It was another hot, miserable August day in Iowa, and Alison Taylor was goddamned tired of trudging along Interstate 80, feeling the softening blacktop beneath her soles, her backpack getting heavier every mile. But she wasn’t about to turn back. She’d hated every moment of the past five years, stuck living in Marshalltown with her stupid bimbo of a mother and her mother’s drunken boyfriend, Frank. She’d been little more than an unpaid housekeeper and occasional punching bag, but Alison could deal with that. What she couldn’t deal with was Frank trying to sneak into her room in the middle of the night in order to f**k her. The last time the sick son of a bitch had tried it, two nights ago; Alison had pulled the container of pepper spray from under her pillow and given Frank a snoot full. He’d bellowed loud enough to be heard in Des Moines, and that had woken her mother, who’d rushed into Alison’s room and tried to beat on both of them for “betraying” her. Alison had had enough. She’d turned eighteen the week before, so her mother couldn’t call the cops and have her dragged back. She was going to keep walking until she got to Chicago. Maybe there she could find a decent job there. She didn’t have much experience, but she’d read online that Chicago had more than 300 titty bars, and the only useful thing Alison had ever gotten from her mother were the genetics that gave her a terrific rack. If that was the only asset she had, by God, she’d use it.
Alison plodded along, hoping she was getting close to a town. She didn’t have much money—just what she’d managed to save by swiping beer bottles and collecting the deposits—but she had enough to stop and get a burger and maybe a giant Coke with lots of ice. She would have liked to hitch a ride, but she knew how dangerous that could be. A couple of times so far today, guys had pulled alongside and offered her a lift, but Alison wasn’t buying. The last one who’d stopped, a nasty-looking trucker with a big beer belly, had only been scared off when she’d waved her can of pepper spray in his face. As the day grew hotter and Alison sweated until her t-short clung to her, she began to think that she should have accepted the trucker’s offer.
