Born 01 - Born

faster.
    Meg runs as fast as I do. Her footsteps are a whisper in the grass beside me. I burst through the door. The house is dark and silent.
    "Anna? Jake?" The living room is empty. The blankets are gone. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know where they would go. I run down the basement steps into the bunker. Nothing is there, just my panting breath.
    I run back up the stairs. "We need to go hide. They're gone. They might be looking for me."
    "Who?"
    "My friends." The words feel funny in my mouth.
    I grab her sweaty fingers in the dark and pull her back out to the barn. We slip inside the dark of the barn. I drop to my knees in the hay and feel for the hatch. It has hay glued to the top of it. It's impossible to find even in the bright of the day. I only found it because it was open when I arrived.
    I groan, lifting the hatch and whisper, "Hurry, climb down here."
    Leo jumps down into the hole like he has before, many a time. Meg feels for me in the dark and then the hatch. I climb down after her and pull the huge hatch back over the hole.
    I feel in the silence for the stools. I sit and suddenly the pain in my feet is overwhelming. I know they’ve been cut.
    "Did your feet get cut?"
    Meg is closer than I think. Her whisper is right in my face, "No. Momma makes us walk and run in the woods barefoot all the time. They always take the shoes."
    "Smart."
    "Yeah, Momma was a warden at a maximum security prison before. She says she knows all the worst things people can do, and she knows why they do it."
    I shiver at the thought.
    We don't hear voices or noises. Eventually, I fall asleep on the wooden floor against the warm fur of Leo. Meg sleeps against me. She touches me and tries to hold me in her sleep.
    My feet pound too hard for me to get a good night’s sleep.

Chapter Ten

    "It's been five days, Em. He walks to the same spot and makes weird noises. I have a hunting hound. He does the same thing when he wants me to follow him. We need to get following him in the woods."
    She has not stopped talking for five days. Momma this and Momma that. I don’t know what to do to make her be quiet. She doesn’t take my silence as a hint.
    "Yup, that there wolf is trying to tell us the way to go to find them. Are your feet better?"
    I look at the cuts on the bottoms and nod. "They have scabs."
    I rub salve into the bottoms of my feet and pull my thick socks over the scabs. I pull on the boots I had stored in the farmhouse bunker ages ago.
    "For a survival expert, you'd think he woulda told you about thickening the soles of your feet. I can walk across coals with mine." She lifts a foot showing off her padded feet. I want to grimace at the filthy things but I know she's right.
    She throws a huge bone for Leo. He runs and gets it and chews it in the field. "Not so sharp, is he? My hound brings it back."
    I look at the bone and grimace. "Is it a human bone?"
    She shrugs. "Does it matter?"
    Leo picks up the long thin bone and walks toward the same spot in the field he has for five days. He whines.
    "Okay let's follow him, then." I sling on my backpack. I look back at the farmhouse. I've left a note in the bunker under the barn. Anna knows it's my favorite hiding place. My heart hurts. I don’t look behind me. I don’t run through the field. Leo trots along like a real dog. He doesn’t wait at the meeting tree.
    Nothing is the same.
    I open the cabin door and suddenly my life feels lost. I knew I would regret opening the stupid door and helping her. I never imagined the regret would be being separated from them.
    My heart hurts when I think about the kiss I shared with Jake. My stomach hurts when I think about Anna being taken.
    Leo picks up the pace as we enter the woods. I reach out and brush my fingers along the meeting tree. Instead of going the way home to the cabin, he cuts a hard left and we climb a different hill.
    She rambles on and fills the air up with her voice, "So then, when I was eleven, she says that she wants to try to go to the city. So we get all dressed up and I mean bathed and spiffy. We walk all the way to the city, but they don’t just let us in. We have to go through a bunch of tests and other nonsense. The city was brand new. It looked like nothing I've ever seen. Anyway they come to us in the bright white clothes and make me take all my brand new clean clothes off. They burned them. Momma was mad as a wet hen. Aunty Lisa failed the diabetes test they gave us, and so if we wanted to go into the