moonlight. We keep watching. Dude’s not moving. Doesn’t even blink.
Then the lizard skitters out from under the suitcases and winds his way to the greasy lawn mower near the door. Fee sees him from out of the corner of her eye. I don’t have a chance to cover her mouth before she screams again. Fuuuccckkk.
I nudge the lizard toward a gap in the wall with my toe. Fee’s scream hangs in the air.
Out the window, dude’s on the move, goose-stepping through the weeds toward us. But the little shaved-head girl appears from out of nowhere, sneaking up behind the guy. Where did she come from?
She calls out to him. We can’t hear what she says, but he stops, and makes a six-point turn to face her, like it’s all happening in slow motion. She moves a little closer.
We watch the dude raise his arm and swat at the little girl. She dodges his hand, and starts to back away. Then he reaches out with both arms and starts after her, like a zombie. That’s when Fee and I bust out of the shed.
We didn’t talk about it. Didn’t check for copters and drones and bounty hunters. We ran straight out into the stinking, dusty wind, screaming, “Hey! Hey! Leave her alone!”
The guy turns around, and we see his face. He totally looks like the undead—unblinking eyes, just no one home. He starts taking uneven steps toward us, and the little girl seems scared.
Fee and I step to the guy, calling out to the little girl to run away, but she doesn’t. And the dude—it’s like he “comes to” for a sec, and he starts blinking, and I can see he recognizes us. He breaks out into this huge, ugly grin, and turns around and starts back for his Airstream—no doubt to get his phone. The little girl tries to stop him, but he pushes her into the trash cans beside the front porch.
Fee grabs his arm, saying, “Please. Stop.” He throws her off, then shakes his finger at us, saying things in Spanish that I do not understand. Sounded like he was stroking out.
The little girl gets up and dodges the dude as she runs into the Airstream. The man stumbles after her. And that’s when we hear the sound of a chopper coming up over one of the hills. We can’t run back to the shed across the open yard without being seen—and we gotta stop this guy from hurting this little girl, and calling the cops. So we run for the trailer too.
Hoarder. Piles of crap everywhere in a space already too tight. Stuff he must’ve taken from people’s trash—broken chairs and old computers, bulb-less lamps, and stacks and stacks of hardcover English books. I nearly gagged from the smell—cream of sewage soup.
The old TV is on—pictures of us flashing on the screen. He points to the screen and back at us, and he nods ‘cause he knows he just won the lottery. Then he’s muttering, stumbling over crap on the floor as he’s looking for his phone in the mess. We can’t see the little girl, but we hear her moving around in a curtained-off room at the back.
Fee’s trying to talk to the dude, telling him that we are innocent, that we didn’t detonada the bomb, and please don’t turn us in, kinda like the way I’d pleaded with Javier when we got here. But he just keeps looking for his phone. On the counter I see a line of black ants marching toward a peanut butter–covered knife, so I nab it and hold it behind my back. My hands are shaking bad.
Thought dude was looking for his phone, but when he turns around, he has a gun. He gestures us toward a couple of broken chairs. He wants us to sit. Never imagined it would end this way. I think of my mother. And I think of my blog, and how I won’t have a chance to tell the whole story. That I’ll never press Post. Maybe I should have started at the end instead of the beginning.
Through the window we can see the helicopter banking in a circle over the clearing. The guy with the gun turns his attention to the copter too. I wonder if we could overpower him and take the gun. He’s got the shakes, which is terrifying. When he turns back to us, I’m really afraid he’s gonna pull the trigger by accident. He stuffs his free hand into his