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mall until midnight? How long would I have to lie there before someone saw me and came to help? I'd almost been smashed to a pulp! I needed a little concern here, a little something .
    I was getting very indignant. Hello… a body lying in the parking lot, and no one notices? Yes, it was night, but the parking lot was lit by those huge vapor lights, and I wasn't lying between two cars or anything. I was… I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings.
    My vision was blurred; all I could see were black shadows and patches of light, and those swam and ran together. Automatically I tried to rub my eyes, only to find that my arms, neither of them, wanted to obey. They would move, but reluctantly, and not very well—certainly not well enough to have fingers flailing away at my eyes; I might blind myself, and wouldn't that be adding insult to injury?
    Okay, so I couldn't see exactly where I was. Still, I had to be lying in the end of the row closest to the mall, where someone should notice me. Eventually.
    Dimly I heard a car start, somewhere. So long as it wasn't a car that would back over me, that was okay, but I figured in that case the driver would have had to step over my body to get to said car, so that scenario wasn't likely. On the other hand, there have been times when I was so rushed that if I had stepped over a body I might have thought, I'll get to that later .
    Something else to worry about: being backed over by someone like me.
    Was there any sort of record on how long someone could lie in the middle of a parking lot and no one notice? And—yuck—what if ants and things crawled on me? I was bleeding. Probably all sorts of little critters were crawling at top speed toward me, eager to feast.
    This thought was so disgusting that if my head hadn't been aching so badly I probably would have bolted upright. No, I don't like bugs. I'm not afraid of them, but I think they're nasty and icky, and I don't want them anywhere near me.
    Come to think of it, the parking lot itself was nasty and icky. Tacky, classless people spit on the pavement, and sometimes they spit more than just spit. All sorts of crap landed on pavements, including, well, crap.
    Oh, God, I had to get up before I died from an overdose of the nasties . No one was coming to my aid, at least not on my timetable, which pretty much meant NOW . I'd have to do this myself. I'd have to find my purse, dig out my cell phone—I hoped the damn thing still worked, that the battery hadn't been knocked out or something, because finding a battery and replacing it was beyond me at the moment—and call 911. I also had to sit up, to get most of my body off the nasty pavement, or my mental state would soon match my physical one.
    On the count of three, I thought, I would sit up. One. Two. Three . Nothing happened. My mind knew what I wanted to do, but my body said uh-uh. It had already tried that sitting-up stuff.
    That pissed me off, almost as much as did the lying-there-unnoticed. Okay, I'm lying about that. Lying-there-unnoticed came close to the top of the list. If I had to rate the things that pissed me off right then, someone trying to kill me— again !—would have to rate a ten. No one paying any attention to me was a nine. A disobedient body was a distant third, coming in at maybe a five.
    Still, I'd been a cheerleader for years, all the way from junior high through college. I'd told my body to do painful things lots of times, and for the most part it had obeyed. It just didn't make sense that it wouldn't obey me now when the stakes were a lot higher than turning a cartwheel or something. My life could hang in the balance here! Not only that, it felt as if something was crawling on my face. No doubt about it, I had to get up. I had to get help.
    Maybe I was trying to do too much. Sitting up all in one motion, without the spur of panic to push me, was more than I could manage. Maybe I should try moving my arm again.
    That worked out pretty well. My right arm hurt,