Anne’s heart still pounds. She hopes that Mitch is breathing. Hopes his head hurts, though. The sun had dropped from the blue sky to hide behind the trees. Shaky, she pulls her pack off. Unzips it. Still walking, she reaches in for her cell, shrugs the pack back on. Several missed calls from her mother. Anne texts Trot.

Pack a bag. Meet at the shack. Blowout with mom. I might’ve killed Mitch. Ready to forget this town.

A dog barks somewhere. Voices converse from porches. Smells of food being grilled. Barbecued. People tilting back their evening swigs of booze. Sounds. Words. Muffled laughter, music playing, vehicles traveling from other streets, motors revving, everything rising in pitch and volume, vibrating Anne’s eardrums. What if she has killed Mitch? She will go to jail. They will be hunting her down. It will be on the news. People will be looking for her. She will be a fugitive. An outlaw.

Then comes the pinch and clamp of teeth. The growl and tug. Jeans rip in the animal’s slobbering mouth.

Her muscles and tendons exude sudden alarm. “Shit!” she yells, and starts to run. The weight of her life, crammed into her pack, slows her movement over the ground. She cuts over streets, through more yards. Shapes, sounds, and objects blur. The dog pants on her heels. Must be old, or she would have felt the teeth again by now. Anne huffs for air. Her heart punches and punches against the bones surrounding it. Running hard through a field. Finally, in the distance, the condemned lot. Boneyard of cars, all makes and models scattered over the acres. Rusting chain-link fence. Anne runs the perimeter to the back of the property, to what looks like a small barn, its wood grayed with age. The dog huffs and barks behind her as she leaps onto the fence. One foot planted in the wire, hands grasping the top course of rusted links, she swings her free leg up and over. The other leg follows suit, until something latches on—the dog. It had jumped and now has her ankle and a fold of her jeans locked between its jaws, its weight hanging and jerking. She would swear that ligaments and tendons were ripping apart like putty. The dog uses the fence, its paws climbing and bracing, its thick neck jerking. Tugging.

“Get off me, you bitch!” she commands. “Let go!”

The dog is going to shred her leg. So she swings her other leg back over, comes down with all her weight and force, and drives her heel into the dog’s jaw. With a yelp, it releases her leg. It takes everything she has to pull herself back up, swing one leg over the top of the fence, then the other. Weak and spent, she drops to the dirt on the opposite side. For a few seconds everything goes black.