I must have dozed off again, because when I open my eyes I can tell it's almost morning. I spot Justin standing off a ways and staring at the horizon, I wonder if he got any sleep. I turn around and see everyone else is still asleep. Corinne is laying on the ground with one hand on Molly's arm, Justin's jacket covers her like a blanket. Leo is sprawled out with drool coming out of his mouth, which I can't help but giggle at.
When I turn back around Justin is smiling at me.
"Good morning."
His eyes look puffy from crying, but he seems better than last night.
"I thought you'd be up soon, we need to wake the others up and get moving soon. It's best if we get a head start before the sun comes up. I just wanted to let you guys sleep a little extra."
We both wake everyone up, and we each have a piece of beef jerky and a handful of trail mix for breakfast. Justin tells us not to eat our grapes until we're thirsty, because of the water contents. Corinne looks in the direction of the sun's glow.
"Hey Nerd, what direction does the sun rise?"
Molly scratches a bug bite her arm.
"Uh, east, I think."
Corinne nods.
"We should go west then, there's a river in that direction. Our first priority should be to get water. Unless anyone objects?"
No one does, so we gather out things and begin our long walk. We don't say much at first, but Corinne stays cheerful and tries to make small talk.
"This is kind of cool. We're like gypsies, or vagabonds."
"What's a ragabond?" Leo asks.
"A vagabond . It means wanderer in French. You would've known that if you paid attention to my lessons."
"It's so boring." he grumbles back.
"Maybe that's what we can call ourselves." I say, "The Vagabonds."
"Makes us sound like a bunch of pirates!" Leo hollers excitedly, "The ferocious Vagabonds, the terrors of the great sea!"
We chuckle at his imagination, and Leo runs around fighting imaginary sea monsters. We continue to walk until the sun finally begins to rise. We haven't found anything to shade ourselves yet, so we just sit down and hold our jackets over our heads to block out the sun. Pretty soon my arms are so tired that I just toss my jacket over my head, what I really need right now is sunglasses. We drink a few sips of our water, and nibble at a few bites of food.
"Don't eat unless you can't take the hunger." Justin tells us, "If you eat something dry it'll make you more thirsty. Also you should try to sleep, because we'll be walking the most at night."
We try, but it's so hard with sweat pouring down my back and soaking into my shirt. Fortunately, we're all graced with a bit of wind to ease our suffering.
"Hey April?" Corinne says.
"Yeah."
"Can you put on some music?"
"What should I play?"
"Anything, I just need a distraction."
I open a playlist of all our favorite songs and crank up my mp3, we sit there and try to find our individual happy places. Leo takes out his cars and makes race tracks in the dirt. Molly reads her book, and after Leo gets bored of his cars she passes him the Penderwicks and helps him sound out the words. Justin encourages us to sip from our water every hour, and he lets Leo eat a few grapes.
After a painstakingly long afternoon, Justin's watch finally reads 7 pm. We eat some beef jerky and as the sun touches the horizon we begin walking again.
"Why can't we use our flashlights?" Leo asks.
"We have to save the batteries, and if any planes fly over we could be spotted. It's too risky."
"Can we still play music?" I ask, "They can't hear us from the air, right?"
Justin laughs, "Go ahead. Blast it."
I start a playlist of our favorite songs that are practically ancient now. A nice mix of Queen, Nirvana, Imagine Dragons, 21 Pilots, a little bit of Hozier, the best music to sing along to and help keep us alert. We all sing and laugh at each other's imitations of various singer's accents, but our fun is quickly interrupted by the sound of the mp3's battery dying. Shit, I knew I should have charged it up while the sun was still out. Now I'll have to wait until the morning.
"Damn it!" Leo says, "Now we don't have anything fun to do!"
"Watch your language, kid." Justin warns.
"But you curse all the time!" Leo insists.
"That's because I'm much older."
Leo says a few words under his breath, and Justin chuckles.
"You wanna hear a story?"
"That depends." Leo says suspiciously.
"Don't worry, it's a cool story."
"It better be."
"Oh it is, I'll tell you about how me and Corinne met you."
"Okay, that sounds good. But let me ride on your back."
"Sure, hop up."
We stop for a few seconds so Leo can jump onto Justin's back.
"You already know how we met April and Molly, right?"
"Yeah, they were put into an orphanage and then they escaped and found you guys."
"Yep, and we met you after Corinne graduated. The four of us were walking somewhere when I noticed you following us. I chased you off, but then a few days later you started following us again. I got tired of having to chase you off every other day, so the next time we saw you I just stopped you and asked you why you were following us."
"I asked about Molly's crutch, right?" Leo asks.
"Yep, and I told you that she was born with her leg twisted and that her parents couldn't afford to have it fixed so it stayed that way. I told you to go away after that, but of course you still followed us back to our house."
"All I wanted was a bath!" Leo says defensively.
"If a random dog came over to you, would you give it a bath?"
"No. But I'm not some random dog."
"We didn't know that when we first met you." Justin says, "I thought you might've wanted to steal something. But after Corinne talked to you for a bit she decided you had to stay with us. She said you could sleep over for the night, but at that point she was attached to you. I tried to change her mind. I reminded her that there were already four of us that we were struggling to feed, but she said to me- 'What about April and Molly? We took them in when they needed us most, and look at how wonderful it's been to have them? You've practically become a father to them! They were strangers to us at one point in time like he is. At least give this kid a chance, too.' I hated to admit that she was right, but she was. After a while I did realize that you weren't such a bad kid after all."
"And I realized that you weren't an old meanie." Leo grins maniacally.
"If I'm old, than what does that make Corinne?"
" She doesn't act like an old crab."
"I'm not an old crab! Who taught you your manners?"
"What manners?"
"Ugh, you're hopeless." Justin fluffs Leo's hair.
"Cut that out!"
"Only if you stop calling me an old crab."
"Fine." Leo grumbles.
We're all quiet for a long time, but suddenly we hear the rumble of thunder in the distance and see the distant sky flash. We keep walking, and watch as the clouds get closer to us. I feel a few drops of rain, and before we can say anything water begins pouring from the sky.
The cool water feels amazing after us being so sweaty all day, and it seems to boost Corinne's mood too, because she starts singing Bohemian Rhapsody. We all join in, screaming the lyrics at the top of our lungs as our words get drowned out by the downpour. Leo jumps off of Justin's back and starts running in circles around us, whooping and hollering as he's drenched. Molly laughs at him, but starts to shiver in her soaked coat. Corinne puts her own coat over Molly's shoulders, and walks with her arms folded, trying not to shiver herself.
In a few minutes we're too tired to keep going, and Justin lets us stop for 30 minutes to catch our breath.
"This is really weird. The rain season for Batil is in late November, and it's not even close to then." Justin says, "Put your water bottles out with the caps off, we need to take advantage of the rain while we still have it."
We follow his orders, and spend the rest of our break trying to relax and prepare ourselves mentally for the miles ahead of us. When Justin finally tells us to stand up and keep moving the rain does seem to slow down a little, but we still have to trudge through the thick mud that has accumulated. After another two hours we're even more exhausted and shivering with our hopelessly drenched clothing.
"I think we should stop and sleep as much as we can, we won't make much progress tomorrow if we're exhausted." Corinne suggests.
I can tell Justin wants to keep going, but he doesn't contradict, I'm sure he's as exhausted as the rest of us. We hope that the rain clouds will still hang around tomorrow, since none of us want to be back walking out in the sun just yet. We try to fix up a tent with a few of our coats, but with nothing much to hang them on we take it down and just wear them. We sleep against each other's backs so we don't have to lay completely on the mud and get mud in our face. It's pretty uncomfortable having to sit in basically a giant mud puddle, but at this point I just want to close my eyes and escape reality for a while.