After the small camp was ready, Mark lay down on the grass near the campfire and closed his eyes.
And for Mark that was a mistake, not because anything bad happened, but because the moment he stopped moving, every sensation he had been ignoring throughout the day hit him all at once.
'I don't remember feeling this awful…' Mark thought as the heat from the campfire warmed his side.
His sore throat was no longer the mild discomfort from the morning, it was now an intense burning where every time he swallowed it felt like sandpaper scraping the inside of his throat.
His head throbbed with a dull ache concentrated behind his eyes and radiating toward his temples.
His nose was completely stuffed, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, which in turn dried out his throat further and made the burning worse.
'Good thing I wasn't more stubborn,' Mark thought. 'If I had kept walking for another couple of hours, I probably would have collapsed in the middle of the forest.'
