Sulphur and Folded Clothes

What Now? Chapter 3

When the sun lazily slunk through the window, the sacks where the boy had lain hours since where piled up in a corner of the cramp space. A peculiar breakfast lay in front of him- foodstuffs in different stages of consumption. The sweetest, a dry lump of honeycomb, days old now, was almost completely gone, though the bread was paid the most attention to. Living on the streets and all alone, you soon learn that bread is best eaten right after you've stolen it front the bakers.
He hated fruit. From the ages of puny to responsible, children, well, most of them, refuse to eat any type of fruit, if not forced to. Once responsibility and puberty have forced their way past, fruit is likened to and eaten voluntarily.

Clump.

Clump.

Clump clump.

Hang on, breakfast could wait. He bundled the food quietly into a grimy cheesecloth (also stolen) and stowed it in his pocket.

Clump screeeee-ek. 

Something was moving around, and it was terrifying him. The rope swinging loose out of the skylight grew taut on the ledge, and the boy began to scramble away into the scarce shadows. No. Please. Any time but now, he thought, but he came up short. A meaty arm fumbled blindly like a fish out of water, and the boy crept forward like the breeze. He reached towards the iron ring which secured the rope. He watched in horror as the owner of the hand regained balance and hold on the hatch ledge, getting ready to pull themselves up.

Involuntarily, he let out a squeak and shrunk back again, as the top of a balding head became visible. Wrinkled forehead unwrinkled, heavily sunken eyes widening, and a terrifying sentence escaped the stretched lips of the infiltrator.
"Found you at last." He wasn't smiling kindly, though. Easily overpowering the boy, he grabbed his arm and forced him down out to the ground.

Sitting awkwardly on the ground, the boy shivered and nursed his ankle where he had fallen. The infiltrator, identified as Jake, the local beefer, was picking up rocks from the ground and crushing them with one blow of the larger stones bordering the firepit. His battered phone lay on the ground beside the piles of stony dust left by the destroyed pebbles, where he had tossed it after making a phone call mostly filled with grunts, 'yea, uhuh' and illegible words growled so deep it swamps the phone's microphone.

After a few more minutes of this,  a large and muddy van bounced up the lane and screeched around in a circle. The door swung open, and from inside jumped out two more of Jake's friends. One of them held a boy-sized barley sack.

Leering at each other, and at the boy, the three of them closed in the only escape route the boy had.
'Stop,' he croaked, voice raw with unuse,
'Please,  just leave me alone!'

Needless to say, his pleas fell on deaf ears. Jake caught hold of one of the boy's flailing arms and dragged him up, still screaming dryly, and prepared to stuff him into the sack. Then all at once, the hold on him disappeared. It had happened again. Jake and his pals' clothes and shoes were folded up and lying on the ground, no trace of their owners. The sack too, was there. The phone on the rock bordering the firepit began to ring consistently, though the boy made no move to answer it. All around him was the powerful smell of eggs. Rotten eggs.