Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 108709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 544(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 544(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Stone drives east for twenty minutes before easing to a stop alongside an old train track. Without a word, he gets out and grabs the black trash bag filled with our old clothes.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond, just goes about his business, fishing a bottle of something out of the backpack, along with a small lighter. He dumps the trash bag beside the old track and pours some kind of liquid inside of it, making sure it’s thoroughly soaked before taking a few steps back and igniting the flame on the lighter.
He tosses it onto the trash bag, and it immediately goes up in flames. “Well, shit,” I say, an impressed smirk pulling at my lips. “That’s one way to do it.”
Stone just turns and walks back to the car, and I can’t help but feel like it’s a scene out of a movie. The only difference is that instead of a massive explosion in the distance, it’s a flaming bag of dirty clothes. Either way, he looks hot doing it.
Stone drops back into the car. Not waiting to see if the whole bag burns to ash, he hits the gas and pulls the car around, heading right back the way we came.
“Whoa,” I say, bracing one hand on the dashboard and glancing over my shoulder at the direction we just spent twenty minutes heading. “What are you doing? Why are you turning back?”
“Get them off our scent,” he explains, grasping the steering wheel as though he doesn’t have a care in the world, and damn it, it’s the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen. “They’ll find the remains of that bag and assume we’re heading east. They’ll pull their search teams and focus their energy here, and while they’re doing that—”
“We’ll be heading in the complete opposite direction.”
“Exactly.”
I shake my head, impressed by the level of thought he’s put into this. “You’re not just a pretty face, are you?”
He glances at me from the corner of his eye, his lip quirking into an amused smirk, and if it wasn’t so attractive, I’d almost find it unsettling. “You think I’m pretty?”
Letting out a sigh, I settle back into my seat and kick my feet up on the dash, realizing we’re in for the long haul. “So, where the hell are we supposed to go now?”
There’s a brief pause, and I glance up, my brows furrowed as I find Stone deep in thought. “Home,” he finally says, not that I know where that is. “If our faces are plastered all over the news, then it’s not just the public who know I’ve escaped. It’s the fuckers who put those burns on your body, and after what I did to their crew, they won’t be able to resist the chance to get revenge. But I’ll be damned if I don’t find them before they find us first. It’s time to start marking names off my kill list.”
And with that, he presses his foot down harder on the gas and takes off like a bat out of hell, leaving Hartley Creek, old sewer lines, and the bushland way in our dust.
18
ARIA
Two fucking days I’ve sat in the passenger’s seat of this old Pontiac Firebird, and the longer we drive, the more we start to realize that the dude fixing this thing up was more than happy to cut corners.
There’s been a heatwave over the last two days, and driving these backroads hasn’t been great, especially when the AC decided it no longer needed to be an active participant in this fucked-up little road trip. To be fair, I’m not sure these old cars were really built to drive the way Stone has been driving, despite what he might think. The poor Firebird has barely had a break in forty-eight hours, only short stops every now and then to siphon gas or when Stone’s eyeballs are falling out of his skull.
The first time he needed to sleep, he insisted I drive, and it was going great until I swerved for an old to-go coffee cup and almost sent us spiraling off the road. He hasn’t trusted me behind the wheel since. On the plus side, it woke him up enough to jump straight back in the driver’s seat and keep us moving.
My ass started cramping a little over two hours in, and now I’m almost certain there’s an ass-shaped groove worn into the old leather. The past two days have been no less than pure torture.
Stone refuses to stop at any gas stations, not wanting to risk being caught on surveillance camera, and from what little snippets of radio we’ve been able to catch, leading law enforcement east seems to have worked—for the time being, at least. As long as we’re able to keep off grid, we should be alright, but with scavenging food and water from the cars we siphon gas from, I don’t know how long we can sustain this. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to head back toward civilization.