instead of the A/C. As a result, both of them heard the voice. It was faint but clear.
“Help! Help! Somebody help me!”
Brother and sister exchanged startled looks. Cal, currently behind the wheel, pulled over immediately. Sand rattled against the undercarriage.
Before leaving Portsmouth they had decided they would steer clear of the turnpikes. Cal wanted to see the Kaskaskia Dragon in Vandalia, Illinois; Becky wanted to make her manners to the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine in Cawker City, Kansas (both missions accomplished); the pair of them felt they needed to hit Roswell and see some extraterrestrial shit. Now they were well south of the Twine Ball—which had been hairy, and fragrant, and altogether more impressive than either of them had anticipated—out on a leg of Route 73. It was a well-maintained stretch of two-lane blacktop that would take them the rest of the way across the flat serving platter of Kansas to the Colorado line. Ahead of them were miles of road with nary a car or truck in sight. Ditto behind.
On their side of the highway, there were a few houses, a boarded-up church called the Black Rock of the Redeemer (which Becky thought a queer name for a church, but this was Kansas), and a rotting Bowl-a-Drome that looked as if it might last have operated around the time the Trammps were committing pop music arson by lighting a disco inferno. On the other side of 73, there was nothing but high green grass. It stretched all the way to a horizon that was both illimitable and unremarkable.
“Was that a—” Becky began. She was wearing a light coat unzipped over a midsection that was just beginning to bulge; she was well along into her sixth month.
He raised a hand without looking at her. He was looking at the grass. “Shhh. Listen!”
They heard faint music coming from one of the houses. A dog gave a phlegmy triple bark—roop-roop-roop—and went still. Someone was hammering a board. And there was the steady, gentle susurration of the wind. Becky realized she could actually see the wind, combing the grass on the far side of the road. It made waves that ran away from them until they were lost in the distance.
Just when Cal was beginning to think they hadn’t after all heard anything—it wouldn’t be the first time they’d imagined something together—the cry came again.
“Help! Please help me!” And, “I’m lost!”
This time the look they exchanged was full of alarmed understanding. The grass was incredibly tall (for such an expanse of grass to be more than six feet high this early in the season was an anomaly that wouldn’t occur to them until later). Some little kid had wandered into it, probably while exploring, almost certainly from one of the houses down the road. He had become disoriented and wandered in even deeper. He sounded about eight, which would make him far too short to leap up and find his bearings that way.
“We should haul him out,” Cal said.
“Pull in to the church parking lot. Let’s get off the side of the road.”
He left her on the margin of the highway and turned into the dirt lot of the Redeemer. A scattering of dust-filmed cars was parked here, windshields beetle bright in the glare of the sun. That all but one of these cars appeared to have been there for days—even weeks—was another anomaly that would not strike them then. But it would later.
While he took care of the car, Becky crossed to the other shoulder. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, “Kid! Hey, kid! Can you hear me?”
After a moment he called back, “Yes! Help me! I’ve been in here for DAYS!”
Becky, who remembered how little kids judged time, guessed that might mean twenty minutes or so. She looked for a path of broken or trampled grass where the kid had gone in (probably making up some video game or stupid jungle movie in his head as he did), and couldn’t see one. But that was all right; she pegged the voice as coming from her left, at about ten o’clock. Not too far in either. Which made sense; if he’d gotten in very far, they wouldn’t have heard him, even with the radio off and the windows open.
She was about to descend the embankment, to the edge of the grass, when there came a second voice, a woman’s—hoarse and confused. She had the groggy rasp of someone who has just come awake and needs a drink of