Salt Lake City, June
“Benjamin Williams come down now, we need to go.”
Linda Williams, a beautiful brown haired woman on her forties but younger looking, her big green eyes shine behind that librarian like glasses; she enters his son’s room and drags him and his luggage to the car.
“Geez. Ben you are 16 now young men, behave as such, it’s not healthy to stay in your room all day.”
Ben enters the car where his father, a tall dark haired man with a important looking face, as expected of his lighting fast growing career as doctor, very much due to the help of his wife as assistant, is waiting to leave.
When forced into the car Ben turns to his father and begs to let him stay. Sebastian, calmly, looks to him through the mirror saying: “Come on Ben, you need to get out of your room for once”
As Ben tries to reply, Linda enters the car and with a BAD LOOKING FACE staring at Ben and saying: “Alright, let’s go”
6 hours later “Welcome to NEVADA”
After another hour, Sebastian stops the car at a gas station, an old wooden gas station with the letters NDW on the front sign. The owner, an old man by the name of Frederick Johnson, dressed with jeans, a grey shirt and a light brown cowboy hat is sitting on an old bouncing wood chair reading the journal and smoking from his smoking pipe.
Ben, wakes up, looks around and closes his eyes again when his mother comes out of the car shouting: “DAAAAAAAADDDDD”.
Ben opens his eyes surprised and looks outside, to a old man standing up from his chair on a jump to hug her daughter and his son in law. Ben, shyly, comes out of the car and gets a hug from his grandfather.
-Look how big you are, haven’t put my eyes on you for so long, young man
After a long talk, Sebastian and Linda head to the car saying their goodbyes. Linda calls Ben close and say: Be kind with your grandfather, love you.
A couple days went by with NOTHING happening. It’s passed the lunch time and Ben is sitted on the roof on the back side of the gas station, he puts his phone up to try to have signal but it’s useless.
-3 days and no connection, there’s nothing to do here, I’m going to dieeeeeee.
As he looks to the right, he sees a big palm tree just outside the station perimeter; he jumps out of the roof and uses a very old wooden stair close by to stand on the top in the middle of the leafs.
Ben, still with no signal looks around for a higher spot. A little further away he notices a communication tower as well as some mountains and a small water course, the view is awesome but his hunger for signal makes him rush right down.
He decides to go to the communications tower. On the way he encounters fantastic views, and animals such as mustang horses running around together, a small light brown white-tailed antelope squirrel comes to him and plays by his foot, kit foxes and beautiful fauna. As he sees them, he starts taking photos with his phone.
Even though he enjoys these things and is having a nice time, he notices the sun passing by. He stays focused and continues his path which become harder and harder as he goes on, with rocks being larger and harder to overcome, falling from high places, getting wet. Despite all that, as evening begins, he finally makes it to the communications tower.
It’s a very big one, all made of very old rusty steel with the old United States Steel Corporation logo. Although it’s a very old structure, it is stable and reliable, Ben tries to shake it but it remains solid so he climbs it.
It’s quite the climb and takes him a while to get to the top as the sun is slowly going down.
As he reaches the top, he steps on the rectangular platform, he falls completely exhausted in sleep.
When he wakes up, he looks at the sun, now with that strong red and orange colour as it’s almost disappearing. He looks at his phone for signal but the battery is over, sad but decided, he says to himself: “Tomorrow I’ll be back first thing in the morning”.
As he’s heading down and almost on the floor, lynxes, 5 of them start growling to him, he can see hunger in their eyes. He searches his pockets for food but he has nothing but his phone and a small piece of string.
Ben, panicking and without forces to climb back starts to lose grip on the steel bar when his grandfather, Frederick arrives on his big, beautiful light brown horse named END with his dog ROB by his side.
Frederick immediately takes his silver revolver from his pocket with a solid, agile rotation movement demonstrating experience and shoots to the air to disperse the animals.
Ben, taking advantage of his grandfather distracting them, descends from the tower, he runs out of energy and falls on the floor, catching the animals’ attention, which quickly jumps toward him and Frederick cornering both between their hunger claws and the fence surrounding the tower. Ben looks at the animals as his instincts make his hands move towards Frederick’s gun when…
Slowly, commanded by the voice of experience the desert life taught him, the old man walks to his horse.
Everything stops, waiting to see what he would do next. He opens the horse’s cell bag and brings out a rubber ball, a small blue ball with signs of small bites, he throws the ball to the lynx, not looking to Ben he says: “That’s not the way kid, get on.” They both climb to END’s back.
The lynx, staring at Frederick begin following him as END gallops back to the gas station with Frederick saying: “Matt, John, Alicia, Ted and Robby, hahahaha, everything grows so fast.”
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