My hand slides down the barrel, lifting the gun in the process.

The voice singing in my head starts to shift and twist. Growing into something lighter. Softer. An echo of one I thought was long forgotten.

I thumb the trigger, screw my eyes shut...

Out loud, I start whisper-singing along with the phantom voice in my head.

—And I let the ocean carry me away.

1

1

Will Foster

The first time I ran away, I was five years old, and I had just watched a minivan run over my dog.

I didn’t get very far, but far enough to scare the hell out of my mother.

With a backpack stuffed with Oreos and a root beer, and my Scooby Doo blanket tucked under a bony arm, I hiked my way down the block to the small neighborhood playground where I found refuge in a rust-streaked, green crawl tube.

To this day, I can remember the stench of fading skunk spray and hot plastic as I spent my afternoon staring out from a star-shaped hole. Willing the whole time for my eyes to stop leaking and my lungs to stop hiccupping and my heart to stop thudding so loud and so fast.

My mom had found me just as the setting sun abandoned me to a world layered in shades of deep violet. Crying and biting her lip, she hugged me. Squeezed me so tight my sandpaper eyes struggled to well up once more.

“Why’d you run, baby?”

“It hurts.”

With gritted teeth, she told me to never scare her like that again. That the city was no place for a little boy to run wild. Grief was like a fever, she said. I just had to let it run its course. Sweat it out, just sweat it out, baby.

She didn’t account for the fact that some fevers don’t break on their own. That sometimes you have to do something drastic in order to heal.

Sometimes the only option is to flee.

Run.

Run, run, run...

August

The sun is high and blinding when I pass the Welcome to Shiloh sign.

Population: 743.

Home of the World-Famous Lackawanna River Viaduct.

The old train bridge carved into the wooden slats of the sign hardly does the real thing justice. Sure, it’s not as massive as I remember. I was only eleven last time I saw it, and that’s usually how these kinds of things go. But there’s still something unsettling about this bridge.

Wrong.

I watch through the tinted visor of my helmet as the dark concrete structure peeks out through the passing trees, growing bigger and bigger on the horizon. A looming shadow against the afternoon sky, it cuts through this small valley town like a relic from mining days gone by.