Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey From the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games Read Online Free Page A

a quick look around. The coast was clear. The guard who normally sat at the door had left his post. My friend opened the door just wide enough for us to squeeze through. One went outside, then another. I started to jump through the doorway after him. I wanted to get out fast before the guard returned, but my friend at the door motioned for me to get down flat on the ground. I did as I was told. I pressed myself against the ground as low as I possibly could and slithered through the doorway into the night air.
    Nothing ever smelled as sweet as the air outside that doorway. Over the past three weeks, the prison hut had turned into a foul-smelling toilet. For the first time since I was blindfolded out of the back of the truck, fresh air filled my nose. I had almost forgotten what it smelled like.
    I didn’t have time to take in the moment. My two friends who were already outside pulled me between them. The third quickly joined us. The door behind us was closed. Again, it did not make a sound. Its familiar squeak fell silent.
    One of my friends pointed along the side of the hut and swept his hand in an arc. The others nodded like they understood. I did not. I didn’t need to. One pushed me flat against the ground, then mouthed, “Follow me.” Off we went, crawling flat on our bellies along the side of the hut like cobras through the grass. All around us voices talked and laughed and cursed. My friends did not seem to notice. They kept crawling.
    I looked up and saw little orange circles in the night perhaps ten or fifteen feet away from me. Then I heard the sound of a match striking hard against something. My eyes went immediately toward the flame. I watched as it went up, then it lit up a face of one of the guards. He held the flame up to a cigarette, lit it, and then let the match fall to the ground.
    A hand pressed down on my head. I glanced to the side. One of my friends shook his head at me. He mouthed, “Stay down.”
    I nodded and kept on crawling after him.
    A soldier laughed. He sounded like he was standing right on top of me. I wanted to look up but I froze instead. My friends on either side of me pulled me along. I kept going. The guards’ voices seemed to get louder and louder. I could not see them—only the nearby glow of their cigarettes. And they could not see us in the moonless night. We blended into the darkness.
    The guards kept talking and laughing, and I kept crawling. No one said it, but we all knew the guards would open fire on us if they found us trying to escape. We did not care. I would rather die trying to escape than to sit and wait for death to come find me inside that prison hut.
    We crawled past the hut. I glanced up and noticed the faint outline of a fence just beyond us. It was hard to see in the dark. I do not know how my friends knew where to go. We crawled closer to the fence. Perhaps ten minutes had passed since we slipped out the hut door. My heart beat in my ears.
    Once we were right upon the fence, I saw a very small gap in the bottom of it. One of my friends climbed through the hole. I could not believe the guards couldn’t hear the clanking of the chain-link fence. However, like the squeaking door that fell silent on this night, I know God Himself was responsible for the guards not hearing us. I thought of the story in the book of Acts where angels set Peter free from prison in the middle of the night. The angel made the chains drop from Peter’s wrists and then threw open the prison gate. Peter walked right out of the prison and not one of the guards noticed. God did the same thing for me and my three angels that night.
    My friend held the fence open and motioned for me. I slipped right through. From the other side I looked back toward the hut. The glowing orange circles all seemed to be on the opposite side of the compound from us. My next friend struggled through the hole. It was so small, I don’t know how any of them made it through it. I remembered a story my mother had told