Fighting for Rain Read online

  “When I found her, she was high as a kite, getting her ass kicked in the middle of Burger Palace over a bottle of painkillers.”

  “Oh, Rainbow. I’m so—”

  “She goes by Rain now, and I’m not finished,” Wes snaps, cutting off Carter’s mother. “Since you guys left, she lost her parents, got shot at, got trapped in a house fire, tried to overdose, and … what else, honey? Oh yeah, she almost got blown up in an eighteen-wheeler explosion last night. So, if you’re asking how we got engaged instead of why she’s crying and looks like she’s been through a war zone, you never fucking cared about her in the first place.”

  I wait for Carter’s mom to slap him across the face, but all I hear is a single slow clap coming from the group of tables at the back of the food court. I open one eye and see a girl about my age, maybe younger, walking toward us with the swagger of a gangster. She looks like she might have had green hair at one point, but it’s faded to the color of decaying leaves and is twisted into messy dreadlocks. Her rounded nose has a hoop through it, and her baggy black T-shirt and pants look like they came from the men’s big and tall section at Walmart.

  Everyone in the food court cowers as she passes.

  “That’s the most fun we’ve had around here since the internet went down.” She twists her full lips into a smirk, still clapping at a painfully slow rate.

  Wes’s grip around my shoulders loosens, and his energy goes cool again.

  “What’s your name, Hawaii Five-0?” Her hazel eyes are the same color as her yellowish-greenish-brownish hair. They cut over to me once and darken before darting back over to the man next to me.

  “Wes,” he says flatly.

  “Well, Wes, welcome to my kingdom.” She spreads her arms and glances around the food court. “I’m Q. That stands for queen, ’cause I’m the muhfuckin’ monarch up in here. Me and my crew been runnin’ this place goin’ on three years now. You and y’all other stray cats”—she flicks her fingernails at the rest of us sitting around the table—“are guests in my castle. That means y’all gon’ have to pull y’all’s weight, or you gon’ get put out.” Her angular eyebrows shoot up in warning as she points toward the barricaded exit.

  “Ya boy Carter here”—she points a lazy finger at my ex—“is on patrol duty. Duck Dynasty over here hunts birds and deer and shit from up on the roof. And mama bear”—she points to Mrs. Renshaw—“cooks it all up real nice. But y’all …” Q taps her fingertips to her lips as her eyes roam from Wes to me to Lamar. Then, she snaps her fingers. “Y’all gon’ be my scouts.”

  “Scouts?” Wes’s body language is relaxed, but his tone is challenging.

  “That’s right. We’re runnin’ low on shit now that all y’all strays are up in here. Somebody got to do some shoppin’.”

  “I can’t leave,” I blurt out. “Please. Let me do something else. We have a hurt friend, and somebody has to stay here to take care of him.”

  Q eyes me suspiciously. “You good at shit like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like nurse-type shit.”

  I sit up and nod. “My mom is … was … an ER nurse. She taught me a lot.”

  Q snaps again and points one long fingernail right between my eyes. “Good. You gon’ be my medic. And you can start with that one.” She swings her finger from my face to Mr. Renshaw’s.

  I glance at Mr. Renshaw and watch the color drain out of his rosy cheeks.

  “Don’t let me down now.” Q cackles as she sashays back to her table, full of other rough-looking, gun-toting, unwashed teens. “I’d hate to have to feed y’all to the Bonys.”

  They’re runaways, I realize.

  We’re all just strays and runaways.

  Turning to Carter’s dad, who hasn’t spoken a word since we sat down, I ask, “Why do you need a medic, Mr. Renshaw?”

  He gives me a sad smile. “That ain’t important right now. What’s important is that you know how sorry we are about your folks, Rainbo—I mean, Rain.” Carter’s grizzly bear of a dad looks at Wes, remembering what he said about my name, and gives him a solemn nod.

  Mrs. Renshaw reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “I am so sorry, baby girl.” Her dark brown eyes glisten as they bore into mine. “I knew we shoulda taken you with us—you and your mama. I won’t ever forgive myself for that, but at least we’re all together now.”

  Lamar and Sophie both get up to hug me and give their condolences, but my attention is focused solely on Carter. The boy I grew up with. The boy I gave all my firsts to. The man who should be consoling me right now. But instead, he’s just staring at me like he doesn’t know what to say.

  “Rainbow …” he finally mutters.

  “Rain,” I snap back.

  His honey-colored eyes fill with remorse, and for a second, I regret being so mean. That face … I was in love with that face for as long as I can remember. I know every angle. Every expression and smile and dimple. It kills me to see him hurting. I want to curl up in his lap and let him wrap his long arms around me like he used to …

  But then I remember overhearing Kimmy Middleton say she made out with him senior year, and suddenly, I don’t feel so bad anymore.

  “Hey, Carter, remember Kimmy?” I watch the guilt crawl across his handsome face, and it’s all the validation I need. “She burned your house down.”

  “What?” Mrs. Renshaw screeches. “Our house?”

  Carter’s eyes go wide and dart from me to his parents.

  Sophie starts to cry.

  Mr. Renshaw stands up, slams his chair in, and stomps away with a definite limp.

  “What happened to him?” I ask, desperately wanting to change the subject after the bomb I just dropped on them. “Why does he need a medic?”

  Mrs. Renshaw shakes her head and looks over her shoulder as her husband hobbles toward the atrium. “We got in a bad accident on our way out of town. As soon as we left for Tennessee, it was obvious that everybody on the highway was under the influence of something. People were speedin’ and weavin’ all over the road. We had only made it to Pritchard Park when a car up ahead of us pulled in front of a tractor-trailer and made it jackknife right in the middle of the road. It ended up rolling about three times and blocking the entire highway. There was a huge pileup, and we were caught right in the middle of it.”

  “Oh my God.” I cover my mouth with the sleeve of my hoodie. “That pileup is why we’re here too. We couldn’t get around it, and when we tried …” My voice trails off as I glance over at Lamar.

  He’s staring blankly in the direction of the tuxedo shop, like he can see his brother from here.

  Mrs. Renshaw is looking at her children the same way. “Sophie and Carter were okay—thank God. But Jimbo …” She shakes her head. “His leg was crushed in the accident, and he won’t let anybody look at it. I’m afraid it’s bad.”

  “So that’s why you guys didn’t come home?” I ask. “Because he couldn’t walk that far?”

  Mrs. Renshaw nods.

  “Plus, the dogs and Bonys,” Carter adds, staring at the table like a kid in the principal’s office. “We never would have made it.”

  “So we decided to stay here. We had enough food and supplies in the car to last us this long, and Q has been gracious about sharing the drinking water from their rain barrels with us.”

  Q.

  I glance over at the runaways’ table and catch her watching us.

  No. Not us.

  Wes.

  “When we woke up this morning and the apocalypse hadn’t happened, I thought …” Mrs. Renshaw’s chin buckles. “I thought maybe things would go back to normal. Maybe we could go back home.”

  Carter’s mom tries to hold it together, but as soon as she looks over at Sophie, her face crumples like a paper towel. I’ve never seen Mrs. Renshaw cry before, and knowing that my words made her do it makes me want to throw up. I was so cruel. My mama had taught me better than that. I was trying to hurt Carter on purpose, and this is what I get.


  Carter, Sophie, and I all jump up at the same time to comfort her. Sophie kneels at her side and clasps her hand while Carter and I end up standing on either side of her, squeezing her shoulders and rubbing her back.

  “I’m so sorry,” I mutter, speaking to Mrs. Renshaw but finding my eyes drifting up to Carter’s.

  “Me too.” His deep voice vibrates around me, taking me to a million different places at once.

  I know what his voice sounds like when he’s sleepy, when he’s sick, when he’s lying, when he wants me to take my clothes off, when he’s angry, when he’s frustrated, and when he’s playing the part of Mr. Popular. I know what it sounded like when he was six years old and lost his two front teeth at the same time. And now, I know what it sounds like when he’s just plain lost.

  “You can have my house, Mrs. Renshaw,” I say, tearing my eyes away from her son. “I’m never going back there again.”

  Wes

  “Wes, wait!” Rain calls out, but I just keep walking.

  I’d rather give myself a root canal than sit around for another second of this precious little family reunion.

  “Rainbow!” Carter yells after her.

  I turn around at the sound of his voice, only because I want to watch her choose him. Them. I need to see it. I need to feel the twist of the knife because I know that’s the only fucking way I’ll be able to let her go.

  “Sorry. I meant, Rain …” Carter has this bullshit, pitiful puppy-dog look on his pretty-boy face, and I want to put my fucking fist through it. “Can we go somewhere and talk? Please?” He pulls his eyebrows up so high that they disappear behind his mop of curly black hair. Then, he bites his bottom lip.

  Motherfucker. I know that look. I invented that fucking look.

  “Not right now, Carter,” Rain says, picking up her untouched plate of eggs. “I have to go check on Quint.”

  Not right now? How about not fucking ever?

  I feel my muscles tense and my teeth grind together as I glare at the piece of shit in the Twenty One Pilots T-shirt, but by the time his eyes land back on me, I’m loose as a motherfucking goose. I roll my neck and stick my hands in my pockets like I’m waiting in line at the DMV, not thinking of all the ways I could crack his skull open.

  Rain turns and walks toward me, her face flushing when she realizes I stopped to watch their little exchange, but I keep my face slack and my posture relaxed.

  You’re not mad. You’re bored. Bored, bored, bored.

  Everybody knows how this show is gonna end. Rain becomes a Renshaw. She gets her happy little family back. They have two-point-five kids who can dunk from the foul line and don’t even need therapy. The. Fucking. End.

  I wait for her to catch up. Only a jealous, bitter asshole would turn his back and keep walking right now, and I’m not jealous.

  Nope. I’m just so fucking bored.

  Rain’s face looks tortured as she approaches, and I feel the fire inside me die down. Her right cheek still has three pink claw marks on it from when she got attacked at Burger Palace. Her lips are chapped. Her hair is matted. And her big, round eyes look like two empty swimming pools now.

  Drained.

  Dull.

  Desperate.

  I hate how badly I want to be the one to fill them back up.

  A moment before Rain closes the distance between us, gasps and shrieks and, “Oh my God!”s fill the food court. I look past her and see that every digital monitor behind every fast-food counter is on and glowing red.

  “Wes?” Rain’s voice is barely a whisper as she comes to stand beside me. “What’s going on?”

  I watch as the black silhouette of a hooded horseman holding a scythe flashes on-screen for less than a second.

  “Did you see that?”

  I nod.

  Another one flashes—this time, the horseman with the sword. Then, another and another. Faster and faster, their images appear and disappear until the screens are just pulsating black-and-red pools.

  People scream.

  Sophie dives for her mother’s arms.

  And Rain grips my bicep so hard that her nails break the skin.

  “Maybe this is just the nightmare,” I say in a half-assed attempt to make her feel better.

  “It’s not, Wes. It’s real.”

  “None of this is real, remember? It’s all just a hoax.”

  “Citizens,” a female voice with a French accent booms through the speakers, drawing my attention back to the screens.

  The face of a middle-aged woman with mousy-brown hair, sharp features, and dark red lipstick fills the left side of the screen while the word citizens is written in at least twelve different languages on the right side.

  “My name is Dr. Marguerite Chapelle. I am the director of the World Health Alliance. If you are seeing this broadcast, congratulations. You are now part of a stronger, healthier, more self-sufficient human race.”

  Rain and I look at each other as dread slithers across her face and into my veins.

  The camera zooms out, and Dr. Chapelle is sitting at a sleek white table with an older man on either side of her. Behind them, on risers, are at least eighty other assholes, all wearing suits that probably cost more than the mortgage payments on their Malibu summer homes.

  The smug bastard front and center is our fucking president.

  “For the past year, the World Health Alliance has been working in conjunction with the United Nations”—she gestures to the world leaders standing behind her—“to implement a solution to the global population crisis. A correction, if you will. We call this correction Operation April 23.”

  “Wes, what is she talking about?” Rain whispers, gripping my arm tighter.

  “Approximately three years ago, our top researchers discovered that, at the rate that our population was growing, Earth’s natural and economic resources would be depleted in less than a decade. To put it bluntly, human beings were facing extinction, and the cause was simple—our species had abandoned the law of natural selection.”

  The camera pans to the man on her left, a skinny guy with a haircut like Hitler’s. The caption below his face says, Dr. Henri Weiss, World Health Alliance Researcher. “Every s-species on the planet is s-subject to the law of natural selection,” he says, tugging at his collar and taking a sip from his glass of water. His accent sounds German, and he looks like he’s about to shit himself. “It is the very f-foundation of evolution. Since the dawn of living organisms, the weaker, more infirm members of the s-s-species die off, and the strongest, most intelligent, most well-adapted members live the longest and procreate the most. This p-process promotes the survival of the species by ensuring that each g-g-generation inherits only the most adaptive genetic traits and by p-p-preventing resources from being depleted by nonproductive s-s-s-subgroups.”

  The camera slides back to the French bitch. “Over the past century, human beings have become the first species to ever circumvent the law of natural selection. Through advances in technology and lavish government programs, we have been actively prolonging the lives of our weakest, most disabled, and most dependent members of society to the great detriment of our entire species.”

  She gestures to President Dickhead standing behind her.

  “The American government, for example, spends over one trillion dollars each year housing, feeding, and caring for its disabled, incarcerated, and unemployed citizens—citizens who contribute nothing in return. As a result, the World Health Alliance calculated last January that the number of disabled and nonproductive members of our species outnumbered able-bodied, productive members for the first time in the history of any species. Immediate action had to be taken.”

  The camera cuts to the man on her right who looks a little like Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. The caption below his name reads, Dr. Hiro Matsuda, World Health Alliance Researcher. “We needed a way to thin the herd, so to speak, while ensuring that the strongest, healthiest, most intelligent members of our species would survive. Engineering a super
virus or inciting a world war would have been … counterproductive … due to the loss of healthy, able-bodied citizens that would have resulted. Therefore, my team and I came up with a plan to introduce a global stressor so intense that it would trigger our least resilient citizens to behave in self-destructive ways while simultaneously encouraging our most resilient citizens to become even stronger and more self-reliant.”

  The images of the horsemen appear again, eliciting gasps from the audience, but this time, they’re presented as icons at the bottom of the screen.

  “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Grim Reaper, Death—these archetypes have appeared in almost every society throughout history. By planting these iconic images in every digital media source worldwide—paired with a single date: April 23—we were able to tap directly into the collective human subconscious and plant the idea of an impending doomsday.”

  “Oh my God, Wes,” Rain whispers, looking up at me like a child who just found out that the Easter Bunny wasn’t real. “Those images you found in my phone—you were right.”

  “Worldwide subliminal messaging.” I shake my head.

  Only it wasn’t at the hands of some evil corporation or a band of sniveling computer hackers on a power trip, like I thought. It was worse.

  It was our own fucking government.

  “We all owe Dr. Matsuda, his team, and our world leaders a debt of gratitude.” The French bitch grins. “Operation April 23 was a brilliant success. Our researchers estimate that our global population has been decreased by as much as twenty-seven percent with most of the relief coming from our nonproductive subgroups.”

  “What does that even mean?” Rain whispers.

  “It means that most of the people who died because of the April 23 hoax were either crazy, sick, poor, or old.”

  I watch Rain’s face go pale, and I wish I could take it back.

  Shit.

  I pull her against my chest and press my lips to the top of her head. I don’t even know what to say. All I can do is stand here and hold her while the government tells her they’re happy that her parents are dead.