A common writing exercise from my old classes was to have one writer start a story, and then to hand it off to the next writer to write the next part.  Here's a story I've started, I'd love to see what other people can do with it!

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John had hidden under the stacks of hay in the loft of his parents' old barn innumerable times before, but this time was very different.  He didn't feel the normal nervous, giddy thrill of adrenaline as he struggled to remain quiet; this time the chemicals coursing through his veins seemed to want to explode through his skin, putting pressure on his chest, constricting his breathing.  He tried desperately to control the volume of the rasps of air entering his lungs by breathing very slowly, but the individual straws of hay were tickling at his nose, threatening to turn his slight wheezing into an audible cough… an audible cough that could give away his location and possibly get him killed.

John wasn't sure he didn't deserve to die.  He was just so scared - he didn't think back at the house, he had just reacted.  He'd always hoped that he'd be heroic if it ever came down to it, but when the improbable finally happened, he had sprinted away from danger without a second thought for his parents' safety.  And now those thoughts were plaguing him as he hid.

It had happened so suddenly, there was no warning.  There was no knock at the door, no sound of footsteps crossing the half-acre open yard that led to his parent's house.   The doors to all three entrances to the house had burst open simultaneously, two men at each door.  In each case one man had knocked the door down leading with his shoulder; the lead man at all three doors had stumbled awkwardly into the house and fallen down in almost identical fashion, the second man trailing afterwards. 

His brain had barely had time to process the scene.   John's dad reacted first, instantaneously leaping up from the couch where he had been serenely reading an old book one second earlier, as if he'd been expecting the unwelcome intrusion.  Ignoring the lead man on the floor at the front door, his dad had crossed the distance from the couch to the door and tackled the second man much faster than John could have believed, propelling both of them outside the house and down the front steps.  John had the fleeting impression of a crimson red stain spreading on the back of his Dad's white sweatshirt as if in slow motion, a marked contrast to the violent speed in which the two men toppled down the small stairway to the front porch.    

John had already been getting ready to leave to go over to Mike's farm, his best friend the last four years.  By pure chance he was right next to the front door just as it had burst open, in perfect position to take advantage of the opening his Dad had created.  His body moved without conscious thought; he immediately bolted out the front door and raced desperately across the unbroken sightline of the lawn in his front yard, only looking back once at the now limp figure of his father on top of the second man.  Somehow he knew instinctively to suddenly change directions once he was out of sight at the tree line.   

Only one thought had been in John's head, to hide.  And the only place he could think of was the hayloft in which he had hidden so many times as a child.  He had skirted the yard, sure to stay hidden in the trees, making his way to the backyard towards the old barn.  Now he hid once again in the hay, keenly aware he was no longer a child, yet still hiding never the less.  John couldn't even reconstruct the scene at the house in his head well enough to hazard a guess as to what had happened to his mother, but fear still kept him hidden under his suffocating warm blanket of hay.