"I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy...down in my heart." 

God it was fucking freezing. This sort of cold wasn't something a sheltered man could know about. Sure people know it's cold at night but there's always a place, a place to warm up, a café or a night club or a convenience store. Abigail didn't have the luxury. This sort of freezing felt just like what it said on the tin - freezing. Her hands and feet were numb to the joints. It burned if you warmed them up. It hurt to curl her fingers and toes. She stuffed another newspaper in her boots and saw that the weeping blisters on the heel now had ink printed into the scabs. She sniffled. "Down in my heart, down in my heart…" her white fingers were stiff, white nails, black fingertips. She worked the base of her palms into the stinking wounds. Rubbed them clean off her heels like mud off a tyre. Her shaky breath turned into an incredulous chuckle. "Down in my heart it stays…" 

To fight the irresistible urge to not get up again was the herculean task of the suffering. Abigail's backpack straps dug into her collarbones. She must have an indentation now on each strip, right down to the marrow. Her breath came out in little clouds of frost. "I've got the love of Jesus, love of Jesus, down in my heart…" her bag creaked as she stood up again. She had laced her boots when she was sat down because she couldn't bend over for love nor money, it'd send her teeth into the tarmac. She kept walking and singing away to herself, counting the number of orange streetlamps she could spy in the distance. The bigger the number, the more distinct their positions - and the closer the town. A sheet metal sign on the side of the road welcomed her to Illinois. She leant on it to hack up a fistful of phlegm, her lungs rattling with each wet cough. After a few recovery breaths, she continued her weary trail to Brightwell.

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In her fitful, feverish dreams Abigail watched a vast forest spread out before her. Cedars as tall as houses, redwoods that scraped the clouds and twisting oaks that blossomed in every direction. There was no footpath and the undergrowth was speckled with ferns and nettles, mushrooms clawing out of fallen branches and rocky outcroppings pushed up by the mass of tree roots. In this forest lay a small cabin with a smoking chimney, and in that cabin was her uncle. Her heart leapt; it felt like coming home, but she turned her back on the house and fled through the forest in as straight of a line as the terrain would allow. She was looking for a road, or a sign, or some sort of landmark that would give her any more information about the location of the cabin. All she found instead was the asphalt of the motel parking lot. She regarded the peeling pastel walls with contempt. She started to make her way back into the woods but a cough caught in her throat and woke her up.

Abigail lifted her head from her backpack, red lines and dimples set in her cheek where the weight had imprinted the wrinkles of her bag into her face. A park bench was no hostel bed, but she had to conserve money wherever possible. If she wasn't so sick, getting to sleep in broad daylight would have been difficult. As per usual, she checked her pockets and each compartment of her rucksack, made a quick inventory check and, just for the hell of it, fished out her baseball cap. She was a long way from Arizona now but the paranoia of being discovered helped cement some bad habits, such as covering her face when walking around town. It not only helped with anonymity but also made her look even more homeless, which was a surprisingly effective way to walk the streets unseen and unmolested. She squinted blearily at the position of the sun, estimated the time and decided to go to the gas station she found earlier to get something to eat.

The gas station was run by a balding Hispanic who had fixed his wary gaze on Abigail the moment she walked through the door. Abigail took her time ruminating over the pros and cons of a bagel versus a BLT, being careful to keep both items well in view of the cashier. Another gentleman strolled in to buy a map just around the same time as Abigail decided upon the bagel, so she filed in line behind him. He was tall, pale, smartly dressed and somewhat distracted. Abigail peered at his pockets and pondered over the likelihood of a sudden increase in her finances, but something dissuaded the girl from acting upon her impulses. It wasn't the cashier, more the person; he made her nervous. She got an odd vibe from him. He turned to leave and Abigail stared at her bagel instead. She paid for it with greasy dollar bills and half-jogged outside to get a better look at the man before he drove off.

Abigail was pleased she didn't try her hand at pickpocketing when she saw the parked sedan full of people. The stranger kept outside and looked at his map, talking to the equally as unnerving friends in his car. Abigail chewed on her bagel as she sat down on a mouldering pile of tyres, shamelessly staring at him. After all, she posed no threat; a stinking little girl in hand-me-downs, all torn up with a cold and struggling to swallow the cheapest breakfast food she could afford out of a backwater gas station in the middle of nowhere. Although she never saw the man in her life, and despite the weird vibes he gave off, she felt an intrinsic pull towards him. Impulse had carried Abigail across several state lines and into towns she never knew existed, within which she found many charitable souls and favours that carried her eastward. Denying her gut instinct felt like turning off her GPS, blindfolding herself and tearing down the freeway with reckless abandon. This man seemed helpful, and Abigail was just waiting for a good excuse to approach him whilst playing up her own pathetic demeanor to scope out if he was the pitying sort.