Kismet (15 page)

“You need to get your sister and get to MacArthur Park. You have to get out of LA.”

Confusion blankets his face. “Is this about the GI Joes?”

“Yes. You have an hour before sunrise, Eddie. It’s important.”

I see he’s grappling with what I’ve said, but in a flash he’s gone. I’m suddenly free as gunfire erupts behind me. I whirl to see what the hell has happened and a bullet strikes the wall next to me. I duck and put my arms over my head as I rush around the corner and into the corridor. I flatten myself to the wall and then sneak a peek back inside the gym. I see Kaori running with a big black man from the JumboTron, and the weapon fire seems to cover their retreat. They run to the other court entrance, the one opposite mine.

If I meet up with them, then they will help me free Hyde and Kris. We can free everyone in the cells and then get the hell out of here. But as I ponder that for a split second, my gaze falls on El Toro as he shoots after the retreating couple.

My vision had me saving El Toro, but I wonder if I’m actually meant to save Eddie, because ever since I talked with him, the vision has stopped streaming through my head. If that’s the case, then there’s nothing to stop me from stepping in to kill the self-proclaimed asshole king. If he dies, everyone goes free, we get to MacArthur Park, and it’s a win-win situation for the good guys.

My heart hammers wildly in my chest. I am weaponless, but this may be my only chance to get to El Toro and eliminate him as a threat. I’m a good fighter; I think I could be agile enough to dance around him long enough to snatch a gun.

Once the escaping couple has fled, the gunfire ceases. El Toro gestures with his hand, and I see the remaining men around him take off after Kaori and her man. El Toro remains, alone. I take a deep breath and then run forward, my eyes focused intently on the big man still standing on his little platform.

But I guess I should have taken into account that pain has slowed my reflexes, because the next thing I know, El Toro has me by the throat and a gun pointed at my temple. I hadn’t even seen him move. I may have skills, but his definitely seem way more deadly than mine.

“You think I gained power from my great looks and charming personality?” he grates in my ear.

“You mean you weren’t elected by the popular vote?”

His fist tightens, almost completely cutting off my air supply. I reach up to claw at his hand.

“All of you came here for a reason,” he growls, giving me a slight shake. “Why? Why now after six years?”

“I would rather go to my grave than tell you anything,” I mumble as best as I can.

“You’re really too beautiful to kill,” he says. “But if you insist.”

“Put the gun down!” Hyde’s voice rings out, and my bones melt in relief. “And let her go.”

El Toro debates for a second before releasing my windpipe. I suck in a huge gulp of air. I turn and see Hyde and Kris converging on us, guns raised, and Kaori’s man standing point. Behind them are unmoving bodies.

And as I stand between the two men, Hyde and El Toro, my dream rolls through my brain. Only now it is a vision, the preemptive warning turning into my worst nightmare.

Then I turn my head and see the other man, the other shooter, the one who Hyde and Kris do not see because he’s hidden by the gaudy throne. I was wrong! El Toro hadn’t been alone when I charged forward with my plan on ending it all. How could I have been so reckless?

Of course, the reason I never could see the shooter in my dreams is because of my own blindness. But this time, I see the gun extend out, and a peace unlike anything I’ve ever felt descends over me. My focus narrows; everything else fades away. I hear nothing. My dream of Hyde dying suddenly warps into high speed, like someone has hit the Fast Forward button on the remote controlling our lives.

I step in front of the gun and embrace Hyde. To anyone else watching it probably looks like I flung myself in the blink of the eye, but to me it feels like my heart is pumping with every tick of the clock. Winding down.

“Take care of Kris,” I say, and then there is nothing else except the report of a gun and burning as the bullet enters my body. There is a moment, a brief moment, of pain as it trails fire down my spine, and then blackness descends.

I never realized nothingness would be so easy to embrace.

Chapter Twelve

I float in a sea of black. My eyes are wide open, but I cannot see anything. I cannot feel anything. I cannot hear anything. All my senses are deprived. But I know; I can think and reason; thoughts pour through my head. Memories. Flashbacks. I can’t turn my mind off or away from the images flashing one by one.

Pictures of my past. My mother. My stepfather. The trailer I grew up in. Atlanta and the diner I worked in. Some of my old coworkers. My boss. Kris, my beautiful, tortured warrior.

I want to cry because I realize they are gone from me forever. I am lost. I am dead. My body will never know Kris’s touch again. My lips will never warm themselves against his. My arms will forever be empty.

But there are no tears in me. The dead cannot cry. The dead cannot mourn properly, because we are the ones abolished. Extinct. Abandoned to the wasteland.

How long I float in the eternal sea, I have no idea. I hear people outside of my dark little world, my name spoken in a whisper. I can feel eyes watching me, though I have no idea where they are or who it is that’s spying. Is it God? Is he testing me? Am I in limbo, purgatory, being weighed and measured for the life I’ve led?

And then little by little, I start to forget. As the memories come, they quickly die away. What color are my eyes? How tall am I? Whoever I am, or whoever I was, soon starts to fade. Disappear. The universe wishes to swallow me, devour my essence, so I may feed its energy. Round and round. An endless cycle of life and death.

The blackness starts to recede, and I see a light far ahead, and I know this is rebirth. I will go—I want to go—to find peace, because I am nothing now but the darkness. Once I was human, and now I am spirit.

But as I race to the light, a hand reaches out and grabs me. I can feel fingers encircle the wrist I thought had long ago disappeared. It holds me firmly, desperately, pulling me irrevocably away from the tunnel and the darkness, back into the light. From the wrist I soon feel my arm. My shoulder. And then the rest of my body follows. Coming back to life.

I am Eva-Ann Florence Rhoton. Named so because my mother couldn’t decide which name she liked more, and the city she had always wanted to see. I have blue eyes, probably from my father since my mother had brown. And I am alive.

“Evie!” said a hoarse, frantic voice. “Don’t you fucking leave me! Do you hear me? Open your fucking eyes!”

I know this voice. I love this voice. Even in my limbo it washes over me in a caress.

The world rushes back to me. All of a sudden I hear all types of sounds. Monitors beeping. A respirator swishing. I hear the voice I know yelling at me and another male voice telling him to let me go.

And I hear my heart jumpstart to life.

I gag a bit over the tube stuck down my throat, because I want to breathe on my own again, only I can’t. A machine is doing it for me, and I feel as if I’m suffocating, even though my lungs are working fine. It feels like I’m just about to die due to lack of oxygen, only to get a dose and be spared at the last second.

I thrash, trying to escape. Around me I hear the sound of people yelling to each other, to me, to Kris. Hands pull at me. Yanking and prodding. Killing me, saving me—I really can’t tell. I want to fight, but I am weak. Helpless.

And I fall into darkness again. But this time it’s sleep. And I embrace it fully.

Chapter Thirteen

Three months later…

I never expected to see Louisiana again. In fact, I have gone out of my way these many years to avoid it. The humidity, the heat, the pollen in the spring, but most of all the collection of memories it holds for me. Who would willingly walk down a broken memory lane?

Sometimes I think the Southern states got hit the hardest by the virus. We had always lagged behind on other issues like education and health, but when the world turned upside down, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana simply drowned in turmoil. What the virus didn’t take, people were killed off because of potential threats. Abandoned. Forgotten. Kind of like how I felt lying in that hospital bed days, weeks, and eventually, months.

When the bullet hit me, it almost made a through and through. In the back, through the lung collapsing it, stopping right before it exited my chest. The only lucky part was the fact that it missed my heart and my aorta. But I lost a lot of blood, and I remember the coma so vividly that my nightmares are filled with the tunnel of death. For two months I had to use an incentive spirometer to help my lungs improve their capacity, blowing into a tube that not only monitored my progress but helped set goals. I went through countless rounds of physical therapy as well. Some days just getting out of bed to pee had been near impossible.

And I did it all alone. Though I know Kris had been there in the beginning, had brought me back from the threshold of death, I haven’t heard a word from him in all the time I spent in recuperation.

I found out after the fact that I had been airlifted to the military hospital located in St. Louis, placed on a special privileges list because of my help in Los Angeles. I spent fourteen days in a coma and had flatlined at one point. The road to recovery had been hard, not just physically but mentally. Everything hurt—my muscles, my bones, even my hair. But especially my chest. It hurt to breathe, and I don’t mean hurt like the ache of PMS or the brief pain of a stubbed toe. Agony burned my chest every time I took a breath, and there was no escaping.

Ever since I awoke from that coma, I never dreamed of Hyde and Kris again. I guess I’ve fulfilled my premonition, and the rest was simply just me overpontificating. But it’s amazing how much sorrow one can feel when love seems to have disappeared.

And though everyone at the hospital has been great and friendly, there comes a time when things must end, as I’ve learned. Of course, everything I owned was on the Cat, and it got destroyed along with Los Angeles. The San Andreas had opened like a dropped egg, cracking all the fault lines that spread from it. Scientists were predicting at least a year before the deadly gases seeping from the area leveled off and disappeared. It’ll be a while before anyone can travel into that city again, but that’s okay with me. I never intend to go there again. So I’ve had my own little funeral rite in my head for my faithful and hardy vehicle.

And just when I had been wondering if I’d be stuck in the new capital forever, who should walk into my hospital room but Hyde and Kris’s direct boss? I can still see him in my mind, a larger-than-life man I had never actually met but had been aware of. Like a pesky bee trying to sting me.

“Evie Rhoton.”

I turn my head. A large man, perhaps one of the tallest men I’ve ever seen, dressed in military blue with a long wool trench coat stands before me.

“I’m Lieutenant Gideon Marek,” he introduces himself. “Commander of the 281. I have a proposition for you, if you’re willing to hear me out.”

God, had I known then what he asked of me, I might have chucked him out the window. But I listened, I wavered on what he asked of me, and finally, I accepted.

In Louisiana it’s easy to get lost in the swamps, but that is where I’m heading now. I drive my trike through the lost, forgotten towns, some even being reabsorbed by the thick jungle of green. The three-wheeled vehicle was a loaner from Marek for what he hopes to be a reliable investment.

The farther I travel toward the Gulf of Mexico, the thicker the greenery around me becomes until even the roads are obscured. But finally I find what used to be Bonne Nuit, Louisiana, my destination in this little adventure that Marek has sent me on. To the average person I suspect that this place would seem like a ghost town. But the people were here—you just had to look for them. I can feel eyes watching as I turn off the trike and step out. I wear sunglasses, but my once tight and toned body now looks slightly gaunt and is, in fact, very weak.

It’s hot and sticky; my dark clothes instantly cleave to my body as the humidity slams into me. It feels like I’m breathing water. I start walking down the cracked road where weeds fight through the asphalt to reach for sunlight. I don’t have far to go when I hear a footstep behind me. I pause, wait. My breath hitches in my throat. I raise my hands slowly and then turn equally as slow.

An old woman stands in front of me, though she is far from showing her true age. Her back stands ramrod straight, her body lean and tough despite the whiteness of her hair.

She holds up a shotgun aimed right at me.

“Who are ya?” the woman demands. Her voice is hoarse, gravelly, her accent unmistakably Southern.

“I’m looking for my mother’s people,” I say. “I’m looking for Eulalie Rhoton.”

I see the old woman’s eyes narrow and the gun waver a little before it lowers a fraction. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Evie Rhoton,” I answer.

“Good God almighty,” the woman says as the butt drops to the ground. Color fades from her face as she stares at me. I don’t respond, only stand and look at this woman from head to toe. There’s something about her that reminds me of…me. And then I get it. This is Eulalie.

“You’re my grandmother,” I say.

The woman nods. “Misty Mae was my youngest daughter. Her head was always in the clouds, chasing rainbows. She was sixteen and pregnant when she ran off with your daddy.”

“He didn’t stick around,” I answer. “None of her men did. The virus took Mama.”

Eulalie closes her eyes for a moment, and I can see her lips moving. A prayer, maybe? A curse at her daughter for being so obstinate? Whatever. The past is over and done with.

If I dwell too long on my own recent past, then I’ll break down in tears, and that wouldn’t impress Grandma too well, would it?

“What happened to you, girl?”