The lights just went off in the farmhouse so you crawl your way through the grass toward the garden—trying to keep as low to the ground as you can. It is full dark, but you can't take the chance that someone might catch a glimpse of you.

Something moves off to your right, but you can't see what it is. You just hope it isn't a snake and if it is, you hope it's moving away from you instead of toward you.

The dry grass crunches under your hands and knees so you slow your pace to not make any more racket than you can help.

You are so, so hungry. It's been days since you've eaten anything—anything at all.

The hard, dry ground suddenly becomes loose, damp earth and you look up to see three dim strands of barbed wire. On the other side, you can make out the dark shapes holding their orbs out to you.

You wriggle your way under the bottom wire. Halfway through, you reach up and pluck the first one you see, then another and another. They all look the same in this light so you grab as many as you can and bag them up in the bottom of your shirt.

You hear a bawl coming from the direction of house, joined by a couple more as the bulb above the back door flips on and the door is thrown open.

"What is it, boys?" you hear a man say, "What's out there?"

You are dragging yourself backward with your knees and shoving with your elbows when you see an orange flash near the house. You hear the boom a split-second later.

He's shooting at you!

You scamper with everything you have and don't stop until you're back on the other side of the embankment. You lay prone with your eyes peeled for any sign of movement coming over the rise and, when your heart finally slows, you look down at the single piece of fruit in your hand. At least it's something.

You take a bite and feel your face attempt to implode. The tomato isn't ripe, but it doesn't matter. It's food and moisture all in one and you've been without either for much too long.

After all the commotion and dogs' barking finally peters out, you creep back to retrieve your bag and continue on down the tracks.



You see the back of a big truck stop over on the highway up ahead of you about a mile or two away with a constant stream of vehicles coming and going. The moon is just coming up and from the glint on the tracks it looks like they might come really close to it. It would be a good place to fill up your water jugs. You might be able to blend in among all those people and them not even suspect that you are all alone out here.

You don't have a lot of money, but maybe you can find some food that you can afford with the little bit of change you still have in your pocket. A couple of cheese crackers or the peanut butter kind would go really good right about now.

When you get to a spot that is almost directly behind it, you set your bag down in the grass off to the side of the tracks and—taking just the jugs in hand—set off across the field. As you approach the crumbling asphalt of the back parking lot, you see a water faucet next to the pay air hose. What luck! You rush over and—after gulping down as much of the sweet liquid as you can—fill both jugs to the brim. You lug them back across the parking lot to the knee-high grass and set them down before heading around to the front of the building.

Before going in, you pull the bread wrapper out of your pocket and sit on a yellow concrete curb to count out the change. You need to know how much you have before going inside. At long last, you decipher that there's eighty-six cents—a small fortune. You still want to hold onto the dollar for a real emergency so you are only willing to spend the change. You've got to be careful not to spend all of it, though. You might really need it later on.

As you step through the front door, you are blasted by frigid air. You'd almost forgotten that such a thing even existed. Several pairs of eyes are on you, but you pretend not to notice.

"His mother should be ashamed of herself. Letting a boy get so filthy," a woman with her face stretched back in a bun says to her friend who only nods in agreement.

You glance down at your hands and can't tell where the dirt ends and your skin begins. She's definitely right about how dirty you are, but if she were a nice person, she wouldn't have said it loud enough for you to hear. Maybe you should clean up before doing any shopping.

You walk up to the stocky woman behind the counter and quietly ask "Do you have a bathroom?"

She squints at you before saying "Sure do. It's right down that hall over there."

"Thank you," you say, walking as quickly as you can so you can get out from under all the judgmental eyes.

It's a tiny little room with only a stainless steel toilet and sink. Above the sink is a cloudy mirror that reflects what little it has to and in the corner is a tall, skinny trash can with a flapper on top. You lock the door before stripping off you shirt and shorts so someone doesn't walk in on you. You do the best you can with wet paper towels and have to climb up on the sink to make sure you got everything off of your face and neck. After getting dressed, you sop up the floor as best you can. By the time you finally head back out the door, you are feeling fresh as the morning. The trash can, however, has seen better days.

You walk down each aisle slowly looking at what is offered. Too bad you don't have more money, because there is a lot of really good stuff you wouldn't mind having. You finally choose a big plain bag of tortilla chips that are marked "3/$1". It's big enough that it should last you a good long while.

The cashier eyes you with a smirk as you count out thirty-four cents to her. You can't help grinning back at her every time you make eye contact.

"Thank you, sir. Please come again," she says handing you back your bag of chips and giving you a wink.

You feel your face getting warm and you nod to her as you turn toward the door. You can't remember the last time you felt as relieved as you do now to get away from people. If it wouldn't seem suspicious, you would run.

Wrestling the two jugs while trying not to crush the bag of chips too much, you head back to the tracks and fetch your bag before continuing on your trek.



You come to a fork in the tracks and don't know which one brought you here. One continues on to the south and the other angles off into the distance in a more easterly direction and looks like it goes right through a distant town. If it's not just a mirage you might try hopping a train down there, but you aren't sure that it would be going the right way. Maybe there will be another town somewhere up ahead on the one stretching south.

You head for the town

If you can get on a train, it'll be well worth going slightly out of your way. You head down the tracks toward the distant town.



The sun is still high overhead when you cross into the train yard. There's a cross track here and little else save for a row of run-down, caved in buildings along a dusty, weedy road. It doesn't look like a train would stop here anymore even if it did pass through. You might as well turn around and head back the way you came.

You have just reached the end of the yard when you see a sky blue car cross on the last street in town just ahead of you. It looks like the driver is looking straight back at you. You duck down, but there's nowhere to go and it is too late anyway.

The car slows and you make a mad dash for the buildings just as it disappears from sight. You run at full bore until you see a stack of shipping pallets laying haphazard against the side of the far end building. You dive in behind them.

Did he really see you or was it just your imagination? Maybe he only slowed down because there was something in the road. You'll just hide here and wait for a little while until the coast is all clear and then you'll get the heck out of Dodge.

The car drives slowly back up the road from where it came. It is barely creeping by this time. He must've seen you. What else could it be? He'll turn you over to the cops and then you'll never make good on your promise to Jane. You have to somehow get away from him and out of here.

You find somewhere to hide

There goes that car again. The one that's been creeping back and forth down the same street for the last hour. The driver must've seen you. He might take you to the cops and you'll be taken back home if he catches you. You duck down as low as you can. If you can hide until it gets dark, maybe you can sneak away.

You look around for a better place to hide and see nothing. This stack of pallets isn't much, but it's better than nothing. You'll just have to wait.

The minutes pass by slowly. It will be a long, long time before you'll be able to escape. Your leg starts cramping so you reach down and rub the knots out of it.

"There you are," comes a crackly man's voice from behind you, "I almost thought you'd flown the coop. C'mon, let's go for a ride."

You are paralyzed with fear. He found you and now they'll take you home. You can't go home, yet. You're not finished.

He lifts you to your feet by the back of the shirt and you can hardly hold onto your stuff due to your feet barely touching the ground. He takes you around to the back of the building and opens up the passenger door of his car. "Hop in."

Something isn't right. This isn't the way strangers act. You struggle to remain outside, but he snatches your bag from you and pitches it over the backseat with his free hand. You slap at his hands and kick at his shins, but he doesn't seem to even notice. He backhands you across the face and shoves you in anyway.

Your cheek burns from your temple to your chin. The tiny itch on your eyebrow turns out to be a trickle of blood. You are dazed and can only watch as he makes his way around the front of the car to the driver's door. By the time you finally snap out of it, you see the town getting smaller and smaller through the back glass.

You start to dive over the seat back and his hand comes crashing down on you again. Your vision narrows to a tiny speck and then winks out.



You wake up shivering. It is dark all around you. You don't have any clothes on. You are sore in a place where you shouldn't be and it really, really burns. There's a strange, intermittent scraping sound coming from somewhere close by.

You cough and the scraping sound stops.

You try to raise up on your elbow and see something coming straight down at you from the darkness overhead. It's the back of a shovel blade and it's the last thing you will ever see.



— The End