Joel got the shortcut from somebody. I didn't know who, but we needed a way home and we needed it soon. We started up the road and took a left up an overgrown path. He seemed optimistic, but even though we were going on my urging I was trepidatious.

Joel is clean cut and enthusiastic. Sarah, Joel's sister and the third in our party, is simple. Simple as in mildly retarded. She is harmless and spacey; unhelpful but not much of a burden. For my part, I am watching my civility be reduced quickly because of the circumstances. No money, no food, no prospects. No way home. Well, we had the shortcut.

The valley we were in was verdant and idyllic. Rolling hills were painted with green grasses and flowers in the late summer. It's violence towards us was it's barrenness: we cannot eat grass and flowers. There is no civilization here and we will die if we stay. We turned up the path outlined as Joel's shortcut.

The hillside quickly gave way to a shanty town built up into the slope. The tenement, completely hidden from the valley we left, was built up from trash and cast-offs. It wasn't ramshackle anymore, really, years of shoddy building on shoddy building gave the paths and rooms the complexity of a many-storied apartment spread. There was a long balcony on the upper edges with a railing made of broken branches and plastic netting. Filthy barefoot children stared down at us unabashedly as we walked cautiously through it. Sarah, unversed in the social graces among the poor and threatened, stared right back.

We walked through the increasingly developed shantytown, the overgrown path quickly giving way to a beaten dirt track that looked now more like an alley between city buildings. We entered a room with a wall made of hay, and the wall to the alley a dirty blanket strung up from the floor of the gallery above. There was a small fireplace with a cook pot hanging over it. The woman that lived there was suspicious of us but not unkind. We tried to be polite. We were starving but unsure of how to ask for food, as these people hadn't much of anything of their own, much less anything to share.

She was not mean to us but did not offer us food. Sarah, in her oblivion, was drawn to the cooking food and the pretty warmth of the fire. She flitted around it like a moth. Joel and I kept an eye on her but were occupied with trying to negotiate a meal from the residents here. Our dealings with them were tenuous at best; we were one misunderstood comment away from being robbed and killed. These people, these gypsies that lived here, had been living a very hard life for a very long time. We were like idiotic fawns among them. So preoccupied were we that neither Joel or I noticed when Sarah laid her jacket on a hay bale next to the fire. Her very flammable synthetic jacket.

Before we noticed enough to do anything about it part of the hay bale wall was on fire. The fire licked greedily up the bales and to the plastic and wooden gallery frame above. The shantytown exploded with life, residents scurrying to put out the flames and escape with their lives, as the fire spread and reduced the perilously balanced structure to a sagging, melting mess. Melted petroleum products dripped flame onto the filthy blankets, which proved impossible to put out and spread the fire even further. The residents, aware that their home was doomed, began to stream out of the shantytown into ramshackle boats in the river that flowed over the mountain and into the valley to the East, taking us with them.

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I dreamed this last night. I will finish the story later, I have to go meet Cheryl. Later on in the story we come across a dammed river with another shantytown turned into a thieves' casino, and a small abandoned airport. I had to work constantly to prove myself, Joel and Sarah to the gypsies.