Chapter 1
CHAPTER
ONE
CHASE
We’d only been gone from Macon, Georgia, for five days, and Cash had a cough.
It wasn’t a normal cough. It came in fits that made him struggle to breathe and left a rattling, wheezing sound in his chest when it was done.
The weather was fucking cold too. There was even snow in this part of North Carolina, just a thin dusting of it all over the place but enough that we couldn’t sit down on the ground without it soaking into our jeans.
We were cold and hungry, and Cash was getting sick.
It had only been five days, and I’d already fucked things up.
The plan had always been to leave home after graduation.
That had been Cash’s idea. Because we needed to graduate, he’d said.
There were too many doors shut in your face if you didn’t graduate.
We’d been saving money for a while—not much, but whatever we could squirrel away.
We even had our birth certificates and Social Security numbers.
But when our dad had snapped, worse than I’d ever seen before, and put his hand around my throat and squeezed, all our plans had gone out the window—along with us.
For a few hours we’d hung around the neighborhood, hunkering down in the overgrown vacant lot by the AutoZone store until we figured it was safe enough to head back to the house.
Except when we finally went back, shoes crunching on the broken glass from last week’s rage-filled bender, Dad caught us sneaking in and threw Cash so hard against the wall that I thought I heard his spine crack.
A switch had flipped.
I’d never been so fucking angry. There was no buildup, no rising tide.
Just pure, sudden hatred that exploded out of me before I’d even registered it was there, and every bit of it was directed at our dad.
By the time Cash pulled me off him, Dad wasn’t moving anymore and there was more blood than I’d ever seen.
And Cash whispered, “Run! We have to run!”
And so we did.
We went to Brad’s place. Brad was a guy from our school.
He liked me because we’d messed around a bit and even fucked a couple of times, and I liked him because he had a nice dick and didn’t ask too many questions.
He drove us to Atlanta. Cash sat in the back, staring out the window, and I sat in the front and talked shit and laughed and pretended I hadn’t just killed our dad.
He wasn’t dead, though.
We’d thought that maybe he was.
Brad dropped us off at the bus station in Atlanta, and Cash found a pay phone that still worked and we called our dad’s cell phone.
“Who’s this? Who the fuck is this?” he’d demanded, and we’d hung up.
So he wasn’t dead. He’d sounded pretty bad, but then he usually did. I couldn’t tell if I’d fucked him up any more than the meth and the booze already had.
“You think he knows it was us?” Cash had whispered over the noise and bustle of the station behind us.
“He probably hasn’t even noticed we’re gone.”
We didn’t have money for bus tickets, and even if we had, we didn’t have photo IDs, but the bus station was still an okay place to hang around for a while.
Nobody looked too closely at a couple of teenagers with backpacks in a bus station, even if it was the middle of the night, just so long as we moved around every now and then.
And it gave me time to come up with a plan.
It took two different MARTA buses and a bit of walking to get to where I’d decided we needed to be—the Petro Travel Center. I’d never seen so many semitrucks all parked in one place. We hung around there for a while, trying to figure out who to approach for a ride out of Atlanta.
Cash had been scared. Me too, but I hadn’t shown it. But there were two of us, right? So whichever trucker agreed to let us hitch a ride was probably taking on more of a risk than we were. That was what I told myself anyhow, so that I didn’t shit myself when it came to approaching one of them.
It was easier than I thought, in the end.
Now, five days after leaving Macon, we were at another truck stop in Boone, a couple hours north of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Cash was sick.
I’d spent most of our money on food and whatever over-the-counter stuff I could buy that I thought might help his cough, and now we were sitting back behind the shower block, shivering in the cold, jeans damp, and Cash’s breath was a creaky wheeze.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked him, trying to distract him from this place. “Maybe Arizona. Arizona’s hot.”
“N-not in winter,” he whispered.
“California then,” I said. “We could see the ocean.”
His mouth twitched.
We were sitting on the edge of a pool of yellow light cast from a flickering bulb attached to the back wall of the amenities block. It made him look sicker than he was. At least, I hoped it was the light. I hoped he wasn’t really as bad as he looked.
“You hungry?” I asked, digging through my backpack for one of the granola bars I’d bought on my last foray into the truck stop’s store.
He shook his head and hunched over.
“I could go get us hot dogs,” I said. “And coffee.”
“You hate coffee,” he mumbled.
Yeah, I did, but it was cheap and it was hot.
“Wait here,” I said, which was dumb because it didn’t seem like he had the strength to move more than a foot even if he’d wanted. “I’m gonna get us some coffee.”
This truck stop wasn’t big like the Petro Travel Center back in Atlanta, which meant it was a lot harder to get lost in the crowd.
I didn’t like how I got stares when I went inside the store.
I didn’t like how the truckers eating at the booths in the restaurant area all tracked my progress through the store.
Did I look like a hitchhiker or a lot lizard?
I had no fucking idea. Hell, maybe they were exactly the same thing.
But I didn’t like the stares because I couldn’t tell if they were from guys who were worried what someone my age was doing at a place like this in the middle of the night, or if they were calculating how desperate I was.
Were they family guys with kids my age or were they fucking creeps?
Maybe they were exactly the same thing too.
I took a detour down the aisle that had all the pharmacy stuff, then bought a hot dog and two coffees and went back to Cash.
He sipped the coffee and shook his head at the hot dog.
“You gotta eat,” I urged him.
He shook his head again and leaned against me. He was burning up.
Then, after a while, he fell asleep. I sat there for hours, my arms around him, counting all the ways I’d fucked this up and hating the universe for taking it out on Cash instead of me.
In the morning, Cash was still wheezing, and I decided I’d spend some of our money on whatever I could find in the aisle with the pharmacy stuff that might help him.
The only thing that had stopped me just pocketing the bottle of pills was the thought that if I got caught, they’d send us back home, and no way in hell was that happening.
I left Cash propped up against the back wall of the amenities block, went and took a piss behind a bush, and headed back toward the store.
But just as I was rounding the corner of the amenities block, a guy was coming out. Just a regular guy. Middle-aged, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt that pulled hard around his beer gut. He had a cap pulled down over his face, keeping his eyes in shadow, but I could still feel his stare.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t have to.
He just jerked his head in a nod toward the door of the amenities block, and I knew exactly what he meant.
So I followed him inside.
“California’s out,” I said a while later, surprised my voice sounded so natural over the high-pitched buzzing sound in my skull.
Cash blinked up at me and whispered, “Out?”
I crouched down, pretending I couldn’t feel the twinge of pain in my ass or the gross stickiness left in my underwear by the lube. “I got us a ride, but he’s going the other way. Says he can take us as far as Raleigh.”
Except the asshole dumped us outside Greensboro because he didn’t like how Cash kept wheezing and coughing.
Said he didn’t want to catch whatever Cash had, which was rich coming from a guy who fucked random teenagers in truck stop bathrooms. I would have cussed him out except I was too busy trying to catch Cash and stop him from hitting the road face-first when the guy literally shoved him out of the cab of his prime mover because he wasn’t moving fast enough.
We were still miles out of Greensboro, just past some fucking interchange, with low hills on one side of us and trees on the other.
We climbed over the guardrail, landing in tangled brush up to our thighs, and worked our way down the sharp slope to the potholed local road that ran alongside the interstate.
Cash’s breath rasped as we walked, and tears streaked his face. He started to cough, and it left him doubled over while he choked. I rubbed his back and fought tears of my own. When the coughing finally ended, he leaned on me heavily and whispered, “I can’t breathe.”
I wondered what it would be like if we both just stopped right here, surrounded by the winter-blasted scrubby bushes and brown grass and sticky weeds, and just lay down.
I wondered if anyone would ever find us.
Probably not. Because even though the interstate was so close we could hear the rush of the traffic speeding past, why would anyone ever stop and look for anything, or anyone, in the tangle of bushes off to the side?
“We have to keep going,” I said, staring into his pale, drawn face. “Remember? We have to.”
We had no choice. Because we couldn’t go back, and fuck if I was going to let Cash stop here when I was afraid that if I did, he might not get up again.
He held my gaze as though he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Five minutes.”
I wavered. “Five minutes.”