The Fear: Prologue

The fear oozed out of him, all thick and gooey. Like the 200 ounce orange plastic jug of Tide with Color Safe Bleach, about ten feet away from where he crouched, that must have sat out in this sun too long and was now leaking a vaguely sea green line of laundry detergent on the cracked and faded concrete that covered maybe half of the garbage-strewn yard.

How, he wondered, had he ended up crouching in the narrow space between an old storage shed and a back fence. Hiding from some thugs sent to prevent him from testifying against some bad, bad man. He hoped that his hidey hole was good enough but from the way his body shook he had his doubts. The thugs were across the street searching in an abandoned warehouse and he could hear them yelling to each other as each checked the little places he might have been.

The sweat beaded down his forehead and his stomach got tighter each time he heard another voice. Flies and worse were out in the noonday July sun but those he barely noticed, or the rumble of trucks and cars on the next block. None of that mattered, would make a difference in his survival, and so he was bit or not bit by the flies but never lifted his arm to flick them away. He was far more concerned that the motion might somehow reveal his location. One of the thugs had sent a few stray bullets his way when they first approached him and he had no interest in hearing that sound again.

A helicopter flew by overhead, so low he wondered if it was part of the search for him, and he looked up but it wasn’t that close after all and simply continued on and the sound faded. The motion led some of the sweat down to his eyes, so that he finally noticed it and wiped his sleeve across his face. He sighed, took a deep breath, tried to calm down. But then he heard another yell from across the way and risked a look around the side of the shed. One thug was standing out in front of the warehouse; they were done searching and he wanted the other two to come out and move on. A stabbing pain shot through his gut as he realized they weren’t giving up.