Guns and Gas

“Ah, there’s the truck.”  I say. It only took us two days to get to the truck rather than four. We’d found some bikes a while back and because the run was mostly downhill, we were able to make it to the house faster.

“Let’s spend tonight at the truck instead of trying to make it back, it’s already kinda late.” Jamal suggested. “It isn’t too late but there is only a few hours till sundown, and a bit of actual sleep in a bed wouldn’t hurt. In fact it would hurt a lot less than sleeping on the ground.”

“Okay”

I go inside Shawn’s house to look for anything that could help him before setting up camp, but nothing was there not even the pots or pans. The only things that were left where the couches and rugs, even the TV got taken.

“Ryan!” Jamal shouts.

“What?”

“What’d you put in your sleeping bag?” he asked. I only remember leaving my journal and pencils in it, so it shouldn’t have been that heavy. I go outside to see how heavy it really is.

“Whoa, that is heavy. What is in it?” I ask quizzically. We unzip the bag and see about four or five AR’s, a hunting rifle, and a countless cache of ammunition. And down near the bottom, is two broken pencils, and my journal

“Whoa.” Jamal says calmly.

“Yeah.”

“What do we do?” Jamal asks, “We can’t carry this stuff all the way back, the bikes won’t be able to hold it all, if we drop it too hard, some of the ammo can go off, and the truck is out of gas.”

“Let’s look around for some stuff first. We’ll decide later.”

“Okay. What do we need to look for?”

“Well, if we’re spending the night here, we need some wood for a fire. I don’t want to turn into a Ryan-sickle.” Jamal smiles at me with a confused look on his face. He pokes me as he says the words.

“You do realize it’s June, right?”

“I know, I was just making an excuse to build a fire.” We both laugh it off, and get to looking for stuff.

“Jamal! You’ll never believe what I just found!” I shout from the basement. I hear his footsteps stip-step their way down toward me.

“What’d you find?”

“Look for yourself.” I step out from in front of what I want to show him.

Gasoline, and a lot of it.

“Oh my god! We can take those weapons home, by tonight! This is amazing!”

“Wanna see something even cooler?”

“What?” Jamal squeals, he sounds like a child in a candy store.

“These.” And from my back pocket, I pull a spare set of keys for the truck.“I remember Shawn saying something about having a set of extra keys but I could never remember where he said he kept them.”

“Where’d you find them?”

“Behind all this gas.”

“Kinda weird he’d put them behind that. huh?”

“What matters is we found them.” We’re both incredibly optimistic of our find, and almost immediately pack up everything and hightail it out of there before anybody comes by to notice that we just stole their weapons.

Please start, please start, please start, please start. I think to myself

Please start, please- *Vroom* “Start! Oops, I just yelled ‘start’ didn’t I?”

“Yes Ryan, Yes you did.” Jamal insures, We laugh it off as he puts it in drive and makes his way back to camp.