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THE SMALL BOY HAD BEEN told to run.
And that was what he’d done. He ran as hard and fast as he could through the snow, and the trees, and the broken limbs. He heard loud noises behind him. Some of them he didn’t recognize. Loud engine sounds. But some he did know. He heard gunshots. He knew those. He had seen movies, bad movies, movies his parents hadn’t wanted him to watch. He didn’t really understand what was going on. He only wanted to go home. He wanted to see his parents again. He wondered why he hadn’t seen them.
The man had taken him away from the bad men. He understood bad men. He had seen them in movies, too.
What he had never seen was real-life violence. Not like tonight. Tonight, he had seen a man on fire.
The boy had walked close to him in the freezing snow. He had watched the man combust and then flail around like a chicken with his head cut off. The man had stopped and dropped to his knees, and then he’d dropped flat onto the ground and continued to blaze. The boy had stared at him, not sure what to do.
There was a lot of noise. Gunshots. An explosion. Crackling fire. A dog barking in the distance. Voices yelling.
The man screamed at him to run. Run. So the small boy turned and ran. He didn’t want to because it was cold. Not near the fiery man. Near him, it was warm. But he had to run. He had to listen to the man he had come there with.
Before he ran, he saw an object on the ground. He wasn’t sure what it was. But it blinked. It was small and box-shaped. He picked it up. He saw the blinking light. And he slipped it into his coat pocket.
“Run!” the man screamed again.
The small boy ran into the forest and over the thick snow and away from the nightmarish sounds.