I crouched beside it.
The gravel burned through one knee of my uniform pants.
The cardboard was warm under my fingertips, almost too warm to keep touching.
The duct tape had softened in the sun and gone sticky at the edges, but the hold was still tight.
“Alright,” I said under my breath, snapping the blade open. “Let’s see what the joke is today.”
The knife made one clean sound as it split the tape.
I peeled the top back.
The smell came first.
Heat.
Sweat.
Dirty cloth.
Then something underneath all of that, something small and human and terribly fragile.
Then I saw them.
Two infant twins were lying in the bottom of the box.
For half a second, my mind refused to make sense of it.
Their bodies were so small they looked like they belonged in a hospital bassinet, not inside taped cardboard on the shoulder of a highway.
