House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

Author:Gabino Iglesias [IGLESIAS, GABINO]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

28

GABE

—

Creepy stories

A dark figure

Sidewalk ghost

Vengeance

A gun isn’t enough

You’re not supposed to trust a junkie. Everyone knows that. But sometimes you’re so desperate that trusting a junkie is just one more bad decision after the others. Maybe it’s your only option.

We were leaving Old San Juan behind, the whole city as dark as the night that opened up beyond the reach of the car’s headlights. All I could think about was the story of things living right beyond the reef. We all grow up surrounded by creepy stories. Some are made-up tales about kidnapped children and awful accidents told by our parents and grandparents to keep us safe and afraid of the world. Some are made up by our friends to scare us just for the fun of it. Some are always around, like the kid who died crossing the road without looking both ways, the student at your school who vanished mysteriously, and the one dilapidated house in every neighborhood, which is either haunted or the house of a witch. As you grow older, reality pushes those stories out of your head. But sometimes those creepy stories find you and invade your life again. And the second time around, you’re old enough to know they’re not just stories. Fear was our constant companion and we dived down to a level of the streets that was new to us.

“So, what now?” asked Tavo.

“Right now? Nothing,” said Bimbo. “I’m gonna get you guys home and that’s it. Tomorrow we’ll get you a gun and see if we can find Raúl. If what Henry told us is true, it shouldn’t be hard.”

“And what happens if we find him?” I asked. I was afraid I already knew the answer.

“If we find him, we’re gonna take him for a ride and ask him a few questions.”

Fear does weird things to you, and I could feel a lot of fear inside me. They knew where I lived. They had killed Xavier. The list of stuff making me uncomfortable had been growing steadily since this whole thing began. Everyone has different coping mechanisms, and one of mine was anger. Hearing Bimbo’s bullshit response made me snap.

“Shut the fuck up, B,” I said. “What you fucking mean to say is that you—we—are going to torture him and then kill his ass. Am I right? Did I get it all?”

Tavo opened his mouth as if to say something and then closed it without uttering a word.

Finally, Bimbo spoke. “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do, Gabe,” he said. “But you don’t have to come along if you don’t want. It’s cool. Same goes for you, T.”

The world had collapsed, but bad things don’t stop just because there’s no power and no water. We had to be like those bad things, like the bad people who made them happen. If we didn’t put an end to this, more of us would die. How long did we have before they came for Bimbo? For Tavo? For me? What if they decided to

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