The Lola Chronicles (Book 2): A Day Without Dawn (3 page)

Hayley

You would think after being
attacked by one drinker and hunted by another I would be smart enough to carry my gun with me at all times.

Well, you would be wrong.

I cursed silently when my hand went to my hip and came back empty. The gun that
should
have been there was sitting on top of my duffle bag, which was sitting right outside the sliding glass doors.

Right about now you’re probably rolling your eyes at my stupidity, but let me tell you something. Despite all the movies and the books that say otherwise, you don’t magically turn into an expert-level warrior the moment the world around you goes to shit. You can’t run faster or kick higher or start a fire using two pencils and a magnifying glass. And can we talk about the flawless makeup and perfect hair? Give me a break. When you’re running for your life you don’t exactly have time to slap on eyeliner.

Living through a tragedy doesn’t make you into something you’re not. You just become a more terrified version of the person you were before.

Abandoning my cart I crouched low and made a beeline for the next aisle over. I may not have had a weapon handy, but I knew where to find one.

All of the knives in the baking section were covered in little plastic sheaths. Selecting the biggest one, I ripped the plastic off and adjusted my grip on the handle in a way that hopefully made it look like I knew what I was doing. The truth was that while I had gotten used to handling a gun, I wasn’t a big fan of knives. With a gun you could shoot someone from fifteen feet away. But a knife…a knife made you get up close and personal. You had to be deliberate with a knife. Cold. Cunning. Ruthless. And even though I had shot a boy I cared about right in the heart I wasn’t any of those things.

Not really.

Not where it counted.

Killing Maximus had been a crime of passion, not premeditated murder. If I had given myself time to think – to really
think
about what I was doing – I don’t know if I would have been able to still pull the trigger. And that thought haunted me almost as much as his death did. 

A thick chunk of hair fell into my eyes as I edged my way past the sprinkles and confectionary sugar. With an annoyed shake of my head I tossed it back behind my ear. I really needed to cut my hair. It had grown like a weed over the past few weeks and was becoming more trouble than it was worth. Yet I still hadn’t picked up the scissors. My long hair was the one thing my mom had always loved about me.

When I was little she used to comb it out every single night before bed. I used to live for those moments when it was just the two of us. Sometimes she would sing. Sometimes she would ask me about my day. Sometimes she wouldn’t say anything at all. As I got older she came into my room less and less until one day she stopped coming all together. By then I was well into my snarky teenage phase so I can’t say I really blamed her, but I never cut my hair more than a few inches. I guess there was a part of me that hoped if I left it long she would find a reason to start paying attention to me again.

But she never did.

From a few aisles over to the left I suddenly heard the sharp
pop
and
hiss
of a soda being opened. That made me pause. I had seen the drinkers do some pretty weird shit, but I had never seen one drinking a soda. Did that mean… No. It couldn’t be. No one else was alive. I would have seen them by now. But
someone
was in the store with me. And unless a drinker had suddenly developed a thirst for sunlight and coke, that someone was human.

“Hey!” I called out. Not the most original greeting, but it got my point across. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, making my palms sweat and my pulse race. If it really
was
another human I should have been jumping with joy, but if there was one lesson I had learned it was to always expect the unexpected.

“I know you’re there,” I said when my only response was silence. “I heard you.”

For a second there was nothing but the sound of my own breathing and then the pounding of footsteps echoed through the store.

Sonofabitch.

“Stop!” Clutching the knife in my right hand I pushed off a bag of flour with my left. White powder dusted the air as the flour toppled off the shelf and fell to the floor with a hard
thud
. Bursting out of the baking aisle I made a sharp turn for the sliding glass doors, nearly wiping out into a bin of marked down cereal as my sneakers skidded on the slick tile. Righting myself, I sprinted for the exit and just managed to catch a glimpse of long blond hair before the person I was chasing slipped through the doors and out of sight.

“Stop!” I yelled again, sounding like a cop from a bad 80’s action flick. Temporarily blinded by the sun as I followed my perp – I’d always wanted to say that – out the door, I got my vision back just in time to see them reach and down and snatch up my gun from the top of my duffle bag and sprinted across the parking lot.

Sonofabitch!

My breaths came in fits and starts as I dodged around cars and shopping carts. It was definitely harder to run with a knife than the movies made it seem and I nearly sliced my own finger off twice before I threw it aside. It bounced once on the cracked asphalt before sliding out of sight underneath a pickup truck. If I had been chasing a drinker I never would have let go of my weapon (not that I would have a reason to be chasing a drinker in the first place) but I had gotten a glimpse of the thief as they’d swung wide around the hood of a dusty red fiat and I was pretty confident I could take down a blonde teenage girl, knife or no knife.

The skinny bitch wasn’t going to know what hit her.

I caught up to her on the grassy median that separated the parking lot from the road. Launching myself at her with a garbled yell, I caught her just below the knees and we both went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

“Get off me!” the girl cried. She kicked out and caught me underneath my chin with the heel of her sneaker. My head snapped back and my mouth filled with blood, the taste of it as bitter as it was familiar.

Spitting out a thick stream of red, I managed to grab her arm before she could stagger back up to her feet. I gave a hard jerk and the gun she’d stolen from me went sailing out of her hand and skidding across the grass. We both lunged for it, but I was quicker.

Landing painfully on my shoulder I grabbed the gun, clicked off the safety, and rolled onto my back in one fluid motion. Locking both elbows I pointed the gun straight at the girl’s face.

“Don’t you know better than to…
You
,” I breathed in shock when I realized who I was looking at. Her hair was tangled and she didn’t have her customary six layers of foundation on, but I still recognized her.

“
You
,” she said.

“How – how are you still alive? I blurted. Of all the people I imagined might have somehow survived Death Day, I never dreamed Hayley Nile – AKA Barbie Bitch, AKA bane of my high school existence – would have been one of them.

Her face registering the same disbelief that was written all over mine, Hayley climbed slowly to her feet, wincing a little when she put her weight on her right ankle.

“Do you mind pointing that somewhere else?” she asked, glaring down at the gun I’d forgotten I was still holding. When I lowered it her mouth curled into its customary sneer and she tossed back her hair. “You could have killed me, you little Goth psycho.”

Different day, same Hayley.

I guess some things really never
did
change.

“If I wanted to kill you then you’d be dead.” Brushing grass off my knees I stood up, shoved the gun into the back pocket of my shorts, and crossed my arms. Sweat trickled down the middle of my back but I ignored it. There were more important things to concentrate on, like the fact that my high school nemesis was still alive and well.

It wasn’t that I had
wanted
Hayley to die. I just never expected her to live. We were talking about the girl who had a mini-breakdown in English Literature because her cell phone ran out of battery. The same girl who stayed home for two weeks because of a zit outbreak. And the same girl who had been riding my ass for as long as I could remember.

I didn’t remember when or why we became enemies, but it didn’t matter.

I was the outcast.

She was the queen bee.

We were never exactly destined to be best friends.

“Where have you been for the past three weeks?” I demanded.

Her lips thinned. “I could say the same thing about you.”

“I’ve been hiding out at the old Renner Hotel.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I could have lied or flat out refused to tell her, but what would be the point? Like or not, we were on the same side now and fighting wasn’t going to benefit either one of us.

“On your own?” she asked.

“With my dad. And Travis. You remember him, right? He was the kid you and your bitch posse tormented on a daily basis.” So much for making nice.

Hayley’s blue eyes flicked to the left and the right as though she half-expected Travis and my dad to jump out of the bushes and yell ‘Surprise’!

If only.

“Where are they now?” she asked sharply as her gaze refocused on mine.

“My dad’s missing.”

“And Travis?” she pressed.

I met her stare without blinking. I didn’t want to say the words out loud, but somehow
not
saying them seemed even worse. Travis deserved for people to know what had happened to him and how hard he had fought right up until the end. I might not have been able to save him, but I could at least give his death some small measure of dignity. Surely that had to count for something.

“Lola?” There was a quiver of uncertainty in Hayley’s voice I had never heard before. “What happened to Travis?”

“Travis is dead,” I said flatly. “He tried to save my life and a drinker killed him for it.”

Hayley recoiled as though I’d slapped her and the anger I had been suppressing since I found my best friend dead in a pool of his own blood flared to life in a bright, brilliant burst of red.

“Don’t you dare look sad,” I snapped out. “You went out of your way to make his life a living hell so you don’t get to pretend to be sad now that he’s dead! You didn’t know him. You didn’t care about him. The only thing you ever did was tease the shit out of him! And why? Because he was a little different from you? Because he didn’t fit in? Because you and your friends got off on making other people miserable? Why did you do it, Hayley? WHY DID YOU DO IT?”

She paled. “Lola, I never meant–”

“Just shut up, okay? Shut the hell up.” Before I did something I truly regretted, I turned around and forced myself to walk away.

“Lola, wait!”

I heard Hayley calling after me but I didn’t stop. With a gun burning a hole in my back pocket I didn’t trust myself enough to face her.

I really should have kept my mouth shut. Too bad I’d never been that great at biting my tongue or keeping my temper in check. I know, shocker right? Still, screaming at her hadn’t solved anything. Although I did feel a
little
bit better.

Veering off the grassy median I marched across Main Street and onto Spruce. Sprawling Victorian houses with white picket fences closed in around me. I was in the historic section of town, about as far away from my suck-ass apartment complex as I could get.

When everything was normal and I was just a degenerate teen with a dead-end future I had liked to walk here sometimes. To look at the big houses with their fancy balconies and inviting porch swings and imagine how different my life would be if I lived
there
instead of a two-bedroom with stained carpets and a fridge that sounded like a dying elephant. Would I have been nicer? Smarter? More devoted to my homework? Did a person’s environment make them who they were, or did their personality come from other sources, like their parents? If that was the case, then I guess I was shit out of luck either way.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t blame everything that was screwed up about me on good old Mom and Dad. But I did blame some things on them, like my constant cries for attention through negative means (our family therapist’s words, not mine). Turns out when you’re consistently ignored you start doing things to become
un
-ignored. Like flunk a class, smoke a pack of cigarettes even though it makes you sick to your stomach, and steal a car. Well,
attempt
to steal car.

I think we all know how that ended up.

“Will you just wait a second? God, Lola, this is so not the time to be a diva.”

“What?” Spinning around to face my high school nemesis I flung both hands up in the air. “What do you want?”

Hayley stopped short. Perching a hand on her hip she tossed back her gleaming blond – and miraculously tangle free – hair and extended one long leg in a pose that was so classically Hayley I couldn’t help but snort.