Grit and sand whipped against Samuel’s face as the wind picked up. His skin was dry and cracked, like the compacted red of the sandstone beneath his boots. He rested his eyes on the shoes, but instead visualized the face of his mother reprimanding him. She had wanted to make sure he wouldn’t forget the damn things.

“What am I going to need boots for, Mom? It’s a road trip. I’m not hiking across Death Valley.”

She had insisted anyway. He grimaced silently at the irony.

The short black of his hair and beard seemed to be absorbing most of the abrasive sand, to the point of tan colored streaks showing in the thick of it. His head throbbed with the force of a splitting headache, likely attributed to the nearly empty fifth of Captain Morgan in his hand. He gripped it tightly, like the heft of a weapon.

The progress across the hot land was slow. Most of the time was spent attempting to disregard the sweat dripping down his forehead and neck. He wiped his free hand over his face, but a dull wound throbbed painfully in his palm.

Blood. A significant coat of deep crimson dripping from the gash in his hand. Samuel wiped it on his jeans and kept walking.
“Beth?” He shouted. His voice was hoarse. The only response he received was the whistle of slight wind in an empty valley. His eyes flicked up and left in their sockets as he tried to parse through what he did and what he did not remember from the previous night. There was a lot of black.

“We should race.” The drunken sentence echoed in his patchy memory.

“Race? To where?” Beth’s soft featured face had seemed mischievous in the fire light.

“I don’t think it matters,” Sam had nodded the traditional dragging pace of an assumedly wise drunk. “Somewhere out there.”

Beth shook her head. “Nope. I don’t think so.”

“Oh, but wh-” The tiny blonde leapt up and began to sprint away with a commitment not seen in the soberness of day.

Sam leapt up and followed, laughing.

“Try not to have too much sex.” Sasha called sarcastically from beside the fire. She turned back toward Conner as the pair vanished into the darkness.

The memory of the night began to fade. A few moments passed as Samuel began to feel the heat irritating his face and the burning heat of the Death Valley sun grounded him once again. He realized that he had been staring at it. How long had passed?

His mouth felt dry and sticky. A font of good decisions this one, a drunk, a fool, and as his family put it, he hadn’t made a right decision in years.

And still I don’t seem to care, he thought to himself. His legs were stiff as he began to trudge along, as though the land below would be damned if it was going to let him pass. It couldn’t be too much further. Just got to keep on moving.

His hand went to his head instinctively as it began to spin. The ground met him hard. Hours passed, with Samuel flat on the dirt.
The sun made it past the peak point in the sky while he lay. A brush lizard darted over his left leg and the wind tickled his back. A short dip of its gust drove dirt particles into his nose and he woke with a start. It was late afternoon.

The ground seemed barren around him. Thankless that he had returned. Not but a few pebbles were disturbed as he pushed himself to his feet, his wounded hand complaining all the way. One of the pebbles, however, caught his eye.

It was a different texture than the others. He knelt and picked up one of the pebbles near him. The texture on its bottom was the same as his special pebble. So it had flipped over. He shook his head. So what.

He strained to rise from his crouch.

One last sidelong glance at the pebble entranced him. There was a near invisible mar in the sandstone below it, as though it had been dragged along the ground a few centimeters. Samuel looked off in the direction the line pointed. It could have been dragged by a footfall.

He decided to stumble into the pebble’s pointed direction. The sick feeling he felt in his stomach could have been fever, as sickness would explain the thick film of sweat stuck to his body. In any regard, he assumed he should have some liquids soon. The fifth was still cool in his hand.

"Bad idea," he admonished.

Twenty minutes later he was taking swigs from the quickly diminishing bottle. The result was more sickness in his stomach, but even the rum seemed to satiate his lips and tongue. It was very near heaven. A steep rise in the land lay ahead of him and he sighed. A hill sounded like a depressing exertion. He began to take another swig, but stopped when he noticed something reflected on the side of the bottle. There was glass in the dirt nearby.

He got down to crawl and his legs were happy for the respite. Glass, quite a bit of it, was scattered here and there. One of the larger shards had the dried brown of blood along its edge. A neck of another fifth lay smashed, a half dozen feet to the right.

What a stupid way to wound yourself, Sam. He rolled his eyes and started off in the direction of the bottle’s neck, but stopped abruptly. He went back toward the hill, reasoning that the nearer glass shards had his blood on them, so he had probably thrown the bottle neck into the distance while drunk. It was just a red herring.

Hold on, Samuel. Since when were you a detective? Follow the bottle you idiot. He stopped and argued with himself, breathing heavily enough that his body swayed in the arid breeze. The voice of his mother took over his conscious to hand him a bit of guidance, thinking perhaps he would listen to it for once.

“There is more of a chance that you are just being foolish and you should keep walking. There’s only disappointment over that rise, Samuel.”

He stood with a furrowed brow, staring at the remains of a fifth scattered on the dirt. He took another swig of his own.

To hell with it.
He crested the hill.