A Kingdom of Our Own

Chapter Nineteen - Cold Blood

After spending an hour standing by the side of the road without luck, Harry and Dalton decided it would be for the best if they started to walk towards Waterville and tried to get a pickup along the way instead. At the end of the day, even if they had to walk the whole way it would only take them two or three hours to do so, still enabling them to arrive in town by early evening.

Harry began walking and Dalton instinctively followed, which irritated him because he was relying on the person who had almost got them lost the previous day due to his ego and arrogant nature. If there was anything he hated about his friend, it was his inability to ever accept he was wrong. But he followed anyway, rubbing his arm and feeling the bumps from the mosquito bites, his skin dirty from spending yet another night in the woods. There was a thin sliver of blood on the palm of his right hand, probably from a thorn or nettle bush that he had brushed past.

They walked on for a while without sighting any cars, and soon the road opened out and the surrounding forest gave way for vast, open fields, spreading out endlessly in every direction.

“Hey y’know, we don’t have to go straight to your Godfather’s place. We could do a little more exploring before we decide to settle down,” Harry said as he examined the map under the bright rays of sunlight.

Dalton almost punched him. He stopped and glared at him for a moment; hands placed firmly on his hips and then kept on walking. There was no way in hell that he was going to spend another night in the great outdoors. He couldn’t last much longer without the homely comforts he’d enjoyed all of his life and he found it difficult to understand how Harry was coping so well. Harry ran along beside him with the map. “Hey, I was just kidding!” he called, although deep down he had been hoping for a little more action in their travels. Although he’d promised himself to tone down his character since leaving Portland, he couldn’t help but crave danger. It was his guilty pleasure.

Dalton ignored his pleads of innocence.

He was sweaty, tired and fed up of walking, but was spurred on by the idea of having a roof over his head and some hot, heavy food. The Amish had a reputation for good food. Skandar, Dalton’s Godfather, had mentioned the famous Amish Sixth Layer Dinner and Shoo Fly Pie, and for some reason the vision of these fresh, home cooked dishes stuck in his mind and made his stomach rumble.

There weren’t many places you could eat food like that – fresh and original recipes, not the readymade, packaged crap he always had to eat at home. Amish communities were literally unheard of in the western states and Dalton wondered why they’d chosen to live here, so far away from their family in Pennsylvania. Then again the same question could be asked about he and Harry for that matter, or Skandar even.

They walked on a further half mile before any vehicles passed by, when a large cargo truck overtook them and blared its horn.

“Hey, get out the road!” a heavily built, bearded man yelled out the window at them.

“Asshole” Harry shouted back defiantly, giving him the finger as the truck sped off into the distance. “None of these wet ends will stop for us,” he complained.

A few short minutes later though their luck turned when a light blue Ford ’65 F100 truck came into view. Harry held out his hand, expecting it to come zooming past, but instead it slowed to a steady halt beside them. Finally someone had stopped! The passenger window rolled down and a man who must have been in his early twenties poked his head out. He had a black goatee beard and dark hair that was shaven down to a grade three.

“Where are you boys headed?” he asked.

“Waterville,” Harry replied, eyeing a tattoo of a snake on the man’s left arm. Seeing that did admittedly unsettle him a little and made him wonder whether or not they could trust them. He’d read about some gangs who used tattoos to mark their membership, like many of Gavin’s closer friends had at school to symbolise their allegiance. Were these guys the local thugs, or was he just being irrational and paranoid?