Dying for Rain (The Rain Trilog - BB Easton Page 0,30
unless you would like to be robbed at gunpoint.”
I can’t help but smile. Even Quint’s GPS voice sounds Southern.
“I don’t think we have to worry about getting robbed in a giant truck that says DEATH TO SHEEP on the side of it,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“You know it probably just has dicks on the other side.” Lamar laughs. “You can’t give a dude a can of spray paint and not end up with a buncha dicks.”
“Oh shit.” Quint laughs, rummaging in the glove box until he finds a flashlight. Then, he leans out the broken passenger window and shines it on the side of the truck. “Gotdamn it! There’s one right here on my door! Why does it hafta be on my side?”
We all laugh, which feels strange and wrong, considering the circumstances, before Quint pulls his head back into the truck.
“Jesus. Who the hell do you s’pose lives there?”
I follow his gaze out the window and find a house—no, a mansion—set back from the road behind a perfectly manicured lawn and a brightly lit fountain. The brick monstrosity is illuminated from all sides, making the white plantation-style columns—and the police cars lining the circular driveway—glow in the dark.
“That’s the governor’s mansion,” Lamar says. “They didn’t make y’all go there on a field trip?”
Quint and I shake our heads.
“Pssh. Y’all lucky. They made us go in sixth grade. Pissed me off so bad. How you gonna drag a buncha country kids all the way into the city just to show us a buncha shit we ain’t never gonna have?”
“Yeah, especially when our tax money paid for all that shit,” Quint adds, still staring out the window.
The property seems to go on forever.
“I didn’t even learn nuthin’. ’Cept that Governor Steele has, like, thirty rooms in his house, a heated pool, a helicopter pad, some kinda marble floors that came from Italy or France or some-fuckin’-place. Oh, and at Christmastime every year, somebody makes a giant gotdamn four-foot-wide gingerbread house that looks just like the mansion, and then they just throw the whole thing away in January. Homeless people down the street would eat tha hell outta that thing!”
“And they say sharing what we got with sick people and old people is why we were facin’ extinction. If you ask me, it was from assholes like this taking all the damn resources for themselves.” Quint clicks off his flashlight and tosses it back into the glove box. “I saw on TV that one percent of the world’s population owns ninety-nine percent of the wealth. If anything goes against nature, it’s that shit.”
“You’re right.” I nod, trying to keep my eyes on the road instead of the mansion my mama and daddy helped pay for with their hard-earned money. “I remember watchin’ an episode of Hoarders once where they said that no other species on Earth hoards like humans do. I mean, animals will store food for winter or whatever, but they never take more than they actually need. Not like us.”
By the time we get to the end of the property and pass the fully illuminated tennis court, I’m convinced that Governor Beauregard Steele’s house is more than anybody actually needs.
“Turn left onto Northside Drive,” the GPS lady says.
“How much longer?” Lamar whines from the backseat.
I glance at the glowing screen in the dashboard. “That’s weird.”
“What?”
“It says we’re only nine miles away, but …”
“Ten hours?” Lamar yells, his face between Quint and me as he reads the dash for himself.
I assume it’s a mistake until I come around a curve and have to jerk the wheel to avoid hitting a stopped car. The truck bounces as I careen over the curb and onto the grass, slamming on the brakes and coming to a stop inches away from a telephone pole.
Lamar flies into the dashboard and lands in Quint’s lap. “What the hell, Rain?”
“Look!” I point through my broken window at the sea of parked cars stretching all the way down Northside Drive. At first, I assume there’s just a bad wreck up ahead that never got cleared, but then I hear the sound of bass in the distance.
And screaming.
And gunshots.
The streetlights are still working, but that’s more than I can say for the businesses lining the road. Smashed windows, busted neon signs … the bank has an actual car sticking out the side of it.
“We still have nine miles to go?” Quint asks.
“Uh-huh.”
“There is heavier than expected traffic up ahead,” the GPS lady announces.
“Yeah, no shit,” Lamar grunts as he