In the moonscape just outside of Las Vegas, the sun cracked roads and reflected off the scruffy terrain. The heat browned everything - skin, plants, even the dirt seemed browner than normal. Houses were drab against the hazy sky, and the dry heat sapped up inspiration and spark. It wasn't just the oppressive temperatures that could kill a man.

Gil skidded down an embankment by one of those broken roads, shoes kicking up dust clouds and sticking to his shorts-clad legs. Behind and beside him were a couple of his friends, the lot of them skipping a dreary day of depressing, sweltering school, all skidding down in the same way. Nobody would see them, they knew, and nobody would look for them this late in the school day anyhow. It was after lunch, and nobody would care if they were missing.

They went to the old dilapidated shack that they always went to, behind a dried up, mangled shrub. They had never been sure what it had been built for, but now it was littered with old soda bottles and cigarette butts that should never have been in fourteen and fifteen year old mouths. Their hideout, this ramshackle shed. Their escape from the truancy officer who didn't care they were cutting class anyway.

Gil watched his friends light up, silent and analytical; Bobby handed him a cigarette and lighter, and he shook his head. "No thanks."

Bobby scowled and pocketed both items. "Why do we let you skip with us again?"

He rested his lithe body against the dry, broken wall. "Because I'm the only one who can seem to come up with decent ways to skip," he answered, looking directly into Bobby's eyes. He was quiet, but damn if he wasn't self-assured.

Drew took a puff of his cigarette, and hid his coughing. "Gil's got a point. We'd 'a been caught about ten times over without him."

"Yeah, well," Bobby muttered. More experienced in the art of smoking, he hid his cough far better than Drew had. "Anyways. What're we doing this weekend?"

Gil watched Drew apathetically shrug and kick a rock. Then, Gil watched Drew back away from said rock, apathy turning into disgust. "Eww," Drew said, stomping his foot against the clay ground.

The rock had rolled into a shaft of light that peered between two broken slats in the wall, and they saw that it was not a rock at all. It was a fruit, decaying and teeming with squirming, slimy maggots.

"That's disgusting," Drew mumbled, still trying to shake imaginary maggots off his shoes.

"What is that?" Bobby asked in that curious and disgusted way that only a teenage boy could ask. "A peach?"

Gil cocked his head and stared at it as the worms retreated back inside its rotting body, and he was completely without disgust. "No," he said. "There's no fuzz on the skin. It's a nectarine." Unaware of the other two staring at him, he watched that nectarine, amazed.

Out of death, new life.