She glanced down the rutted dirt street that connected all the crumbling shacks, the ones in use and the ones too far gone for even the likes of these people to live in. The men had piled onto the flatbed and gone back to the drilling site; and the women, the few that were still here, were all resting or napping inside out of the mind-numbing heat. This was it, now or never! Sarah got up and moved slowly toward the open door of the office shack, angling toward the tin-roofed food storage building first in case someone spotted her.
She rechecked the number she had scribbled on the inside of an empty cigarette package and waited for the operator to answer somewhere south toward the highway and the cities of the real world. This was the moment she had dreamed of, walked the floor over, for weeks on end. If the voice on the end of that line held out the slightest hope for her, she would be out of this hell on earth within twenty four hours… and she would never look back!
CHAPTER TWO
It wasn't so long ago really, but all that seemed to have been in another world to Sarah now, another life somewhere that she had lived through and was now ended, no more a part of her life now than night was a part of day, or one day a part of the one before. That was over, gone, past, and nothing counted any longer save the present. And each day that she lived now was one more to make up for the miserable ones that came before.