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Going not away from anything, he told himself, but toward something. Some better place to string a rope between a pair of trees and hang their tarp from it. Some secluded place. All alone he’d have slept anywhere, but not tonight. Not with her. He’d have slept by the roadside with trucks screaming past or under a ragged outcropping with bats fidgeting over his head. He’d have slept in a newdug grave if he’d found one. But not now. He thought he’d pictured this trip pretty well but he hadn’t pictured this part. Their exposure in that makeshift tent. Her exposure.
    The fear constricted his throat and made his breath come harder, and he jogged on as long as he could but not long. The dirt road was washboarded and riddled with potholes and he told himself he didn’t want to break a leg in the early dark. Where would they be then. He looked back and saw his footprints in the dirt and didn’t like seeing them. Standing there panting. What if somebody. What if. Don’t think. He set the girl down and didn’t let go of her hand and she wouldn’t have let him anyway. “Let’s keep going,” he said.
    “Where,” she said.
    “Just a little farther.”
    “I’m hungry.”
    “Me too.”
    They slowed so he could find an apple in her backpack and they shared it bite by bite. The PharmAgra label got caught in his teeth and he spat most of it out. She was still hungry and so was he, but neither of them said it. They’d eaten the apple down to the seeds and the stem and they were starving but who wouldn’t be.
    She said, “We could plant these seeds if we wanted.”
    “Sure,” he said. “Grow ourselves an apple tree. But that’d take a few years.” Working at the rest of that sticker with a fingernail. “We’re better off eating what we packed, don’t you think? That’s quicker.”
    She sighed and gave a theatrical shrug. “I meant when we get home.” Like wouldn’t he ever understand anything.
    They marched on. They came to a ruined intersection with lamp posts and sign posts and a traffic signal still hanging overhead on wires. Little gabled roofs over the stacked holes where the colored lights used to be. All of it hanging dark up there against the rising moon. He pointed it out and described what of it she couldn’t see. He said it sort of looked like a big birdhouse. She asked him what kind of birds lived there and he said they probably didn’t have birds here anymore. Just like they didn’t have them at home. Which he guessed wasn’t much of an answer, so he said maybe robins. Robins like in the book she had. Robin redbreasts. But they’re all sleeping now. It’s bedtime for everybody.
    They turned there and went up a little distance to where some trees grew. Settled in among them and chose two and hung the rope from one to the other and draped the tarpaulin over the rope like a pup tent. Got supper out. Ate it cold rather than risk a fire, even a low one, even here surrounded by close-set trees and undergrowth dense with the last of summer.
     
    *
     
    Whoever woke them up had a flashlight. Over the years Weller had found plenty of flashlights in the dump and he had devised theories about how they worked, but he’d never seen one lit up. This one was shining into his eyes at close range and the man holding it was drawing back to kick him in the kidneys a second time, so he didn’t have the opportunity to think about it any. He just recoiled. Recoiled and half sat up and put himself between whoever this was and his daughter.
    “Hands behind your head.”
    Weller reached to retrieve his glasses.
    “Behind your head or off it comes.” A clicking sound in the dark. “And then who’ll look after your baby girl?”
    Weller put his hands behind his head.
    “That’s better.”
    The voice belonged to an old man. A powerful old man by how he kicked and a cunning old man by where he kicked, but an old man just the same. An old man who’d lived on cigarettes and solitude by the sound of his