Slinking from track to track. Watching legs in grimy coveralls walk up and down the rows, pause to look beneath a car, then move on. More waiting. Anne’s heart is thumping loud enough to wake the dead. She tries to imagine an unknown future, in which she meets and surrounds herself with others like her. They are the misunderstood, the mistreated, who had a gap in their home life and who want only love, family, connection. Maybe this will be her chance for that family. If she survives this. If she doesn’t get caught. And then she sees Mitch, lying on the kitchen floor. All that blood. Stealing the money. Cops looking for her. No. Pull your shit together! Not a useful train of thought. Placing her hands over her ears. Bending her head foreword. Quit obsessing, she tells herself. Trot’s hand squeezes her knee. Whispers reassurance. “We’re gonna make it.”

Anne’s head lifts. Her eyes meet his. She musters a tentative smile.

Cinnamon’s head jerks back. Anne says, “What’s wrong?”

“White pickup parked twenty feet away. Looks to be a bull. Probably keeping watch. We gotta wait a little longer. When he drives away, we make a run for it. Not a moment sooner.”

After a few very long minutes, they hear the pop of gravel under tires as the white truck backs up and rolls away. Cinnamon makes eye contact with Anne and Trot. Smiles and says, “Y’all ready?”

Anne gulps and says, “We are.”

“Let’s move,” Cinnamon commands.

Coming from beneath the metal compartment, moving over the empty tracks until they hit another row of railcars. Hearts are pounding, they work their way down the last line of boxcars. They hunker down and duck walk beneath. Thighs burning, they come out the other side and are looking at the chain-link fence, a mere twenty feet away. Beyond it, the woods. Freedom.

From nowhere, a deep voice yells, “They’re down here!”

Turning, they see the muttonchops man leaning against the next car, a tanker, huffing air.

“Now or never,” Cinnamon says. “Follow me. The break in the fence is down here, just past the pole. Come on!”

Running down the fence line, Anne’s dog-bitten leg is throbbing. The yard bull is coming at them. Though he’s not fast, he’s constant.

“Stop!” He yells.

Anne keeps running, through the pain.

Trot yells, “Where is it?”

“Farther down,” Cinnamon says, waving her arm.

Pointing at a large pinkish rock, she says, “There!”

Hands grab the stone and roll it away from the fence, pull back the stiff panel of galvanized chain-link. Trot goes first, snagging his pack on the clipped wire ends. “Shit!” He yells.