Blind Faith - Sharon Sala
One
The morning sun was hot on Tony Dawson’s head, but his anger was hotter. This camping trip in Big Bend National Park was nothing but a setup—a betrayal—and by two people he had considered friends.
The drunken argument the three high school boys had last night had carried over into morning hangovers. They packed up camp in silence, and were nearing the junction that would take them back down to the Chisos Mountain Lodge, where their overnight hike had begun.
Tony had nothing to say to either of them, which obviously wasn’t what they’d expected, and as they neared the junction, both Randall Wells and Justin Young lengthened their strides to catch up to him.
“What are you going to do when you get back?” Randall asked.
Tony just kept walking.
Randall pushed him. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”
“Keep your damn hands off me. Not interested. Don’t want to hear the sound of your lying voice. You said enough last night,” Tony said.
“Are you going to keep seeing Trish? After all you found out?” Randall asked.
Tony fired back. “I had girlfriends back in California. I would assume they moved on when I left, because I did. So what if you dated Trish before I even knew her?”
“What about what Justin said?” Randall asked.
Tony stopped, then turned to face the both of them.
“You want the truth? I don’t believe Justin. Why would I? You two lied about wanting to be my friends. You lied about this camping trip. It was a setup. You’re both losers. Why would I believe two sore losers over my own instincts?”
Tony saw the rage spreading over Randall’s face, but he wasn’t expecting Randall to come at him.
Randall leaped toward him, swinging. Tony stepped to the side to dodge the blow, and when he did, the ground gave way beneath his feet. All of a sudden he was falling backward off the mountain, arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, knowing he was going to die.
Two days later: Dallas, Texas
A Dallas traffic cop clocked the silver Mercedes at ninety-five miles per hour, and was just about to take off after it when his radar gun went dark, and then the car shot through a nonexistent opening in the crazy morning traffic, before disappearing before his eyes.
“That did not just happen,” he muttered, but just in case, he radioed ahead for the next cop down the line to be on the lookout.
Wyrick wasn’t concerned with the cop’s confusion. She was already off the freeway and taking backstreets to get to the office. She knew the cop had clocked her, but she had her own little system for blocking traffic radar, and she was in a bigger hurry than normal because she overslept—a rare occurrence that happened now and then when she dreamed.
Last night had been one nightmare after another...from her mother disappearing at the merry-go-round when Wyrick was five, then being kidnapped and taken to the people at Universal Theorem who had created her, to the years at UT and what she referred to as her life in mental bondage.
From there, the dreams morphed to the man UT had picked out for her to marry...the man she thought loved her...until she got cancer.
Dreaming of the treatments and the chemo, then waking up sick in the night and thinking the dream was real, then falling back to sleep into the same web of disease and deceit.
Reliving the shock and disgust on her fiancé’s face when he saw her rail-thin and bald, coldly breaking off the engagement by telling her he didn’t want to watch her die.
The look of frustration on Cyrus Parks’s face, and his matter-of-fact dismissal of her illness, explaining it away as a flaw in her system, and chalking her up as another failed experiment. She woke up bathed in sweat as Cyrus was walking out the door of her hospital room.
She threw back the covers in anger.
When she was at her weakest and sickest, they threw her away like food gone bad, and it was rage that kicked in her own will to live.
She stomped into the kitchen to get a cold Pepsi, wanting the bad taste of that memory gone, and drank it in the middle of the kitchen, remembering how she’d healed herself in a way she didn’t even fully understand. Accepting as she finally calmed down that once in a great while she was doomed to relive the death and downfall of Jade Wyrick, and the resurrection of the woman she was now.
And because she finally went back to