Chapter 25
I Won’t Lose
That nigga thought he killed me, but you can’t kill a God.
The second that car hit the tree, everything went black.
One minute we were flying down the road, dodging traffic, trying to take that nigga on a chase, and he made us hit a fuckin tree.
I remember slamming into the tree and glass exploding around me.
Then it went dark, but when I opened my eyes back up, I thought I was dead for a second.
My ears were ringing so hard I couldn’t hear shit, but a high-pitched noise.
Smoke filled around us quick, and when I looked down at my feet, I could see the fire starting to fill in.
“Come on!” Carlos yelled out, trying to pull me out of his door.
I was moving slow as fuck, my body feeling like I got ripped apart, when we heard engines revving. We looked back and saw Love coming toward us.
“Come the fuck on!” Carlos yelled again.
I was trying to move as fast as I could, but him and his niggas hopped outta their whips and lit our shit up. We tried ducking as we moved through the big cloud of smoke, but it didn’t do shit, we still got hit.
I felt something tear through my arm, and it almost dropped me to my knees.
“Fuck!” I yelled, grabbing at it.
Bullets were coming from every direction. Them niggas wasn’t aiming at us no more, they were aiming at the whole fuckin car.
Joe fell beside me, rollin behind a piece of bushes while holding his leg.
“I’m hit!” he yelled like we were on a fuckin battlefield.
“Nigga, everybody fuckin hit!” Frog snapped back.
The smoke was thick as hell, and honestly that was the only thing that worked in our favor that let us leave with our lives. Between that and the smoke, they couldn’t see where we was.
Carlos grabbed my shit and dragged me behind some trees.
“Move, nigga!” he yelled.
I was trying, but I was fucked up, my leg felt like it was barely attached to me. Every time I tried to walk, it felt like somebody was driving a nail through my body.
The gunfire kept going while we took cover. Nobody said shit the whole time, we were all just trying to breathe.
I looked down at all them niggas lookin’ scared, bleeding, hurting, trying to stand up when none of us hardly could when I started counting.
Kev was there, Carlos was there, Joe was there, Frog was there, Spy wasn’t.
That was when I looked at the car
“Where Spy?”
Nobody answered me.
I looked at Carlos.
“Where the fuck is Spy?”
His face told me before he even opened his mouth.
That nigga never got out.
“He had his seatbelt on,” Kev said low. “I couldn’t get him.”
My stomach dropped, and I shook my head, staring at them niggas lighting my car up. When everything got bright, the whole fucking car blew up.
The smoke started to clear out some, and that’s when I saw him.
Love.
Standing there looking at my shit go up in flames like it was nothing.
He wasn’t hiding.
He wasn’t ducking.
The nigga didn’t even look worried. Matter of fact, he had a smirk on his face when he pulled off.
That nigga thought he won, he thought I was in that fire.
I smirked at that shit.
We stayed hidden until the last set of taillights disappeared.
“How the fuck we gonna get back to the hotel now?!” Frog yelled out.
“We can get an Uber,” Kev responded.
“From where?” Frog asked. “From the site of a blown-up fuckin’ car!”
They went silent, and I let them, not adding shit to the conversation; my mind was spinning too much.
Frog was limping, talking about how he thought his foot was broken. Kev said he thought he broke his finger, while Carlos expressed how he thought the bullet went through his arm, and maybe his leg.
I didn’t say shit, but I knew I was fucked up, my arm, my leg, my fucking head. It was all fucked up. But it wasn’t gonna make me stop shit.
“Come on, I saw a gas station around the way. We can make it close to that and call for a ride,” Carlos said.
They nodded, but I didn’t say shit. We held on to each other while we tried to move outta the bushes without fucking up ourselves even more.
Once we got onto the street and under the streetlight, you could see the blood running out of our arms and legs through our clothes. We took our shirts and pants, whatever that wasn’t covered in blood, and tried to cut off the circulation.
We made it halfway to the sidewalk when we could hear the fire crackle and smell burning rubber when it got mixed with the sound of sirens, and knew we needed to get off the scene as soon as possible.
“Man, I can’t make it,” Frog said. “My shit is fucked up.”
They all nodded, agreeing with him. Again, I didn’t add shit to the conversation, letting them niggas handle shit. Carlos talked his nigga off a cliff and called an Uber so we could sit down.
I sat a lil’ ways away from them, listening to them talk but was looking off in the sky.
I took L. Not a setback, not an inconvenience, it was a fuckin Loss. I never have taken so many L’s back-to-fuckin-back like this, but it was no way I was gonna let it end like this.
When we got back to the hotel, all of us laid the fuck down feelin’ like we had been through war.
And shit, maybe it was the start to one.
The next few days were hell.
We laid around the hotel trying to nurse each other back to health. But real talk, I was fucked up the most.
I thought the bullet caught my arm once; it caught it twice, had my shit burning to the white meat, and one caught my left leg.
We spent time on Google looking up what to do and got ourselves some shit delivered to try to get the bullets out and cover up our wounds.
But that shit hurt like a bitch.
“What the fuck!” I yelled out as Carlos poured alcohol on my arms, then dug into the hole searching for the bullet
“Man, I can’t feel that shit, and my fuckin’ hand hurts,” Carlos responded, his hand damn near white like my shit was.
“Nigga, I don’t give a fuck what hurt. We need to get this shit together,” I responded.
“This shit was a fuckin’ dummy mission,” Frog expressed. “Look at us, we need a fuckin’ hospital.” Carlos, Kev, and Joe agreed with him. “For real, I think my ankle fucked up,” Joe added.
I rubbed my head. I was already annoyed, my heart beating in my ear, and these niggas weren’t making shit better. “We are not going to no hospital, and if any nigga mentions going back to Cali, I’ma shoot you. We are not leaving here until the job is done!”
“How the fuck are we supposed to finish a fuckin job, and we all are fucked up?” Carlos asked. “And this shit is not what you said it was at all. You talked like it was some lil’ nigga, not a nigga that got two trucks full of niggas after you,” Frog added.
Them niggas talked back and forth about how we were fucked up, how the whole trip was fucked up.
But that’s not where my mind was. My mind was on Islah.
She got that nigga wrapped around her finger, ready to run a drill over her.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I was more fucked up than I thought I was.
That ho ass nigga had eyes on me all over the city, so my move had to be thought out.
I took a deep breath and kept thinking about what move I needed to make to achieve my goal.
When a thought came to me—a thought that made me smile for the first time, and I don’t know how long.
“Listen,” I said with a lower tone. “This shit didn’t go the way I thought it was.
I thought I had the upper hand, but that nigga know how to move in the streets.
” I exhaled, looking around at them. “But to be real with you. I’m not no bitch ass nigga, and I’m not gonna let this nigga make me look like one. ”
Carlos exhaled. “So what do you want to do, Gio? As a team, we can hardly move.”
I looked at him, then looked at everybody.
Kev was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his shit.
Joe was trying to walk, but the nigga couldn’t put any weight on his foot.
It was all fucked up, but I didn’t give a fuck about none of it.
Frog took a seat on the bathroom sink, shaking his head while looking at his wounds like he was regretting even agreeing to this shit. I rubbed my jaw and leaned back.
“We can’t make no moves like that.” Carlos nodded. “Finally, sound like you are talking with some sense. We can’t move like this.”
I exhaled slow. “We need help. The hospital is gonna ask too much shit.”
Joe looked over at me. “So, what does that mean?”
“It means that whether somebody like it or not. We need somebody to come here and get us right,” I shot back.
“You talkin bout a nurse, what fuckin nurse you know here in Atlanta that’s gonna come in here and fix us with no questions asked?” Carlos asked.
“A nurse who nigga did this shit to us,” I responded.
The room went silent as they all looked at me like I had lost my mind.
“Nigga, are you fuckin serious?” Kev asked.
I didn’t answer right away.
“You want to get your ex to come here and fix us? I know you not on that shit,” Carlos added.
“What the fuck are we gonna do, take her?” Joe added.
I raised an eyebrow.
“All hell nah!” They all said at the same time. “We fucked up, but not that fucked up,” Kev said.
“Yeah, I’ll just try my luck at the hospital,” Frog chimed in.
“We are not going out like no pussy,” I said low.
“What the fuck did you just say?” Carlos asked.
“I said I’m not goin out like no pussy!” I yelled out trying to stand up, but that shit felt like fire going through my whole body.
“That ho ass nigga tryna make me look like I’m pussy, like I don’t know how to move in the streets.
And Islah, MY FUCKIN GIRL! She turned her back on me, taking that nigga side and shit.
Hell, she probably told that nigga I called her…
the way I see it, she’s the reason why I’m fucked up, why we all are fucked up, and the least she can do is fix us.
” “And you think she gonna be willin’ to do that? ” Joe asked.
I shook my head with a smirk. “I don’t need her willing, my boy. I don’t need her to be willing at all. That bitch is gonna remember who I was to her.”