Hitchhikers (Wolf Point #1)

-4-

I wake at the base of the tree, staring up into its branches.

I feel comfort when I have slept in nature like this, unlike last night in the barn. Yet I stay to the roads, avoiding the forest. Something about the empty shadows between the trees frightens me.

So alone that even the trucks rumbling by are company to me.

Three years. That should be enough time for everyone to have forgotten. Of course the police don't forget, but so long as my face on the WANTED poster isn't still hanging up at the post office, maybe I can go home and see my mom, let her know I'm okay.

No.

My sixteenth birthday is in two months. If I go home and get caught, I could be tried as an adult. And if they know about all the others... the results of my blackouts...

There have been more than a hundred.

I should hide. The forest offers herself to me. I can feel a presence there, and a pull. If I let myself go, I might disappear into those woods, and no one will hear of Daniel Connors again.

While it might be better for the human race if I do disappear, I have only myself to cling to.

This is partly the reason why I have drifted into the Midwest, away from forests. That, and the winter I can feel coming.

I barely survived my first winter on the run, with its heavy snowfalls and cutting winds. Many nights I spent in homeless shelters, cold and hungry. I made a habit of hanging around in 24-hour Walmarts, sleeping in bathroom stalls at gas stations. More than once I took up a trucker's offer of a night in a cheap motel, though luckily I do not remember most of those nights. There are many nights which are completely gone from my memory.

I try not to think about how many lives were lost that first winter.

Last winter was better, but only because I found an abandoned house and spent my days scrounging through dumpsters for food and whatever I could burn.

I didn't need much food, at the rate I blacked out, though I knew from the remains I found at my abandoned house that I killed mostly animals.

Summers are better. More food around, more places I can sleep. This summer hasn't been so great, and the ribs poking through my chest can attest to that. The animals hide. I am too cold and wet to sleep well.

Now summer is turning into autumn. The rain, the cooler nights. I knew for sure when I started seeing school buses trundling over the patched up roads. Soon the leaves of this tree will turn brown and spiral to the ground.

I've heard that Texas is warm, even in the winter. Out in western Texas, there's lots of open space. No people, no forest. Ghost towns. Maybe I can learn how to hunt rabbits and drink water from cacti. And if Texas is too cold, I'll keep going south, all the way down to Mexico.

Chewing on a blade of wheat grass to keep my stomach from growling, I head off down the road again.