and the cellular began searching for service. Trevor pulled the antenna all the way out, not knowing if it mattered.
The screen read:
Trevor watched and waited.
Still
When the screen changed and Trevor saw the first little bar in the corner, he almost cheered. But then the bar disappeared, and Trevor frowned. The searching started again.
Trevor looked at the truck and then at the phone. Not bothering to shut it, he stuffed the cell into his shirt pocket and hopped onto the truck’s bumper. He scrambled up the windshield onto the top of the cab, pulled the phone out again, and waited.
One bar.
No bars.
In another corner of the phone’s small screen, the picture of the battery went from half full to only filled a little. Trevor groaned.
The single bar did not return.
Trevor finally closed the phone and crawled off the truck.
He supposed he could have climbed a tree, squirreled his way up to the very top and tried the phone again, but what if he fell? What if he cracked his head open and his brains fell out and he died? Or what if he was okay but he landed on his pocket and the phone snapped in half? He couldn’t risk that. Zach was counting on him. Trevor was counting on himself.
He looked around again and decided he really only had one choice. The trees directly behind the house seemed level with where he stood now, which meant at least they weren’t downhill. Whether the ground got higher beyond the trees or not, Trevor couldn’t tell. For all he knew, there might be a cliff or a gully, a river or a lake. He might walk through the trees and end up slipping into a mudslide and zooming over the edge of a waterfall like something from an action movie. Who knew?
Trevor shrugged his shoulders a little and started for the woods.
He walked with the phone open and held out in front of him, watching the screen for a bar and using the itsy bit of light coming from the thing to help guide his way, pressing the
He
Trevor didn’t like that. If something was going to try to gobble him up, he wanted to know it was coming.
Trevor pushed through brush and dead thickets, got smacked in the face by a low-hanging branch and swatted at it angrily. He should have paid closer attention to where he was walking, but his eyes stayed glued to the phone’s screen.
He stubbed his toe on a rock or a tree stump and hissed.
He circled around another tree and found himself at the bottom of a little hill. He climbed.
One bar.
He stopped. The bar didn’t disappear. He climbed a little farther up the hill, and the bar stayed there.
Holding the phone in one hand and poking at it with the other, tongue in the corner of his mouth, Trevor keyed the seven digits that had been his phone number since before he was born but that he had only recently forced himself to memorize. He hit
It rang. And it rang again.
His mommy’s voice came on the line, and Trevor smiled, but then he recognized the words and realized he was hearing their stinking answering machine, hearing his mommy’s voice but not really his mommy while she talked about her computer job and all sorts of things he didn’t understand. He waited for the beep and said, “Mommy? Are you there?”
No mommy. He waited a second and said, “Mommy?” one last time before pulling the phone from his face and stabbing the
Where could she be? Sleeping? Going potty? He guessed she might be doing either thing. Maybe if he waited ten minutes and tried again, she’d be there. But what if she was gone? Or what if she was watching a late movie on TV the way she and Daddy used to do, with a big bowl of popcorn on the sofa beside her and the ringer turned off so nobody could interrupt the show?
It didn’t matter. He couldn’t wait ten minutes. Zach was still inside, and the bad man was wandering around somewhere, maybe hunting after Trevor at that very moment.
Something moved in the bushes.
Trevor squatted down a little, as if the something might come flying at his head. Another rustling followed, and a small and furry creature waddled out into the open. A raccoon. Trevor shook his head and straightened.
The raccoon moved along, not looking at Trevor, not seeming to notice him at all, and Trevor returned his attention to the cell phone.
He knew only one other number. He tried it. The phone rang again but then beeped at him. Trevor peeked at the screen. The battery icon flashed.
“Yes?” said a voice that sounded like a scared-little-boy version of his daddy, “Hello.”
When Trevor talked, he did so as fast as he could. If the phone’s battery died before he gave his daddy the directions he’d memorized, he would never have another chance.
The phone beeped mid-sentence, and Trevor somehow managed to talk a little bit faster.
From his place in the bushes, Hank watched the raccoon cross the bare patch of land and re-enter the undergrowth on the other side. He wanted to jump out and stomp it to the ground. A raccoon was a troublesome, dirty little thing.
And so was the boy.
No, wait. That wasn’t right. Davy was a good boy. Davy was a perfectly fine little boy.
The child worried over the phone and then pressed it to his ear. Upon hearing Davy’s awkward progress through the woods, Hank had originally intended to move directly to him, snatch him up and drag him back into the house, but now he thought he’d wait. He wasn’t sure how the kid had gotten loose in the first place. He knew he’d locked the door—the key was in his pocket. Davy was clever, he guessed. Davy couldn’t be chained. He wanted to see what Davy did next.
The boy talked, and Hank extracted a new toothpick from his pocket. The tip slid between his lips and poked
