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  Out in the woods, “night” meant something very different than it did in the city. Stars shone through the murky canopy like countless pinholes in a black sheet. The moon seemed bigger out here, and its bluish light fell softly on Ryan and the dying fire.

  He had gotten bored of staring off into the nylon of his tent, and had decided to hobble out and take his seat next to the fire pit. He poked and prodded at the embers, but Lowery hadn’t gotten nearly enough firewood to last them the night, so Ryan had occupied himself watching the flames burn slowly down to coals.

  It was chilly, the first real bite of autumn, and Ryan hugged himself more closely, debating just how many body parts he’d give up to be back home.

  Apart from the aromas, the other advantage of the woods was the silence. Traffic on the highway had stopped almost completely, and with none of the other campers around, Ryan reveled in the quiet. He leaned his head back in the canvas chair and closed his eyes, listening.

  He let the silence wash over him, and despite the cold, even allowed himself to doze off for a moment. Then however, something came to him on the breeze: the faintest whisper out of the woods. Ryan’s eyes shot open and he strained his hearing for a second sound that never came. The first had sounded almost like a man’s scream: too ghastly and pained to be a flag-capturer’s cry of victory. After a moment however, Ryan dismissed what he had heard entirely. He had been half asleep at the time,and the forest at night was home to all kinds of mysterious sounds that, nonetheless, posed no real threat. Still, the split-second event had planted in Ryan’s imagination the possibility that there was a serial killer roaming the shadowy woods with a large hatchet. The silence was slightly less comforting now.

  Ryan crawled back inside the tent and dug around in his pack. He pulled out a small paperback that he knew he’d never finish. It had been recommended to him by his mother, whose taste he generally trusted, but Ryan knew that as soon as he was back in the real world, the siren song of movies, TV, and video games would lure him away from literature. It always did. He liked to give recreational reading the old college try every few weeks, just to make himself feel better, but he rarely stuck with it faithfully enough to finish more than one book every couple months.

  He had delved half a chapter in when the batteries in his flashlight began to fade. Ryan hadn’t found himself enthralled by the pages anyway, so he put away the book and crawled into his sleeping bag to begin the arduous battle of falling asleep in a tent.