It was raining when Chris stirred in the morning. Raindrops slid lazily in zigzags down the window, casting shadows on his bare arms. He felt refreshed and awake, and relieved that he'd be able to drive again. Teddy had been making him nervous. He'd actually had a dream about Teddy driving them off a cliff.

Stretching as well as he could in the confinements of the backseat, he suddenly realized that the vehicle had stopped. They were at the side of an old back road.

"Teddy?" he whispered. Everyone else was still sleeping except for him, Teddy and Claire.

Peering sheepishly around his seat, Teddy looked back at him. "Yeah?"

"Why did you stop?" He glared. "Is there something wrong with my truck? Did you break my truck?"

Claire scoffed. "Worse. He got us lost."

"You got us--" Chris stared in disbelief at Teddy, who was looking scared and embarrassed. "You got us lost?"

"I think so."

"How the hell did you get us lost?" he shrilled. "We're not going anywhere! How do you get lost going nowhere?"

In the front, Cale turned over onto her side, and then groggily opened her eyes. She looked around and saw that Teddy was looking at her. "Good morning," she said, smiling sleepily. "Never thought I'd wake up and see you."

Claire considered mentioning how that was a lie; Cale quite often thought about waking up next to Teddy, but decided that Chris was already in a bad mood so she would try not to provoke him.

Smiling painfully at her, he then looked to Chris and said, "It's a long story. How about we wait until Vern and Gordie wake up so that I don't have to tell it twice?"

"I don't think you'll get to live to tell it twice," Chris said pleasantly.

Claire saw to it that Vern and Gordie were awakened in a matter of seconds.

"Okay, you can tell your story now," she told him.

Sighing, Teddy shrugged and said indifferently, "I was just driving and then I noticed that everyone had fallen asleep--"

"You damn dirty liar, Claire never sleeps!" Chris interrupted.

Claire glanced over at him and grimaced. "Actually, last night I did fall asleep."

"You had to pick last night to suddenly quit being an insomniac?" he demanded.

She shot back, "Yes, just to inconvenience you!"

"Guys, guys, Teddy was trying to tell us something," Gordie intervened, hating how the two of them always argued. Chris was his best friend, and he wasn't used to seeing him act like this. Chris wasn't the one who started fights; he made peace of them. Claire wasn't that bad. Gordie didn't get what it was about Claire that brought out the worst of him.

"Sorry," Chris apologized. "Go ahead, man."

Nodding, Teddy continued. "Anyway, I saw this sign that said World's Biggest Corn Chip, Next Two Exits, and I thought since everyone else was asleep and I'd never seen the world's biggest corn chip that I should go and see it. But I couldn't find it and I was driving around in all sorts of directions trying to look for it and I have no idea how to get back to the highway."

Everyone started talking at once. Teddy was apologizing angrily a mile a minute, Gordie was describing the amount of trouble they were going to get in and Vern reminded him that since they were going to die and get eaten by vultures it didn't matter how mad their parents were going to be.

Having faith in himself enough to believe that he was a capable enough person to get them back to the highway, Chris took over the driving, much to everyone's delight. After driving around for over an hour and seeing the same patch of trees four times, Chris began to lose that faith.

"Dammit, Teddy, how did you manage to get this lost?" he cried.

"I don't know," Teddy said softly. "I'm really sorry, guys."

"We're going to die," Vern sang. "And no one will ever find us and we're going to turn into petrified fossils that scientists will mistake for dinosaur bones--"

"Shut up, Vern," Teddy snapped.

"Hey, you okay?" Chris asked, peering over at Cale. She hadn't said anything for a long time, which was an oddity for her.

"Yeah," she said unconvincingly, trying to smile.

So that no one else would hear, Chris turned up the radio. He was surprised to find out that they got better reception wherever they were. "Scared?"

She shrugged, making herself look small and young. "A little, I guess. But we'll be okay." She looked up at him, searching his face for some reassurance. "Right?"

"Oh, yeah," he promised. "Definitely."

Vern was describing their doomed fate again. "We're going to get hunted down by a crazy old fucker who lives in a tree and talks to flowers and he's gonna chop us up in little tiny bite size tater tots and feed us to his squirrels and use our bones for toothpicks and our skulls for ashtrays and--"

"Shut up, Vern!" Chris barked. He closed his hand over Cale's and murmured, "Cale, he's just a retard. There's nothing out here."

"I know," she muttered.

Vern continued. "And THEN, once he's finished with our BODIES--"

"Vern, shut up!" Claire yelled. "You're gonna make me cry, you fucking moron."

"Who CARES, we're gonna die anyway," he shot back.

In the rear-view mirror, Chris saw Teddy slip his arm around Claire and pull her towards him. "We'll be fine, Claire," he assured her.

"Yeah, right," she scoffed, tears swimming in her eyes. "Those of us that the crazy old tree fucker doesn't get, the bears will."

"There's always death by natural means," Vern offered helpfully. "Like starvation, dehydration, sun stroke, old age…"

"Shut up, Vern," Teddy said. "You're not helping."

"I'm not trying to help."

"That's obvious." He shot him a look. "You're just trying to scare your sister."

"I am not! I'm plenty scared myself! I'm just telling you guys the facts!"

"Vern, since when have you ever known a fact?" Teddy demanded.

Chris exchanged looks with Gordie. He could tell that Gordie was worried, but not scared. So Chris decided that he wouldn't be scared yet either. When Gordie was strong, so was Chris.

Up ahead, Chris saw a building that wasn't quite broken down enough to be called a shack. He knew it wasn't abandoned because there were sheets drying on the clothesline. He laughed. "Guys, look! Who's going in?"

"What?" Vern screeched. "That's where the crazy old fucker lives!"

"I thought you said he lives in a tree," Cale said.

"I'll go," Claire volunteered. "But I'm not going alone."

"Of course not," Chris said, looking at her like she'd said something ridiculous. "I'll go with you. Anyone else coming with us?"

They all decided they'd much rather be in a getaway truck if the old fucker came out frothing at the mouth and wielding a butcher's knife stained with Chris' and Claire's blood.

(AN: if there's a lot of mistakes, I'm sorry, but I didn't feel like editing it!)