormous tree trunk, he slid me off his back gently and put his arm around my waist so that I could lean on his shoulder and use him as a crutch. Then he opened a door in the tree - not a dinky little door like the kind that would get me back to the safety of my bedroom - but a big, proper wooden door fitted perfectly into the trunk.

Fritz ushered me inside and sat me down on the floor so that I could rest my mangled leg on the bottom step of the freaking spiral staircase that wound up the hollowed out trunk to the living quarters above.

"Don't move," Fritz said. Thanks, because I was planning on stepping out for a quick jog... Fritz was already out the door.

It was much drier inside the tree, though still damp. I could hear wave after wave of rain beating against the trunk, and trickles of water seeped in between the cracks in the floorboards that made the roof, and through the crevices in the glass windows that had been fitted into the sides of the tree trunk. The shelter smelled earthy, like wet wood and leaves and dirt. It wasn't a bad smell, but it was strong enough to make me nauseous.

Fritz burst through the door a minute later and plopped a huge glob of black mud on my knee and my ankle.

"Hey!"

"Sit still," Fritz said.