Read Online Walk Me Home by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online

around to the henhouse door, but it’s padlocked.
    “Shit,” Jen hisses.
    “We’ll find a way.”
    Bent over and scuffling, they move around the side of the building. Carly examines the windows to see if they can be opened. But they don’t even appear to be built that way.
    “Look at this,” Jen whispers.
    She motions Carly to a corner of the henhouse where the wood has rotted away near the dirt line, leaving a space maybe two feet high and a foot and a half wide at the bottom. A triangle of rot. The gap has been patched with chicken wire.
    Carly crouches down and examines the wire patch closely. It’s attached with those big staples you shoot from a staple gun. She grabs one edge and pulls hard. Three or four staples pop free, and the wire breaks at those that hold firm. She pulls again, and then the wire is attached at one side only. She can peel it back like a door.
    “Can you fit through there?” she whispers to Jen.
    “Sure. Easy. You can, too. There’s lots of room.”
    Jen sinks to her belly and shimmies through, leaving her backpack outside in the dirt. Then she reaches a hand out to Carly.
    Carly strips off her pack and falls to her belly, shivering at the thought of snakes. She inches through the space, but halfway in her jeans get hung up on the wire. She has to shift into reverse andmove completely out again, then bend the wire much farther back, out of her way.
    Her hips just barely make it through the rot triangle. Jen has to grab hold of her hands and pull while she turns mostly sideways.
    Now they’re both inside, but Carly doesn’t like the feeling one bit because there’s no fast escape.
    She looks around.
    The hens are dozing in straw nests in two layers, the lower layer on the hard-packed dirt floor, the second on a shelf at waist level. Their eyes are closed, heads drooped downward. They either don’t know they’re being invaded or they don’t care.
    The big yellow moon shines strong through the windows, bathing the room in light. Nearly as strong as daylight, but seemingly in black and white, like the negative of an old photo. All this light’s not good, she thinks. She motions to Jen to get down, where they can’t be seen through the windows.
    She crawls on her hands and knees to the first nest and reaches under the bird’s warm, feathery belly. The hen squawks a sharp complaint.
    “Shhhh,” Carly says.
    There’s no egg.
    She crawls to four more nests. The hens only scold in quiet clucks. Then she finds one. An egg! She wraps her hand around it and pulls it free. Looks at it in the moonlight. It’s brown and medium size. It’s the most beautiful thing she can remember seeing. It looks like salvation.
    “I got one,” she hisses to Jen.
    “I got one, too,” Jen whispers back. “But it’s really little.” Jen examines the little egg in her palm. “It’s sort of light green. Is that normal? Or does that mean it’s bad?”
    “Just the color of the shell, I think. Hurry up. Two more, and then let’s get out of here.”
    She wonders briefly how they’ll shimmy through the rotten triangle without breaking the eggs. Maybe they should eat them before they go.
    A loud, metallic click nearly stops her heart.
    The henhouse door swings open with a spooky creak. Carly jumps up and spins around, and then she’s staring down the muzzle of a shotgun. On the other side of the weapon is the old native woman.
    The old woman’s spotted brown hand is so clear in a beam of moonlight, strong and unbent as she chambers a round with a grave, deadly “shuck-shuck” sound. It sounds like death. Like the last sound you hear before dying.
    Jen lets out a sound, halfway between sucking in her breath and screaming, and the woman spins and turns the gun on Jen. As if she hadn’t known Jen was there until Jen gasped.
    “Who goes there?” she asks. Her voice is accented. Strong for a woman her age. “Name yourself! Stand closer together!”
    Jen runs to Carly so fast that she slams into her,