She considered her clothes.
If the ballistic vest could drag her down, so could her steel-toed boots. Letting her hands dangle straight down, she was able to remove them. It would be good if she could keep hold of the boots somehow because the only way out of the jungle of bent vehicles would be to hike to help.
She tied the boots together and shoved her socks into the toes.
Pulling her phone from her thigh pocket, Auralia inserted it in the waterproof bag she had had dangling at the ready since she heard about the possibility of rain.
She’d keep the cord around her neck as her get-out-of-jail-free card. If everything else were lost, she could reach Iniquus. She pulled her shirt and fleece out to make space, then thrust the plastic bag inside against her skin. Auralia reached under her top to position her phone in her bra under her boob, pulling the cord tight and putting the slack in her cup as well, hoping that it wouldn’t get caught on anything and trap her.
Whew. It was hard to breathe.
In her mind, she tried to block out what she expected—the impact, the re-orientation, her escape from inside the vehicle, then the churning white water that would wrestle to drag her under.
Her goal was to stay conscious as she hit the water.
Get out. Get to shore. And there, her battle would be with the wind and cold.
Hypothermia was terrifying because the body’s best survival tool, the brain, slowed and dulled.
Auralia felt for one of the large black leaf bags she kept in the console for emergencies and dropped her boots inside. Followed by her fleece, then her thermal shirt.
She needed to get out of her pants—windproof and fleece-lined, with her identification and credit cards in the zipped pocket. Yeah, she’d need her pants too.
Popping the snap, pulling the zipper, she had space to slide them over her hips because of the angle of her dangle. She let the rhyming words loop around as she edged her pants down by an inch on one side and an inch on the other.
Soon she’d be out of tasks, and that wasn’t good.
Action was Auralia’s counterbalance to fear.
Her pants slid to her ankles, and she scooped them up and put them into the bag. Auralia had to think through this next step. Before she tied off the clothes bag, should there be air or no air in the bag?
No air would make it easier to get it through the open window in the back.
Air could help the bag stay afloat.
Too little air in the clothes bag wouldn’t be helpful.
Too much air, and she could rip the bag as she exited.
She needed Goldilocks air; it needed to be just right.
Auralia scooped the top through the air to trap a little more gas inside, then rolled the top again before tying it to ensure no water got in.
Water was weight, and the boots were heavy enough to drag through that current.
“You will float, you will hold me up, and you will stay with me,” she told the bag.
She put that bag in the back seat by the window.
What would she do if she broke a bone or was injured?
Release the clothes.
Hypothermia?
She had another bag that she could use to make a flotation device, and once she was on the shore, she could crawl inside, just as they had taught her in the Hug-a-Tree Program at Sunday School.
All that rain from up in the mountains was rushing toward the ocean, ice-cold.
