A murse had taken me into this locker room before, said it was more private than the bays. And he was right. I let him come all over my face and he gave me an M&M bag full of colorful pills and a joint.
I missed that part the most, being able to fuck and smoke whenever I wanted. Here I had to wait until one of the guards could sneak off. Then again, I did like it when they didn’t know I knew they were watching me touch myself through that little glass window on my door. They would touch themselves too. I enjoyed that part more. It was like watching the cap of a soda pop blow off when ya shook it too hard.
I shook my head, finally remembering why I was here, and tugged on each of the locker room doors until one of them opened and I found a pair of leggings and an old t-shirt. I took off my itchy hospital clothes and shoved them into the locker.
“Tradesies!” I giggled to myself before tugging the leggings up my legs and throwing the shirt over my head. Then I snooped around until I found a pair of shoes that fit. A few squirts of perfume and a comb through my hair and I was finally looking like my old self.
Pressing a hand to the locker room door, I popped my head out into the hallway, my mop of red hair brushing against the floor before my feet followed it.
All the alarms were going off now and I could hear sirens in the background. That meant that whoever was beingemergenciedwas super important. Funny enough, the super important guys always had the smallest dicks. I could tell ya from experience.
I skipped back past the medical ward and out the back door, looking for someone to play with, but there was no one out here either. Just a big ol’ truck-van thing. I tugged the driver’s door open and found a set of keys inside.
Finders keepers!
I adjusted the seat and the mirrors like my daddy taught me and glanced up at the reflection of my green eyes staring back at me.
“Okay, Nickie Saint James, I think it’s time we blow this popsicle stand. What do ya say? You in or are you out?”
CHAPTER 31
RUDY
PRESENT
Fucking nutjob. Fuck you, Nickie. Fuck you, Prat.
“We haven’t been out this way because of the storm. Maybe we can find some more…” My words trailed off as I realized… I was alone. “Fuck you, Quentin.”
That one hurt. Out of anyone, I didn’t think that I’d lose Que, but here I was, walking in the goddamn dark by my-fucking-self.
What was fucking new?I’d always been the only one to actually do anything worth a damn in our mismatched group of fuckups. There was a reason I was the designated leader. I was the biggest fuck up of them all.
I thought about the guys. About Vix and how bad his drinking had become since we’d escaped. The asshole had sobered up in prison, as much as he was able to while avoiding all the readily available contraband. He’d gotten his dumbass put there in the first place for beating the shitout of his boss for taking a liquor bottle away from him. You’d think that would have been enough to keep him off the stuff.
Clearly it wasn’t.
The twins, Donnor and Connor, were fucking computer geniuses, who lacked any real-world smarts. Sometimes I wondered how they hadn’t landed themselves on the other side of the building, the one the state had sectioned off into an asylum with all the looners. I mean, you had to be fucking crazy to think you’d get away with hacking into multiple government databases and then bragging about it to all your cyber pals.
Dane was probably the most innocent of us. His shit was a pure stroke of bad luck. Sure, he’d killed someone, same as I did. But it had been accidental. He’d hit a patch of black ice, spun out, and plowed into some rich guy’s kid. I think that, that was what made him so angry all the time. He was just a regular dude, and now he would always be remembered as a criminal. A killer.
Fuck, come to think of it, every time he looked in the mirror that gnarly scar served as a reminder that there was no real escaping anything for him…
Then you had Blitz. Bad drug deal and a rivalry gone wrong. Nothing all that complex, but at his core, Blitz was caring, funny, easygoing, and a good fucking friend.
As for Dash, he would be crucified for the hand he played in all this. He was the reason any of us had a fucking chance at being normal again. I never did see him as a nurse. He hated most of the assholes he worked with, the patients too. Until he met Que for the first time. And then his thinking changed. Guy became our biggest advocate after that.
And Que? Well, the fucker signed his life away when he convinced me Holly wasn’t worth mine. He hadn’t even questioned it. What would happen to him or me. Or both of us if—whenwe were caught. He’d simply said:You’ve punished yourself enough. Let me help you. I got you. You know I’ve always been here for you, Rudolph.
I didn’t know what Prat did. He never told any of us, and honestly no one cared or judged him. He barely spoke, mostly just grunted in your direction, but the man was massive with more muscles than any of us combined. That’s what made this so hard. I couldn’t read him like the others.
Did he get away? Or did something far worse happen to him? What was I missing?
I shook my head. What was I even doing out here? I needed to grab Nickie by her hair and drag her out to that damn lake and demand to know why those keys were under the floorboard. Why they were covered in someone’s blood.
“Fuck you!” I screamed to no one and nothing but flurries of snow. Then I dropped to my knees, the weight of this shit feeling as heavy as the shackles I’d been trying to escape.
Freedom.That was all we wanted. A chance to live out our lives just like everyone else. None of us had been perfect, but I didn’t think we deserved tossing away either.
