Lost

Chapter 5: The Struggle Begins

Zayn was lucky. His head was just a few feet above the ground. Had the branch he was hanging from not been entangled by other branches after it broke, Zayn would have completed his previous - and probably his last - fall to ground by breaking his neck.

"What's with you and your jeans getting caught everywhere?" Salma chewed on her bottom lip, contemplating on how to get him down.

She could not climb any of the tall trees around. The forest was mostly populated by conifers. The evergreen trees shot straight to the sky with branches growing out horizontally like the bristles of a bottlebrush. All of them had branches high up there, and from experience Salma knew, they were brittle as a glass, snapping under the slightest weight placed upon them. Regardless, even if she were to somehow climb the lowest branch, she would still be too high to reach out to free his jeans.

Still brainstorming, her gaze randomly came to rest on the black leather of Zayn's belt.

Now there was an easier way out that would leave his jeans hanging in the tree, and set him free. . .

"Bleh, Nevermind!" Salma shook her head, quickly shooting the idea down. Totally refusing to give this option a second thought, she looked away from his belt to find other possible solutions.

The answer came to her in form of a rock nearby. If she were to stand on something high enough to reach the branch, she would be able to unshackle him.

"This should do," Salma muttered to herself, walking towards it.

She started rolling the rock towards Zayn. Forcing her stiff muscles to work, she winced when her badly bruised body screamed in pain. However, having no way out, she pushed on. It took her ages to get the mass of concrete in the right position. Sitting on the rock to get her breath back, Salma looked up at branch. She should be able to set Zayn free now, right?

Wrong.

Salma could reach the branch alright, but his jeans had a lot of weight hanging down from it. She failed to budge the cloth even by a millimeter. After fruitlessly tugging at it for quite some time, Salma realized there was only one way to unhook him. She had to cut through the cloth.

And that meant hard work.

"God, give me the strength not to desert him right now!" Salma muttered under-breath.

After failing to find a sharp edge on the forest floor, Salma desperately rummaged through her bag to find something to rip his jeans with. Fortunately, she found a small set of scissors in the first aid box. It was not sharp enough to cut through the thick cloth but it was better than nothing. After twenty minutes of labor, where the handle of the scissors' started searing the skin of her thumb and forefinger, Salma was finally able to cut through the tough fabric and let Zayn off the hook. 

He slumped to the ground at a strange angle. Relieved, Salma jumped off the rock and sprawled a yard or two away from him. She pried off the scissors digging into her fingers and flexed, trying to get the blood to circulate into her digits again.

"Zayn Freaking Harris!" Salma gritted her teeth. "You had better done something nice in your miserable, stinking life for me to suffer like this for you!"

***

Salma stared at the canopy and the darkening sky visible between the leaves. Sweat trickled down the side of her forehead as her chest heaved and sighed. She had managed to drag Zayn a few steps on the forest floor, and it had taken such an effort that now she was lying on the ground, trying to catch her breath.

She would gladly have spent the night there, on the forest floor, with the worms and bugs crawling and buzzing all over her. However, the sky was darkening and though half unconscious, Salma was well aware of the fact that it was not safe for her, or Zayn to stay out in the forest at night.