I still remember the sound of their laughter as the truck peeled away from the pump. It wasn’t joyful; it was a sharp, jagged sound, like glass breaking against pavement. The tires kicked up a cloud of choking dust, the midday sun hammered against my back, and my heart dropped straight through the floor of my stomach.

“Kyle!” I yelled, running after the fading taillights, my hands waving in the air desperately. “Kyle, stop!”

But they didn’t stop. They just laughed harder.

I saw them clearly—his brothers, Brad and Chase—hanging out of the passenger windows, holding their phones up, filming the whole thing. The red recording lights blinked like tiny, mocking eyes. I could hear Chase shouting over the roar of the engine, his voice carried by the wind: “Good luck, Lena!

See you in three hundred miles!”

Then they turned the bend, and the silence that rushed in to replace the engine noise was deafening. I was standing at a gas station in the middle of nowhere—a desolate patch of concrete with one pump, a bathroom that smelled of ammonia and neglect, and a vending machine stocked with sun-bleached chips. My phone had just died.

No charger. No wallet. No water.

I had left my purse in the truck when I ran in to grab Kyle an energy drink. He had asked for it sweetly, giving me that boyish smile, telling me he was “too tired” to walk inside. So, like the dutiful wife I had been trained to be, I went in.

And when I came out, my life was gone. The Wait
I waited. First five minutes.

Then twenty. Then an hour. I kept staring down the road, expecting to see the silver Ford F-150 come back around the bend.

I told myself it was just a dumb joke. Kyle had done stupid things before—he called them “tests of character”—but never this. Never something so viscerally cruel.

I sat on the curb, the asphalt burning through my jeans. My hands were shaking, my mouth tasting of copper and fear. Every few minutes I stood and paced, pretending I wasn’t terrified, pretending I wasn’t calculating how long a human can survive in this heat without water.

Then, my phone buzzed one last time before the screen went black forever. A single text message managed to push through the poor signal. Don’t be mad, babe.

Just a prank for the channel. We’ll come back in a bit. Relax.