Chapter 92

Most of the time, Sadie kept at his heel. Matt hadn’t thought to retrieve her leash from the car before starting out, but there seemed little danger in her occasional forays off the road. Unlike him, the dog didn’t seem bothered by the walk, and raced ahead from time to time, yapping happily at nothing in particular, before returning to his side.

After the next little hill, Matt found himself walking in farmland. At first, the fields were planted with some low-lying crop he wasn’t familiar with—cotton, maybe? He wasn’t sure what cotton looked like as it grew, and the dense vegetation didn’t really entice him to leave the road. Besides, Roxie had told him to stick to the yellow brick, and that’s what he intended to do. The sooner this silly dream was over with, the better. But the short plants grew taller, stretching for the sky, and soon Matt found himself walking between two fields of thickly growing corn.