By T.S. Fields
Robbie and Scott Ratliff are brothers, brothers that pick on each other. Scott is the older brother and Robbie is the younger brother. Their ages are nine and eleven. Their dad died before the story started. They fight all the time. At the beginning of the story, Robbie “accidently” threw away Scott’s new Boy Scout badges. Scott chases Robbie into the house with a hose pipe. You know that didn’t end well. Their mom came home to discover that the house had been hosed down. We find out that earlier before the story began that Robbie had gotten Scott’s basketball shoes and thrown them into a mirror and broke it. Their punishment was to go shopping with their mom. They go in and spend what felt like hours to them and finally come out. They actually got rewarded with four large forty-four ounce gulpers of Root Beer. The old, beat up Volkswagen was running out of gas and they stopped at the Thirty-Second Street Mini-Mart. It was so hot that Mom leaves the car running. She goes in to pay for the gas, and some stranger just jumps in the car, and starts to drive off. He finally realizes that there are two kids in the car with him. He pulls out his gun, tie them up, and makes Robbie slowly get in the passenger seat and puts the gun to his head. He goes out into the desert, in the middle of nowhere. They finally realize that he is meeting someone. He pulls up to a jeep, and gets out. They talk about why he took a car with kids in it, what they are going to do with them, and if they should kill them. They end up just leaving them there. The boys didn’t know what to do so they just stayed in the car until about dark. They tried driving back to the highway, but that plan, shortly after starting the car, hit rock bottom when the car ran out of gas. So they just tried to stay in the car. Then it rained cats and dogs for an hour or two. About midways into that hour they got the gulper