Scarecrows, fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem
G ibson stumbled out of the woods with his orange jumpsuit covered in beggar-ticks and burrs. Maybe walking away from the county road crew wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done—he only had a couple of months left on his shoplifting sentence—but as his mama used to say her son wasn’t known for his smart decisions. “You got no self-control.” Mama was right. But Gibson believed in grabbing opportunities when they came, and their guard was young and not much good at guarding. The kid spent most of his time on his cell phone sitting in the truck. Gibson and another convict named Frank Moore were working in a ditch not more than thirty feet from the woods. It took them less than five minutes to get gone. Moore wanted to split up—Gibson had an unlucky reputation—and so they did. But Gibson had at least one good reason to take off. Two years ago, he killed a man in Memphis with a lug wrench after a quarrel in a parking lot—another lapse in self-control—and the police hadn’t figured it ...