The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage by Matthew Wayne Selznick

Author:Matthew Wayne Selznick [Selznick, Matthew Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: superhero
ISBN: 9780976942481
Publisher: MWS Media
Published: 2014-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twelve

I got into the car. Jason got us out of there.

He drove us back toward El Toro. I sat in the passenger seat and shook.

My hands hurt. My stomach felt like it was gnawing on my other organs with a slow grind of acidic teeth. There were a couple of Slim Jims left, but the thought of eating anything, no matter how much my spent metabolism told me I needed it, made me dizzy with nausea.

Jason pulled into a gas station, near a pay phone. He opened the door and turned to me before he got out. “Don’t…don’t move, man. Don’t. Okay?”

I nodded.

The fluorescent lights of the gas station were so bright. I closed my eyes against the glare, but that wasn’t good: a movie of red and black and heat and pain played against the inside of my eyelids. I couldn’t stand it.

I settled for just keeping my head down and staring at the floor of the car.

There were specks of blood on my shoes.

I heard Jason drop coins into the phone and press three buttons. Breathlessly, he anonymously called in a badly beaten man in the festival parking lot on Laguna Canyon Road, then hung up. I heard his coins falling into the coin-return slot, since you didn’t have to pay to call 911, but he didn’t seem to care. He got back in the car and put us back on the road.

“Someone will get him,” he said. “He’ll be fine.”

“Good.” The sound of my voice seemed very, very far away from my ears. That was crazy. I had really, really good ears. Right now, they felt like conch shells were strapped to the sides of my head. “Good.”

Jason hunched forward and hovered over the steering wheel while he drove. He kept his eyes on the road. “Man. I knew about it, but…fuck, Nate.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know you were gonna…”

“I didn’t either,” I said. The roaring was starting to quiet down some. “I swear. I was just gonna freak him out. I didn’t know we were gonna fight. Not like that.”

“He’s more badass than we thought he’d be,” Jason said, “not that it did him any fucking good.” His voice didn’t have any of the enthusiasm he’d expressed on the drive out. “What happened to you, man?”

“He…I just…”

I didn’t know.

“I don’t know.”

I felt like I didn’t know much of anything, really. Situation normal for the boy freak.

Why had Finn seemed so…guiltless?

Jason took his eyes off the road long enough to look quickly at me. His face was pale beneath his teen beard. “Jesus fuck, look at you. You’re a fuckin’ mess, dude. How’re you gonna get past your mom?”

“Garage door, right to my room, or right to the shower. Do it all the time.”

What did Finn mean, what he said, right before I left him back there? How could he even think of fucking with me, when I’d just kicked the shit out him? Fuck, I was pretty sure I was in shock, and I wasn’t the one bleeding all over the gravel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.