feet.
He watched for another minute or two anyway, as if Mr. Boots might suddenly appear from out of nowhere.
Pushed against the wall beside the door was a metal bowl that Davy had eaten tomato soup from earlier. Beside it, resting in a congealed puddle of that soup, was a giant metal spoon that had been too big for Davy’s mouth but that he’d finally managed to sip from the way a grown-up might have sipped from a shovel blade. The bowl didn’t look like any soup bowl Davy had ever seen. To Davy, it looked like the dish they used for dog food back home. It was heavy, its bottom weighted to keep it from tipping over. Davy picked it up, leaving the spoon where it was, and swung it through the air. It whooshed, and Davy smiled just a little.
If Mr. Boots was on the other side of the door, at least Davy would have something to use as a shield, or maybe even a weapon. He hefted the bowl and took a deep breath.
Davy reached for the doorknob still expecting a trick, a trap, half assuming he would be electrocuted when his fingers wrapped around the metal, but the doorknob felt cool in his hand. The room in general was hot, and the knob shouldn’t have been any different, but it was. Davy twisted it slowly, hearing the creaking from within, the click when the door unlatched from the frame and swung toward him.
The hinges creaked. Davy grimaced and waited for the pounding boot-steps to come down the hall, for Mr. Boots to discover and punish him.
No boot-steps. No Mr. Boots.
He retightened his grip on the bowl and swung the door in fast, thinking one quick squeak was better than a whole bunch of little ones. He kept hold of the door so it wouldn’t slam into the bedroom wall and took his first quiet step into the hallway.
His bare feet padded across the floor. His sneakers were somewhere else in the house. Mr. Boots had allowed him to wear them once, when the two of them had gone into the back yard to chop firewood, which had seemed to a sweating Davy like the most unnecessary chore ever, but then he’d taken them away again and left Davy barefoot.
Davy padded farther into the hall, looking back over his shoulder, then forward, and then back again so fast he almost lost his balance and fell. The bathroom—the real bathroom with the running water and the toilet paper and the sink, which he had still not been allowed to use— was behind him. Mr. Boots’s bedroom was ahead on the right, his door closed and no light coming from underneath.
Davy almost tiptoed. He walked with his arms held up in the air at his sides the way he’d seen cat burglars do in the cartoons.
The bowl was too heavy to lift for long, and once Davy had passed the dark bedroom door, he lowered his arms and continued. The bowl brushed once against his knee and felt popsicle cold.
Now that he had left his room, he could tell it was night. The single hallway window, which had no curtains or shades or blinds or anything, might as well have been painted black. If Davy hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the whole house was buried way down deep in the ground, like one of those nuclear bunkers movie people sometimes used to hide away from whatever war they happened to be in. But it wasn’t totally dark. A light shone somewhere on the other side of the house, in the kitchen or the dining room maybe, and Davy could just make out the floor ahead of him and the few pictures hanging on the hallway walls to either side.
The place wasn’t huge. Besides the two bedrooms and the bathroom, there was only a small kitchen, a dining room (not much bigger than the breakfast nook they had back home and nowhere near the size of their dining room), and a living room with a sofa and a couple of stinky old armchairs that might have come from a dump or the side of the road.
There was no television set and no telephone. The fridge was a rusty thing similar to one his grandma and grandpa had, what they called an icebox, and must not have kept food very cold. At least, nothing Mr. Boots had ever served Davy had been any colder than room temperature, and he had yet to find a single piece of ice in his water, which was the only thing he’d had to drink since being brought here.
He missed soda, missed milk, even missed the tomato juice his daddy sometimes drank, though Davy thought it tasted like drinking metal. If he got out of here, the first thing he’d do was get a great big bottle of Dr. Pepper and suck it down to the very last drop.
He moved through the shadowy living room and into the dining room, which was almost filled by a warped wooden table and a pair of chairs that weren’t anything close to matching. The light came from the kitchen, through a doorway on the other side of the table, but Davy didn’t go that way.
Still holding the bowl, holding it more out of habit now than out of any fear he might need to use it in a fight for his life, Davy headed for the back door. It was the door he’d gone through when they’d chopped wood that day, a door with a whole mess of glass all separated into teensy panes by crooked, chipped strips of wood. Davy would have rushed right out into the dark night, although he couldn’t see through the glass in the door until he’d practically pressed his nose up against it, but before he could let himself out, something on the floor caught his attention.
He bent down, placed the bowl softly on the linoleum so it wouldn’t make a sound, and picked the thing up. A flashlight. He flicked the switch to see if it worked and was almost blinded by the dazzling ray of light that shot into his face.
He squeezed his eyes shut and blindly flipped off the light, but for a long time afterward, bolts of purple lightning streaked across his vision like something out of a science fiction rainstorm. Stupid, Davy thought, knowing he should have been prepared for the shock of the light after so much time in the dark and that he should at least have pointed the flashlight away from himself before turning it on. He blinked his watering eyes and waited until the lightning storm died down.
Okay, Davy thought. He left the bowl on the floor, deciding he probably wouldn’t need it anymore, and kept the flashlight instead. It seemed a little strange, Mr. Boots leaving the flashlight on the floor that way, where it could get kicked and maybe broken, but Davy guessed Mr. Boots wasn’t any sort of normal. He let himself out of the house, a rectangle of light and his own long shadow beating him through the doorway.
Since the car crash, Davy’s back had been a little sore when he twisted it too much or tried to move too fast. The wood chopping, which for Davy had actually consisted mostly of carrying armload after armload of quartered logs from the chopping block to the wood pile along the side of the house, and endless hours spent lying on the skimpily covered floors probably hadn’t helped. As he moved through the back yard, Davy felt the twinge just above his bottom and tried to ignore it.
He stepped out of the pooled light and into the darkness, flipping on the flashlight again, not looking directly at the beam this time, pointing it ahead of him, into the woods. The ax jutted out from the tree stump where Mr. Boots had left it. Beyond stood a wheelbarrow that might not have been used in a million years, its front tire flat and almost completely hidden by the grass grown up tall around it. Davy passed these things without a second thought and hurried into the trees. Whenever his beam of light found a sharp rock or a pointy- looking stick on the ground, he moved carefully around it, mindful of his bare feet.
He hadn’t paid much attention when they’d come to the house for the first time, had been worrying more about the stranger with the wormy lips than about which direction was which or where they’d left the truck. Now, hurrying deeper into the woods, Davy wasn’t really sure where he was going, but it didn’t matter. Even if he’d known where the truck was, he couldn’t drive it. He was just a kid, with legs so short they wouldn’t have reached to the pedals, and he didn’t know the first thing about driving except that it was something mommies and daddies did. Not little kids. He’d never planned on heading for the truck. The first thing to do was get himself far far away from Mr. Boots. Then he’d worry about roads and directions.
He stepped up onto a fallen tree. The crumbling bark shifted beneath his feet, and for a second, it almost felt like walking through sand at the beach, until he stepped off again and onto hard dirt, pine needles, fallen leaves, and low-growing brush. His flashlight danced in his hands, shining from tree trunks to the ground ahead, from the limbs above to those low-hanging ones that tried to smack him in the face.
