poking his rifle barrel at the girl’s rear-end. She made an attempt to crawl away, swatting ineffectually at the rifle as she went.
Daniel tried to slink further back into the shadows, as slowly as he could manage. He fought the urge to move as fast as his body wanted to. ‘Quick movements can be seen a whole lot easier than slow ones.’ He actually heard his father’s voice say this inside his head.
Shock was what kept Daniel from moving further away. Some unknown part of human nature, the dark part, would not let him shift his eyes away from watching the rest of what took place. The large rolling door opened, and an orange dump truck came out from the shadowy interior. The truck deftly maneuvered through the gate and around the body. It pulled forward a ways then backed up. Two men jumped out of the cab wearing blue coveralls, both running around to the back of the truck.
The city truck blocked most of Daniel’s view, but he could just make out what was happening. The workers pulled a wheelbarrow out of the truck’s bed and loaded it up with the packs, and a few other items were tossed in alongside those. Daniel figured these things must have been taken off of the man’s body. From the posture of the worker that he could see in back of the truck, Daniel knew that the lifeless flesh of the man had been tossed into the back of the truck.
One of the Police men pushed the wheelbarrow back up to the open rolling door while the other two dragged the woman along by the wrists and hair. She seemed to lose consciousness at some point, offering no more resistance as she disappeared from view, pulled into the belly of the Warehouse. The workers locked the gate after the policemen made it through with the new entertainment. Both of them quickly jumped back into the idling, hunter-orange truck. The metal rolling door closed at exactly the same time the truck pulled away, turning to the north on Klondike Avenue.
Daniel tried to lie out as flat as he could against the cool block wall of the pressure house, hoping against hope that the combination of being in the shadows and the brief period of time that the truck had enough of an angle to see him by were enough to keep him hidden from view. The truck zoomed away, giving no indication of slowing down. Daniel crawled away after a few, torturous minutes of silence had passed.
He had to try and get far enough away, as to be out of sight of the sentries he had seen up on the roof, before turning to head east. After crashing through the underbrush of overgrown and abandoned lawns, Daniel made it back onto the cleared water line. Taking a minute to catch his breath and to make certain that he had not been spotted, or followed, he jogged the entire way to the creek.
It would be dark soon, and this alone was forcing Daniel to move slower than he wanted to. When his stomach started growling with hunger, it seemed to sap the rest of his strength. He forced himself to stop running and pull a small baggie out from the pack. Robotically, he nibbled at some dog jerky, washing it down with some warm water from his canteen. Even though he had not eaten for several hours, what he had just seen, and the burned-in images of the bloodied bodies in his backyard, made it a struggle to keep the small amount of sustenance down.
Daniel raced down along flourishing flood plains. He trampled cattails and stomped through patches of nettles with little regard to the obvious trail that he was leaving behind. The darkening sky and long weeds began working against him, bringing his pace to a slow trudge. Suddenly, it got very dark. The sun had bowed out for the day, but its light still muddled the reddish-brown atmosphere. As of yet, no stars had shone through, and the moon, which could be seen low on the horizon, was of little help to travel by.
There would be no refuge found at the Warehouse. Either the police, or the Council, or that politicking Mayor, or maybe even all parties working in collusion, had commandeered the last of the supplies for themselves. The way they had murdered that couple looked well practiced. Whoever it was that remained in charge of the holed-up people in the