I could hear the door kick in, could hear the rush of them as they swarmed the house. “Move,” I whispered to him.

“Move?”

I grabbed his hand again. This time when we crawled, we didn’t have a choice. If they came with dogs, we were screwed. For now, we had a fighting chance. It was dark as pitch beneath the house, but there was only one way to go: away.

A minute went by, two. No one was following us. The sounds of the police began to fade, though I could still hear them inside the house. Sounded like they were searching for something. The pounding in my chest continued. “Where are we Adam?” I heard from behind me.

I stopped crawling. “Better question, are the police here for you or for me?”

There was the slightest of pauses. “Why you?” he whispered.

“Why you?” I whispered back.

He chuckled. All in all, not perfect timing. “I sure do know how to pick ‘em.”

I kept crawling. “To be fair, I found you.”

“To be fair,” he replied, “I chose to stay.” He sighed. “It was the old man in the store. Had to be.”

We came to the end of the road. Or at least the end of the tunnel. I’d say we were about five hundred feet or so away from the house and deeper in the woods. The tunnel was maybe two feet high and three feet wide. There were clothes stashed there, a couple of jackets, some money, bullets. This was my emergency tunnel. This was clearly my emergency. Or his. Either way, we were now both being chased.

I handed him the clothes in the dark. We got dressed and I pocketed the cash in my wallet, my wallet in my pants. I handed him his wallet. I shoved the gun in the backpack. We again listened for the police. By then, all I could hear was our heavy breathing.

“So,” he said.

“So?”

He tapped my shoulder. “You know how you asked me if I ever had a boyfriend?”

I grinned. The tunnel smelled like earth, but I could still detect the slightest scent of Tim. “You think now is a good time to revisit that conversation?”

I could hear him moving around behind me. I could hear the backpack scraping the tunnel’s walls. I heard it hit the ground. I heard him rummaging around inside it just before I saw another beam of light. Thankfully, it was his, a flashlight lit for me to see, the light now illuminating our dirtied, sweaty faces.

“You look like shit,” I said.

“I don’t feel a hell of a lot better,” he replied. “Will you be my boyfriend, Adam?”

I laughed as quietly as was possible. “I think this might be your oddest segue yet, Tim,” I told him. “The police are chasing one of us. We’re in a tunnel in the woods in the middle of the night. This is not what I would consider a romantic setting.”

He shook his head. He reached up and wiped the matted hair from my face. “Yeah, but will you be my boyfriend, just the same?”

I sighed. “Tim,” I said. “I’d have sex you right now if you asked me. I’d do anything you asked me, in fact. Ours, I would say, does not seem like a healthy relationship. So, yeah, that’s a yes.” I blinked. “There a reason for all this?”

He nodded. “I need to show you something, but I wanted to make sure it was safe to show you.”

“And,” I said, “you figured it would be safer if we were boyfriends?”

His nod turned shrug. “Sounded better in my head, but yes.” He leaned in, kissed me, kissed me again. “Plus,” he said, still panting from our recent exertion, “if I were to die, say in the next few minutes or so, at least I had that. With you.”

“I don’t think we’re going to die in the next few minutes,” I told him. “If they had found the tunnel, we would’ve known about it already. Pretty well hidden. You gotta know exactly where to look.”

“Or listen,” he said. “Because that does explain the groaning I’d so recently heard when I sat in that chair you moved out of the way before we ducked and covered.”

“Old house,” I said. “Groans everywhere. Besides, why even look for a hidden tunnel in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Seems to me, it’s not the first thought that would come to mind.” Which is why I built it in the first place. Apart from the obvious reason: escape.

“Still.”

It was my turn to lean in and kiss him, then kiss him again. Too bad the tunnel was so narrow, or I could’ve seriously had some fun him. Instead, I said, “Okay, point taken. In any case, for now, we are still alive and newly minted boyfriends, so, care to show me whatever it was you were going to show me?”

“Why are the police chasing you, Adam?”

“I killed a man,” I told him after the briefest of pauses. Felt good to tell him. Felt good to say it out loud. My belly unknotted, if only by a hair.

“You killed seventeen men,” he replied.

I shook my head. “I killed the eighteenth after those. And here. In the United States, I mean. And why are the police chasing you?”

With his free hand, he reached inside the backpack. When the hand reemerged, it was clenched around a thick stack of bills. I peeked inside the backpack, and all I saw was green. The forest around us quaked in apparent envy.

“I hijacked a plane,” he said.