It was long, long moments before I could catch my breath, before I could stop shaking, before I could slowly climb to my feet and look around me.
When I did, I gazed back across the bridge. The long freight filled it now end to end. As my eyes rose to the far hill, I expected to see Jeff and his fellow thugs standing there, watching me. Maybe shaking their heads. Maybe muttering, “Curses, foiled again!” Or something like that.
But to my surprise, they weren’t there at all! They weren’t anywhere in sight. They had vanished. They were totally gone.
I panned my gaze over the ridge, searching for them. Nothing. Not a sign. Just hillside and trees. Just the sky through the lacework of winter branches. Just the freight train now moving off across the hillside, to disappear on the downward slope into the next valley over.
I stared, my mouth open, my breath still coming fast. My mind ratcheted into overdrive, trying to figure it out. Jeff and Ed P. and Harry Mac—they’d been there a moment ago and now they were gone as if they had never existed. As if I’d imagined them or dreamed them. But I knew I hadn’t.
And then my mouth clapped shut.
And I thought:
Oh no
.
It wasn’t easy to start running again, but I did it. At least it was downhill this time—steeply downhill. I plunged down the slope, taking long strides over the rough ground. My ankle ached. My lungs burned. My hand throbbed with pain because of the splinters still buried in my flesh. I ignored all of it and just ran.
I’ll tell you why. There’s a road up beyond the McAdams Trail. Right up there beyond the trees and the bushes where Harry Mac had tripped me. It’s an old road of broken asphalt and gravel that leads to several other roads, dirt roads, that go into several wilderness areas where there are farms and abandoned farms and campgrounds and other stuff like that.
I felt pretty sure that Jeff and Ed P. and Harry Mac hadn’t hiked to the spot where I had found them. They didn’t strike me as the healthy, happy hiking types, if you see what I mean. No, they had probably driven up the old broken road and parked nearby and walked into the trees to sit and smoke and drink beer or whatever it was they’d been doing that I wasn’t supposed to see. So that meant they probably had a car up there, maybe the hot red Camaro Jeff was always driving to school, the one that had the muffler modified so you could hear it roaring three counties over. And if they had a car up there, well, then they could get in that car and drive it down the hill, couldn’t they? Down the hill to the road below. Which was where I had to go now. It was the only way I could get back to my bike from here. In other words, if they got to their car fast enough—if they drove fast enough—they could still catch me on the road.
So I ran down the hill.
It was so steep, I must have stumbled a dozen times on my way. I nearly fell down half a dozen. As I reached the denser trees by the roadside, I had to dodge between their trunks, leap over their roots, and push my way through the underbrush that tore at my sweatclothes and my hands. But I kept on going, fast as I could. And at last I spilled out onto the road at the bottom of the hill: County Road 64.
I had to stop there. I was gasping for breath. I leaned forward, my hands on my knees, trying to recover. I turned my head and looked up the road. It was two narrow lanes of pavement winding through pine trees and out of sight. I turned and looked the other way. It was the same: two narrow lanes, pines on either side. Not a car to be seen. No one coming from either direction.
I knew where I was. About three-quarters of a mile from the edge of town, maybe half a mile from where I’d left my bike. If I could jog it, I ought to be able to get home before dark.
I took a look at my hand. The sight made my heart sink. My palm was red and swollen. There were black marks on it where the splinters from the railroad ties had buried themselves deep. Even worse, there were two or three big old chunks of wood in there, one end protruding out of the flesh, the other visible under the skin. I knew I ought to hurry and get out of there fast, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to leave those big splinters in there. I grabbed the end of one of them and drew it out, grunting with the pain. I grabbed hold of another, then another. Lines of blood began streaming down over my hand.
By now I’d recovered my breath and was ready to start running again. But before I could, I heard an engine.
There was no mistaking that sound, that aggressive unmuffled roar. That was Jeff’s red Camaro, coming after me.
There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I couldn’t get back up that hill into the woods. So I just took off, away from the direction of the noise, toward town, toward home.
I ran as fast as I could, but I was flagging now, really low on energy. The engine quickly got louder behind me. I glanced over my shoulder.
Yeah, there it was. A flash of sunlight on its silver fender. Then another flash, and I saw the fire-engine red of its hood.
I tried to put on some speed, but I was practically staggering now. What was the use anyway? Even at my fastest, I couldn’t outrun a car. Behind me, the red Camaro gave a guttural roar of acceleration. In another moment, the sound dropped to a guttural hum and the car was right beside me.
I turned to it. Harry Mac’s face was grinning at me through the passenger window.
In pure panic I tried to get away, to dash into the woods to escape. It was no good. I got about two steps up the dirt slope and fell—collapsed, really. I slid back down over the bed of fallen pine needles and dropped onto the road’s sandy shoulder. I knelt there, panting, exhausted.
The Camaro stopped. The doors opened. Harry Mac and Ed P. got out. One of them grabbed me under one arm, the other grabbed me under the other. They hauled me over to the car. They hurled me into the backseat. They got in, one on either side of me. They shut the doors.
Jeff was at the wheel. He hit the gas. The Camaro roared and took off again. Jeff gave the wheel a hard twist and the car pulled a great big Huey, turning full around. Then it headed back in the direction from which it had come—only with me inside now.
If you have never been in the backseat of a Camaro, let me tell you: the legroom is nil, zero. I had to bend my legs so much, my knees were practically in my teeth. Also, there are only really two places to sit back there, one on the left and one on the right, and I was sitting in the middle. The lumbering Ed P. was pressed against one shoulder, and the enormous Harry Mac was pressed against the other. There was no room to move, so all I could do was sort of press my arms close to my sides and make myself small. Oh, and by the way? Ed P. and Harry Mac smelled like old socks.
I was nervous. All right, I was scared. I didn’t know where we were going or what they would do to me once we got there. Whatever it was, I didn’t think it was going to be too good.
I heard Jeff snicker. He looked up at me in the rearview mirror as he drove along the winding forest road. I could see his weaselly eyes reflected in the narrow strip of glass. “We got you now, don’t we?” he said slowly. “We do got you, sure enough.”
“You got me, all right,” I said. “So what are you gonna do with me?”
“Why do you ask?” said Jeff, and this time, all three of them snickered. “You’re not scared, are you?”
“Oh no,” I said. “Why would I be scared of a nice bunch of guys like you?”
I could tell by the reflection of Jeff’s eyes that he was smiling. “That’s funny,” he said. “You’re funny even now. I like that. You’re a tough little punk, aren’t you?”
I shook my head. “Not very tough, no.”
“Oh yeah, you are. You punch me in the face like that? With three of us standing there? You run across that bridge, right into that train like that? You’re a tough little punk, all right, no mistake.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m a tough little punk.” I hate to admit it, but I actually felt a little proud that Jeff had said that.
And he went on too. “Really,” he said—kind of earnestly, as if he were trying to convince me of this very important point. “Running into that train? I don’t think I ever saw anything like that before. That impressed me. It
really
impressed me.”
I shrugged, trying to hide the fact that I appreciated the compliment. “I’m happy I could bring a little entertainment into your shabby life,” I told him as sarcastically as I could.
At that, Jeff let out a real laugh, a big laugh. “See, that’s what I mean,” he said, talking to me through the rearview, glancing back and forth between the rearview and the windshield as he drove. “Saying stuff like that? When we’ve got you like we do? That’s tough. I like that. It impresses me.”
I shrugged again. I wondered if Jeff being impressed meant he wasn’t going to kill me.
I fell silent for a while and Jeff fell silent too. He drove the growling Camaro along the winding road until we reached a turnoff hidden in the trees. He turned there, and we started heading over broken gravel back up the hill, back to where we’d been before.
I looked out the side window, past the hulking—not to mention smelly—shape of Ed P. Outside, I saw that we were in deserted territory again. Empty, rolling hills. A spreading dark oak tree with a flat, dark lake underneath it. The sky.
Not much to see—and no way to escape. I looked away and tried to forget my fear by picking a few more splinters out of my bleeding hand.
After a while Jeff started talking again. “I’m gonna tell you something,” he said. “Normally, if a guy does what you did, if a guy hits me like that, I gotta do something about it, I can’t just let something like that go unanswered. You see what I mean?”
I sighed. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”
“Normally? A guy does something like that to me, I gotta do something back to him, only a hundred times worse, enough times over to put him in the hospital. You can understand that, right?”
I didn’t answer. I felt my stomach drop. Getting put in the hospital didn’t sound like a happy end to my day.
“But I don’t know,” Jeff went on. “What you did. The way you were. The things you say. The way you ran right into that train . . .” He gave a kind of thoughtful sniff as he guided the car around another turn. Now we were bouncing and bounding over a dirt road, past trees, hills, more deserted territory. “I
like
you, Sam,” Jeff said then.
I couldn’t keep the surprise off my face. Jeff was the kind of guy people feared. The kind of guy people treated politely. It was odd to have him tell me he liked me.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You’re just the sort of guy I like to have around me. You’re the sort of guy I want on my team, if you see what I’m saying. Really, I can use a tough guy like you.”
I didn’t know how to answer. No one had ever said they wanted me on their team in anything.
The car came to a stop. I tried to look out past Jeff’s head, out through the windshield, but I couldn’t see much. Then the doors opened and everyone got out. Harry Mac grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out too.
The Camaro was parked in a sandy spot, a sort of driveway. There was an old barn in front of us. Brown, unpainted, the clapboards rotten and splintering. Around us was . . . well, nothing. A hilltop. Trees in the distance. No other building or person in sight. Not even a sheep.
Jeff came around and stood in front of me. I looked up at him—up, because he was taller than me by about a head.
His rat-like face broke into a grin. “I mean it,” he said. “I like you, Sam.”
Then he punched me in the stomach—hard. Really hard. I gasped and lost my breath and bent over. Then I sank to my knees and gasped some more.
“That was for hitting me,” Jeff said, standing over me. “I can’t just let that pass. You understand, right?”
“Sure,” I managed to gasp after a second. “Sure, what’s not to understand?”
Then Jeff reached down and grabbed me by the shirt collar. He hoisted me roughly to my feet. He slapped me twice in the face. It stung like fire and made me so angry I wanted to strangle him. But I managed to control myself because I didn’t want to die. Through tear-filled eyes I squinted at his blurred, grinning face.
“Now that we got that out of the way,” Jeff said, “I think you and me are gonna be friends. What do you think about that? You want to be friends with me, Sam?”
I gasped a few more times before I got my breath back. Then I thought about it. I thought:
Well, why not? Friends with Jeff Winger. That could actually be kind of interesting
.
So after a second or two, I said, “Okay. Sure.”