Dying for Rain (The Rain Trilog - BB Easton Page 0,67
slide the car seat into the red vinyl booth and sit down next to it while Wes goes up to the front to order. Lily smiles back at me as I rock her gently, cooing and kicking her feet under her blanket. She’s so incredibly beautiful. Soft brown hair like her daddy—only hers is fuzzier and sticks straight up. She has giant blue eyes, like mine, but hers sparkle with the kind of pure, innocent joy that only someone who didn’t live through April 23 can know.
By the time Lily arrived, the world was safe again. Orderly. Militant. After Governor Steele was assassinated, we went from zero laws to martial law in the span of about a week. It turns out that all over the country, members of the military were gearing up for a government takeover. Officer MacArthur and Governor Steele’s bodyguard, Jenkins, were in the Green Berets together and had already been in talks with Army officials about organizing a coup in Georgia when Wes suggested that they do it at his execution.
It’s kind of hilarious that Officer Hoyt beat them to it.
Georgia was the first state to fall, but after that, the other forty-nine toppled like dominoes. Within a few days, the military completely seized power. Existing laws were reinstated, mandatory curfews were enforced, and the released prisoners were put to work—rebuilding businesses, clearing the roads, cleaning up the graffiti, and burying the dead. It’s still weird to see tanks driving down the street every night at 8 p.m. and generals giving press conferences instead of men in ten-thousand-dollar suits, but if it means my daughter and I can go to the grocery store without getting raped, robbed, killed, or kidnapped, I’ll take it.
Once the state governments started being overthrown, the president read the writing on the wall and just … disappeared. Rumor has it that he flew off to Tim Hollis’s private island along with a bunch of the other “one-percenters” and is living quite comfortably in the tropics.
Burger Palace didn’t survive though. After Lamar’s footage of what happened at Plaza Park made the national news, boycotts and vandalism spread across the country. Here’s your sponsor, Fuck your sponsor, Not my sponsor, or some other variation was spray-painted over every image of King Burger from California to Connecticut.
After the Burger Palace in Franklin Springs shut down, Mr. and Mrs. Renshaw bought it for cents on the dollar and turned it into a mom-and-pop barbeque joint. They’d actually liked cooking for all the runaways at the mall and decided to try their hand at the service industry. It’s the only restaurant in town, so even though it’s not the best-tasting barbeque you’ve ever had—and every once in a while, you might find some buckshot in your brisket—they do a ton of business.
I’m happy for them. I might not ever be on speaking terms with Agnes again, and I still low-key hate her guts, but … I guess we came to some kind of a truce. When Wes kicked them out of my house after the riot, Jimbo forced Agnes to apologize for having Wes arrested and for tying me up, and I apologized for knocking her out and stealing their truck. But I did not apologize for running over Carter’s foot. He deserved that shit.
Carter ended up getting a job as a police officer, and get this, his first assignment as a rookie is to patrol the area around the Pritchard Park Mall and make sure there’s no resurgence of Bony activity. He’s a real mall cop now! Q would die! Actually, I’m sure she already knows. Her mattress is probably a regular stop on his route. Gross. They deserve each other.
My phone dings from somewhere inside my diaper bag.
“Hold on, little lady,” I say, pinching my munchkin’s toes. “I just gotta … err …” I dig around in the bottomless bag as Lily watches me in amusement. “Got it!”
I yank my phone out and illuminate the screen, giggling at Michelle’s all-caps text.
THREE MONTHS OF MATERNITY LEAVE IS BULLSHIT. IS IT NEXT WEEK YET?
I smirk and drop the phone back in my bag. I always thought I would go to school to become a nurse like my mama, but I think I’ve seen enough bloodshed for one lifetime. After the Green Mile riot, Michelle insisted that I keep working as her co-reporter and personal assistant. I couldn’t tell her no after everything she’d done for me, but I also realized that I didn’t want to. Nobody had