Run: Day 11

Word Count: 66,205

Summary of Events:

Ty, having successfully used the platform to get out of prison, sulked all the way back to Sidney because DaNiel wouldn't apologise as wholly as he wished, but kept trying to justify what he'd done to Ty. The next day DaNiel stopped to get gas in Cheyenne, getting annoyed when Ty took advantage of the stop to steal some Wyoming plates for the car. Later on in the day, while still in Wyoming, they made their second fuel stop, with DaNiel doing the fuelling because the beard he'd grown since escaping and his haircut made him look different, while Ty was now wanted for escaping from police custody mysteriously . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

Silently he turned his head and watched DaNiel fuel up the car before going inside and paying for the fuel, returning out with drinks in his hand.

He handed one to Ty, who merely set it in the cupholder unopened and sat silently as DaNiel navigated the car back onto the Interstate and on westward through Evanston, heading on a large curve southward, to wrap around the southern end of the town — passing some baseball diamonds that made Ty feel a pang of longing to get out on one again, even though he hadn’t played baseball in five years — before it headed on just as large of an arc to the north again, only to make a rather sharp curve back south again that straightened out and left buildings behind for a few minutes before things levelled out westward and passed some more buildings, all on the north side of the road.

There was a large checkpoint-like place on the south side of the eastbound highway, which Ty watched go by before DaNiel’s utterance of an expletive of shock turned him to look ahead and see a sign proclaiming that they were entering into Utah.

“Utah’s too far south!” DaNiel exclaimed. “There’d better be a northbound Interstate before we hit Salt Lake City. I don’t want to have to go back.”

Ty said nothing, he merely watched silently as the road, after curving north a bit, turned south; not due south, but a good southwest, even south-southwest.

Both of them were silent as the road continued to take them southwestward for a long time, during which they passed next to no towns — which wasn’t unlike Wyoming — while mountains loomed on all sides.

The mountains were pretty to look at; Ty actually wished he had a camera with him he could use to take pictures because it was just as he’d heard: Utah was exceedingly pretty, its population was just dominated by the weirdest people in the entire country: the Mormons.

Ty didn’t know a lot about the Mormons other than that the greatest number of them were in Utah and they were disturbingly peculiar people. He’d never met any personally, but he’d watched out his bedroom window as two had come to the door to talk to Grandma, who’d told him that was what they were.

They hadn’t looked too strange, other than being men in suits with name tags; people in suits didn’t often wear name tags, but since they’d been professionally-made name tags they hadn’t looked bad.

Nonetheless, Grandma had seemed thoroughly disturbed by the visit of the men, so Ty had never asked any more questions.

From that experience and the few other times Ty had heard about Mormons he’d gotten the impression that everyone thought them largely to be weirdos, but yet also to be somewhat scary and not the sort of people one wanted to be alone with, although he'd heard nothing about what they might do while they were with a person.