Prompt: here's a fic idea. Hasil and Sally ann meet but as small children and make friends with eachother
No one noticed the boy.
He was small, even at ten winters, and with no ma or fa around to be attuned to his absence, it wasn't hard for him to slip down quietly to where the truck was parked and hide himself under the tarp that lay scuttled across its bed. They were going on a run, he had heard, a trip down the mountain for necessary supplies: gasoline, to keep the generators and the ATVs running; farming tools, replacing the ones that had broken during the summer reaping; maybe even some new shoes, if they could be found. Everyone was talking about it, and of course the boy listened, in the unassuming, observant way he did, soaking in everything he could hear about life down below. He heard all the bad things, too – all the warnings about people with no kith or kin, left to live and die alone on the streets, all the distrust and the fear, all the strangers who'd just as soon shoot at you as ask your name – but it was hard to believe all that, hard to believe any place could be so terrible and heartless.
He had to see it, with his own eyes. Then he'd know.
In the truck bed, he shivered a little, partially out of fear, but mostly from excitement. He only had to wait a short while until the voices surrounded him; Big Foster's growl mostly crowded out the others', but right beside it was the deep murmur of his son, a hulking bear of a man at just eighteen winters. The boy inched himself smaller as one of them hurled himself into the back of the truck – the other three soon occupying the front cab – and then the engine caught, the motor gurgling and sputtering to life.
The ride down was something terrible: his teeth seemed to rattle out of his head as he shook and bounced around in the truck bed. He was sure he was about to die, or get caught, and he couldn't decide which was worse. But he kept quiet the whole way down, all the torturous hours of it, until he felt a road pass smoothly under the tires, and he knew they were close. The person with him in back scrambled up and pounded twice on the roof of the cab, letting out a barking "Ged-ged-yah!" for good measure, and the boy could hear the squeal of the tires as the truck picked up its pace.
They meandered for a time, making quick stops and turning in various directions. He could hear the sounds of other vehicles passing around them, the exhaust and the scrape of gravel on the road. The clean smell of the mountain was fading, the air turning heavier, tinged with something stale and metallic, all of it catching in the back of his throat and making him want to cough. He swallowed roughly, and tried to breathe a little through his shirt.
Eventually, the truck swung right and then right again, coming to an abrupt halt. He felt the engine die, and everyone piled out, the chaotic sounds of truck doors slamming and men yelling excitedly soon fading into quiet. The boy waited a moment and then lifted the tarp an inch or two, peeking beyond its edge, and, after seeing no remaining sign of his companions, emerged from under it entirely.
The truck was parked in some kind of wide open space, white lines painted along its surface, other vehicles situated neatly around each other. Looking behind him, he could see a road lining one side of the space, the occasional vehicle passing by in either direction. But in front of him, there was something to make him stare out in wonder. It was a building, one bigger than he had ever seen, with flat stone walls that reached up nearly thirty feet, an overhanging porch that partially hid a set of wide glass doors that, strangely enough, appeared to have no handles. Across the front of the building were markings, bright and red, a collection of curved and straight lines that had to mean something, he knew, even if they were an utter mystery to him.
The boy jumped down onto the ground, his knees slightly wobbling at the impact with the hard surface. He didn't have that much time – it wouldn't take them all that long to take what they'd come for – but he intended to have more than just a momentary glimpse before he was forced to hide himself again.
He walked up towards the front of the building, wondering what such an astonishing place could possibly contain, but he found it difficult to see inside, the glass offering little but a harsh reflection of the wide space where he now stood. Near the doors, though, there was something that caught his attention: a strange contraption, a little shorter than him, some kind of bizarre and artificial animal painted an unnatural shade of green. And sitting across its back, even though it was neither alive nor in motion, was a girl.
The boy couldn't have known, of course, why she was there. He couldn't have known that her mother had left her there, outside on her own, to play on the back of the mechanical horse while she had gone inside the store to buy cigarettes and a fifth of Dewar's. He couldn't have known that the girl had kept quiet the entire walk down to the store, even though in her six-year-old heart she had hoped for two quarters to make the horse run and leap underneath her tiny body. He couldn't have known how the morning had begun, with sharp yelling and tears, as her mother had impatiently attempted to tame her unruly hair, spending nearly two hours combing it and twisting the sections, then securing the holds with the girl's favorite pink and red ball-bands. At some point, though, the girl must have squirmed too much, or yelped too loudly as she sat between her mother's knees, because she felt the sting as the flat of the brush smacked against the top of her arms, her bare thigh, and her bottom as she scrambled away. He couldn't have known that six months from now, her mother would pack two suitcases and drive off in the middle of the day, leaving the girl in the custody of her unprepared sixteen-year-old brother, all for a man who wanted her to move with him back to his hometown across the Ohio border but who had no interest in playing daddy to her children.
The boy couldn't have known these things. How could he? They were strangers to one another.
At first, he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. He had never seen anything like her before, having had nothing in his short experience of life to prepare him for the idea that other people had skin a different color than his own. It was absolutely astonishing. But even in the newness, he could see the wonder and the beauty in it, and he could now begin to understand that the world might contain so much more, that it might be made up of all kinds of things he could have never even imagined.
He slowly came closer, passing under the overhanging edge of the building and into the shade of the porch, never taking his eyes off her. He didn't want to scare her none: she was just a little thing, not much bigger than some of the smaller children he played with at home. She was looking at him, too, still as a startled doe, her eyes tinged with wariness and a fair measure of curiosity.
"Hi," she said, her voice surprisingly loud for a girl so small.
"Hi," he replied. He didn't really know what else to say; he hadn't thought she would actually try to talk to him.
"You want a turn?" she asked.
At first, he couldn't figure out what she was talking about, and then it dawned on him that she was referring to the motionless animal figure underneath her.
"Nah," he said, "'s better ya should stay up there."
"Okay," she pronounced, her bare legs now kicking back and forth against the animal's sides.
Inside the building, he started to hear some kind of commotion: raised voices, perhaps even the sound of Big Foster bellowing. He knew he didn't have much time left before they emerged back outside, before his brief foray in the world below the mountain was over. There were so many things he wanted to ask her, things about herself and this building, and everything down here. And now, more than likely, he would never see her again.
"Hey..." he said to the girl. "A bunch a' men are 'bout ta come runnin' outta here. Ya gotta stay still an' quiet, okay? Don't move none."
She nodded, her eyes turning wide and serious. Her legs stilled, and she tucked them in tightly.
"Alright, then," he said. "Bye."
The boy trotted back towards the truck and then hoisted himself into the back, giving her one last look as he grabbed the tarp. She was so small, sitting on top of that green creature, so tiny in the shadows, but she was waving at him, waving her goodbye.
So before he crouched down to hide, before he began to ready himself for the long trek back to his home up on the mountain, he waved back at her, his mind now bursting with thoughts, racing with the power and possibility of all these new wonders.