Slipping my legs over the side of the bottom bunk bed, I arched my back and heard half my bones crack. It was so hard to get up, and I found myself out of breath just sitting there.
I had to keep it together. I’d been doing a decent job at trying to hide just how awful I felt. How I was pretty sure my fever was back, and my headache was better but not by a lot.
I’d been sucking shit up my whole life, and now wasn’t any different.
It would be nice to stay another day or two, but I already knew we couldn’t. “We can stay if you want, but we ate all their food, except for maybe a pancake or two worth of mix, and I think we should find a phone.” To call who, I had no clue, but there had to be someone who could help us.
Then I thought about his sparkling personality.
Or not.
He’d either come to the same conclusion already or going another day without food was too much because he pushed himself up almost instantly. “I’m ready when you are.”
All right then.
I tried my best to clean up around the house and make sure things were as close to how they had been before we got there. I triple bagged the trash and wiped the counters down. I promised myself that I would send the owners some money to pay them back for their unwilling help. I didn’t want to be a total freeloader, and I’d found a couple of bills in a drawer with an address in Nevada—there was no way we were there—and I memorized the names so I could look them up later.
Alex wedged a rock behind the door to keep it closed; then I climbed up on that broad back, and we made our way… somewhere.
Again.
I did the sign of the cross in gratitude.
“Any idea where to go?” I whispered a few minutes later.
“North. There are a few communities we should be able to reach today.”
Oh, please, please, please, let us be able to make it somewhere today.
Luckily, for the first time in a while, something actually managed to work out, because not too long after, we made it to a real road—not the pothole landmine mess that we’d come across at the other house—and he purposely turned onto it.
Like he knew exactly where we were going, I noticed.
Soon after that, I started spotting houses in the distance spread out among trees that might have been different kinds of pines. Most of the driveways were empty and overgrown with long-dead weeds. I’d bet that these houses were vacation or rental properties, maybe.
Alexander led us down a rutted dirt road that wasn’t as nice as the one we’d been on a minute ago. His muscles bunched, and his breathing was nice and even as he turned down another deserted, muddy path.
“You know where we are?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
I waited for him to tell me something else, but he didn’t say shit.
We were back to that, I guess.
I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t like it mattered. He hadn’t left me behind, and he could’ve been leading us straight into hell, and I would have gone just so that I wouldn’t have to walk on my own. That was the important part. He didn’t need to be my best friend or anything. Being regular friends was good enough, even though we were more like “friends.”
It was still more than I’d had before he’d come into my life.
Tipping my head back, I soaked up the bright sun hitting the road and sighed. I really was glad to be alive. Like I’d told him, regardless of whatever else happened, at least we’d made it out.
At least, I’d finally had a choice, which was all I’d ever wanted in the first place. Then I’d gone and bitten off all this shit. Taking care of one of the most famous people on the planet, getting kidnapped, waterboarded, getting sick, and now extreme camping with no money or IDs or friends to call for help.
Oh boy, if I could have snorted without it feeling like an icepick to my brain, I would have.
If this shit wasn’t totally my luck, I didn’t know what was.
Alex stopped suddenly.
Perching my chin on his shoulder, I saw him peek at me out of the corner of his eye for a moment before we suddenly started walking again. “There’s a car coming,” he warned.
Not two minutes later, an engine grumbled from the direction we’d just come, and he moved off to the side where the gravel was lighter.
Just as it was right behind us, someone yelled, “Get a car, assholes!”
The driver had rolled the passenger window down, and I got a real clear view of a middle finger being shot at us from a lifted, older-model pickup with a small, blue flag mounted to the rear window. With another bark of the muffler, the truck picked up even more speed as it shot down the road, leaving us in a big cloud of dust that had me closing my eyes and holding my breath.
I hadn’t even realized that Alex had stopped walking, but the second the dust settled, he started moving again.
I glared at the taillights way up ahead. “Is it hard not to destroy people like that?”
He sounded dead serious as he replied, “It makes me feel better to know I can.”
“Did you see the Trinity flag?”
Alexander huffed.
Fucking hypocrites.
I hoped he got a flat tire.
We made it down the road; then his body tensed beneath mine. “Someone is up ahead.”
I tensed, squeezing his throat with my forearm before I realized I was choking him and loosened my hold. “Someone bad?” I whispered like they could hear me.
His gaze was focused straight ahead. “No, a couple in their driveway,” he explained quietly. “Don’t say anything.”
I pressed my lips together and clung to him, knowing what came out of our mouths wasn’t going to be the problem. He was still barefoot and covered in three different shades of Earth. I was in sleep pants and a flannel, with a dirty backpack perched on my shoulders that was filled with my damp clothes and a slightly expired can of beans I’d ended up taking from the last house.
We were a fucking mess.
I hugged him a little tighter.
“What are you shivering for? It’s not that cold,” he grumbled.
Now he wanted to get chatty again? I glared at him out of the corner of my eye. “Says the guy who doesn’t feel cold and is wearing a sweater.”
“I can take it off if you want. It hasn’t been washed in weeks.”
I eyed the side of his deceiving, perfect face, wondering again if it was the food alone that had revived his grouchy ass. “Do you just like to argue for the sake of arguing, or did I do something to you in another lifetime that I don’t remember?”
I wasn’t much better than him in the first place, I knew it. Hadn’t I been giving it back to him just as much as he’d been dishing it? Hadn’t it made me secretly smile too?
A purple eye peered at me a moment before we made it to a deep driveway with a huge, downed tree across it. Beside it was a woman who had to be in her seventies or eighties, along with a man around the same age, holding a chain. A chain that was connected to an all-terrain vehicle parked beside it.
“Don’t say anything,” he repeated under his breath.
I watched the man move around the side of the trunk, like he was trying to find something. Where to hook it to? “We’re supposed to ignore them?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“What if they try to talk to us first?”