If only Jamie Cole had ridden past the truck parked by the side of the road that day, everything might have been different.
If she’d been watching the road and not the trees, the child might not have seen the truck at all. She was riding her pink Schwinn toward the Gas ’N Sip after school that day, where Danny and Jenn and the others had agreed to meet up for a slushie. It was already becoming too cold for things like slushies now that fall was upon them, but Jamie wanted to pretend it was still summer and that she hadn’t recently been sentenced to a dreary nine months in the sixth grade. If she breathed in deep enough and closed her eyes, she could smell the pine and ignore the decaying maple leaves that signified the onset of fall and the new school year.
At least there was Mrs. Kelly’s orchard; they still played there after school even though the old woman herself was sick. Danny was worried that she might not come back from the hospital this time. But wouldn’t the grown-ups say so if that was true?
Jamie hadn’t gone to the orchard for the past couple of days because of what happened in New York with the airplanes; everyone had been glued to their televisions. But slowly, people were venturing outdoors again. Be on alert, she thought to herself. Terrorists could be anywhere. That was what Marcus and Danny said. The terrorists could even be—
Waving at her. Someone was waving at her from inside the semi parked on the side of the road.
Jamie slowed her bicycle, but did not stop. While she was a friendly child, she was not a stupid one and knew about the dangers of speaking to strange men in cars. And trucks. Still, she was curious. What if someone needed help? Then again, what if this was a terrorist? She wasn’t positive what a terrorist looked like, but from all the pictures on the news she thought terrorists were foreign and this man didn’t look foreign. She weighed her options. If anything bad happened, she was close enough to pedal to the Gas ’N Sip quickly; Jamie could see the dusty maroon sign in the shape of a tilted soda cup from here. She backed her bike up a bit and came closer, hair falling in loose strings down her striped turtleneck sweater as she squinted up at the driver.
The young man in the driver’s seat seemed relieved to see her. He had on a plaid shirt and baseball cap, like the kind her stepdad wore on hauls. She wondered briefly if they were pals. He cranked down the window of his truck and peeked out.
“Oh, hey there, sweet pea! I sure am glad to see you.” He waved a sheet of paper through the window, an exasperated look on his face. “Look, I’m lost here. Think you can help me out?”
“S-sure,” Jamie replied. After all, hadn’t she been taught to obey adults, but also beware of strangers? She wondered what her mother would do and had no idea. The woman was an ongoing reconstruction project so that was a difficult question to answer. Jamie decided to keep the bike beneath her, just in case, like a trusty steed. She walked it over towards the driver’s side on her tip-toes, the truck’s tall cab towering over her.
The driver held out a piece of paper—a map. “Shoot, pumpkin, can ya see where I’m pointing? I need to get there. Do you know the best route?”
Jamie, closer now, looked first at the man’s eyes and then followed his finger to the point on the map. She could see that it was not a regular map, but a computerized print-out with a familiar address on it and a star marking the location he was looking for. That’s my address, my house, she thought, and blinked up at him. She saw his eyes once more and thought with a shiver, They’re like teeny pieces of ice.
That was when the door came crashing open, knocking her to the ground. Her heart raced and she scrambled to get up but then somebody else was there, clamping something over her mouth and making the world swim before her eyes. As the hands descended upon her the face seemed to shift with a monstrous force, becoming something else altogether.