Praying for Rain (Praying for Rain Trilogy, #1)(44)

My sinking heart goes into a full-on free fall at the realization that Wes knows I’m lying, but that’s the only sensation the drugs allow me to feel. I don’t look at my house at all as we pass. It’s not there. It doesn’t exist. Nothing exists, except for my feet on this trail. No past. No future. No feelings. No fear. Just the squish, squish, splash of mud beneath my boots and the sound of birds busily rebuilding their nests after the storm.

I breathe the cool, humid air and sigh. With the gray clouds overhead and the woodsy smell of burning leaves on the breeze, it feels more like fall than spring.

But people don’t burn leaves in the spring.

Looking around, I notice a plume of smoke rising above the trees up ahead. I wonder if we got turned around somehow and are actually headed back toward Carter’s house. This doesn’t smell like Carter’s fire though—all that melting plastic and wood varnish. This fire smells cozy and delicious.

Wes doesn’t seem to appreciate the scent as much as I do. As we get closer, his cough gets worse. I guess his poisoned lungs have had enough smoke inhalation for one day. Pulling his shirt over his nose, Wes lets a yellow hibiscus filter his oxygen as we press on, emerging from the woods behind the raging inferno that was once the Franklin Springs public library.

“I guess the orgy got a little out of hand,” Wes muses between coughs as we round the side of the building.

When I realize that the homey smell I was enjoying is actually the scent of burning books, something like sadness begins to settle around me, but the hydrocodone tosses it off like an unwanted blanket.

Wes coughs into his shirt as we cross the street, hacking something up and spitting it onto the littered asphalt. He’s so pale. His lips are almost bluish, and the sweaty sheen from this morning is back.

“You okay?” I ask as soon as we step into the Burger Palace parking lot, but Wes doesn’t seem to hear me.

His eyes are trained on the thirty-foot-tall digital billboard overhead. “How the fuck is that sign on if the power’s out?” he mutters.

“They probably have a generator for it.” I roll my eyes. “God forbid we have to go a day without seeing stupid King Burger on his stupid fucking horse.”

Horse.

I eye the flashing multicolored image of King Burger on his trusty steed, Mister Nugget, as we pass below. He’s holding his French fry staff in the air like a sword—or a mace or a scythe or a flaming club—and a nagging sense of déjà vu tugs at the edges of my fuzzy consciousness.

The sound of gunfire inside the restaurant chases it away.

Wes grabs my hand and takes off running toward the woods as people come pouring out of every exit, screaming and shrieking and calling out the names of their loved ones.

Some of whom I’ve known my whole life.

“Fuck ’em,” Wes’s voice says inside my head as the splish, splish, splash of mud beneath my feet returns.

Fuck ’em, I repeat, this time in my own voice.

I don’t look back, and I don’t let go. I run hand in hand with this beautiful stranger, over roots and beneath branches, feeling more alive than I ever have.

Wes, on the other hand …

When we finally make it back to the place we were searching yesterday, he doubles over and places his hands on his knees, coughing and hacking until his face goes from ashen to purple.

I struggle to yank the backpack off his stubborn, hunched-over shoulders and push him to sit on the fallen log we rested on yesterday. I pull a bottle of water out of the bag and hand it to him. Wes chugs almost the whole thing before taking a breath.

Reaching into the neck of my shirt, I pull the little orange bottle out of my bra and unscrew the cap. “Here,” I sigh, shaking one of my few remaining painkillers into my palm. “This’ll make you feel better.”

“I don’t want to fucking feel better,” Wes snaps, shoving my hand away.

I gasp as the tiny, precious tablet goes flying, disappearing a few feet away in a fat bed of wet pine needles.

“I want to find that goddamn bomb shelter!”

Ignoring my shocked expression, Wes shoves his arm elbow deep into the backpack next to me, rooting around until he finds the giant magnets in the bottom. “The only thing that’s gonna make me feel better is being in a cement bunker underground before midnight.” Wes shoves one of the homemade metal detectors in my direction. “Come on.”

I accept the magnet with a frown. “Will you at least eat something first?”

“I’ll eat when I find the fucking shelter!” he yells, pushing to his feet. “I’ll rest when I find the fucking shelter. I’ll take your pills—”

“When you find the fucking shelter. Okay, I get it.” I nod, blinking back startled tears.

“Do you?” he snaps, tossing the magnet on the ground in front of his muddy boots and pulling the rope taut. “Because I feel like all you’ve done since we met is sidetrack me and try to get me killed.”

“I know,” I mumble, my eyes drifting over to the place where my pill disappeared. I could really use it right about now. Standing, I wander over to the mound of pine needles, hoping to find a glimmer of white in all that brown. I stare down at the crisscrossing lines on the ground, a chaotic pattern as pointless as my short, stupid life.

I’m sorry, I want to say. I was just trying to help, I think to myself. You’re better off without me.