Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

my throat. But he’s not among them. He’s nowhere to be seen.

Leo. He’s still crouched down, still shaking. Nic is up on his knees, staring at him.

I get to my knees too. Doing so brings on another dose of double vision, and I have to stop for a second to let it pass.

I’ve been in danger before. You can’t live the life I lead without landing in multiple fucked-up situations. But I think this is the first time there was genuinely nothing I could do.

I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t run. I was completely helpless. All I had was blind hope that I wouldn’t die – and it was only through blind luck that I didn’t.

Leo looks over at me – and his eyes roll back in his skull. His left hand twitches, then his whole arm. He tilts sideways, slumping onto the parking lot surface, his body jackhammering.

This isn’t like before, when he almost laughed at his leg and his wrist twitching. This is way, way worse.

“Nic,” I say.

He doesn’t appear to hear me.

“Nic, help him.” I’m not sure I’ve got the strength right now to carry Leo myself.

Nic looks up at me, then over at Leo. Moving as if in a dream, he makes his way to the boy. It’s impossible to miss how he hesitates before scooping him off the ground. Like he’s scared to touch him.

But then he has the boy in his arms, straightening up and walking in long, jerky strides away from the stadium. Somehow, I manage to follow.

TWENTY-EIGHTTeagan

Over the past few years, I’ve become very familiar with the giant spurt of adrenaline you get after surviving something that should have killed you.

It always arrives around five minutes after I nearly die, beginning with a prickle on my arms, a delightful tremor in my fingers. Then a feeling of well-being, flooding through me, quickly growing to a kind of hysterical euphoria. It’s like an old friend by now. One I’ve been hanging out with for so long that I know everything they’re going to do before they do it.

It also makes me wildly uncoordinated. As we stumble back down the slope towards the river in the growing dusk, I have to watch my feet, make sure I don’t faceplant. My ears are still ringing, and my balance is shot to shit. God knows how Nic is doing – he’s carrying a twitching Leo behind me, his feet heavy on the hard earth of the hillside. Behind us, the sirens have started.

We are so fucked.

We went to the stadium to get food and water, to keep us going for the long night ahead. We were supposed to slip in and out, just three more poor souls looking for shelter, souls nobody would miss when they made their exit and resumed their stealthy trek down the LA River. Instead, we not only completely failed to get any food and water, but we also sent up a giant signal flare for anybody looking for us. It’s not just Tanner and Reggie. If the Zigzag Man didn’t know where we were, he does now.

Fucking Africa.

I hope he’s OK.

And I hope catches a horrific case of genital itch because, seriously, what the hell?

Lost in my thoughts, I almost run headlong into a tree. I just catch myself, sagging against it, resting my cheek on the rough bark.

Nic doesn’t stop to check if I’m all right. Leo has stopped shaking now, but he’s unconscious, a dead weight in Nic’s arms.

We’re not being chased – mostly because there’s nobody really left up there to chase us – but it’s not a good idea to hang around. With a groan, I push myself off the tree, start moving.

It’s a lot faster going down the hill than going up. Also, a lot harder on the quads. It takes me a few minutes to realise we’re not heading back down to the river – or if we are, we’re not going down the way we came up.

When I mention this to Nic, he doesn’t respond. I have to ask again before he looks at me, blinking slowly, like he just woke up.

“There’s a quicker way to the Main Street Bridge,” he mutters.

“How—?”

“’Cross Broadway, then through the LA State Park.”

“… ’K.”

I kind of grey out for a little while. I just follow Nic, my mind trailing ten feet behind me. We cross an empty four-lane street at the bottom of the slope, then a set of train tracks. There are no trains in sight, the tracks silent and still. I have to work really hard not to trip over them.

How can it be so damn quiet? After the insanity we just went through, the whole city should be on high alert. But there’s nothing. Like none of it happened.

We hit the park, which is barely worthy of the name. It’s a barren stretch of dirt, pockmarked with distantly-spaced bushes. As we enter, I come to a wobbling halt, hands on my knees, a stitch burning in my side and the muscles in my legs twitching. Like I’ve got my own case of the wiggles to deal with.

“Teagan, let’s go.” Nic says.

“Just a second.”

“We don’t have a second.”

“Yeah, don’t care.” I sit down hard, giggling. Actually giggling. What can I say? Adrenaline makes you do weird shit.

He grunts, looks away.

“By the way, just what the hell was that?” I ask. “Back there?”

“What the hell was what?” He’s distracted, glancing in the direction of the tracks, as if he’s expecting pursuers to come rumbling across them at any moment. Leo gives a particularly bad twitch, just then, which makes Nic look down at the boy in his arms. For half a second, a flicker of terror dances across his face. Like he’s been carrying a bomb.

“Objection, your honour, my client pleads the fifth,” I say. “All that.”

Here’s another side-effect of adrenaline: it makes it impossible to lock down your emotions. They whipsaw wildly, joy turning to fury in a nanosecond. It’s why I