Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (37 page)

“Boone’s going to try to get us a deer here in the next day or so,” Dad said. “There are a few coming in close to the house. It wouldn’t normally be sporting. Or legal. But, with things the way they are….”

Boone withdrew his hand from the jar
. He studied his thumbs.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with pulling the guts out of a deer,” I said with a
n over-the-top shudder. “I could probably can the meat if someone cuts it off the bones.”

“We’ll clean it. You can it,” Dad said.

Mom looked at him sharply. Something was definitely afoot, but I also definitely smelled, so I sprinted up to my room. After changing into yoga pants and a sweatshirt, I came back to an empty kitchen, my jeans and sneakers held so none of the skeevy parts touched my clean clothes. I grabbed a scrub brush and some laundry detergent and headed for the big spring. The brush and grass around it were crushed from foot traffic. Muddy water squelched up around the flat rock next to the pipe.

The frigid water shot jagged pain
up my arms as I washed the bloody spots out of my shoes. Setting them aside, I poured detergent on my jeans. I spilled a little when startled by rustling behind me.

A man in a stained
brown jacket angled off the driveway toward me. A couple weeks’ worth of beard grew on his face, dark tufts mixed among patches of nearly bare skin. He looked to be in his twenties, with his unlined face, and brown hair with no gray, though it needed a trim. A royal blue sleeping bag and padded roll lashed to the frame of a backpack swayed over his head, which put it somewhere close to the stratosphere because the dude was
tall
.

I couldn’t call his expression a smile
though I think he hoped that’s what it looked like. It was more what I’d always pictured when I’d read the word “leer.”

He glanced around
The Perch.

Our house looked dark,
no lights or activity, Grampa’s station on the porch abandoned. The walk-through door of the garage gaped as if no one cared enough to close it. Cars jammed the available parking, but there was absolutely no sign of anyone. Except me.

The stranger
swiveled his head to face me, and I sidestepped. Despite long-lashed brown eyes and handsome high cheekbones, every instinct I possessed suddenly spurred me to keep my distance, to get inside the house, behind a locked door.

A chilling unkindness seeped from him.

“I heard you have good water here,” he said. He sounded no different than the dozens of strangers who had visited our spring recently.

I told myself to calm down
, though my mantra didn’t have a hope of winning against the adrenalin rush.

“Sure,” I said. “Fill up whatever containers you have.”
I took another step sideways. His milk chocolate eyes followed as he fumbled with something at his waist. My breath caught in my throat before I realized he’d unbuckled the belt to his backpack, not his pants. With a roll of his shoulders, the heavy pack thunked to the ground.

“You here by yourself, like some kind of water elf?” he asked.

I stared at him, sure he sensed my unease, and pretty darn sure he liked it. He gave me a knowing smile as he bent to dig in his pack. Wide-mouthed quart water bottles landed on the ground at his feet.

“No.”

“Seems pretty quiet.”

“Just get the water you need.”

He straightened, smile gone. “Bossy elf.” He glanced around again and licked his lips. “A man on his own needs more than water sometimes.” As I decided to run, he stepped forward and, despite my high state of alert, I reeled backward across the swampy ground too slowly. His hand came down on my forearm, a vise at the end of a whip, with pressure and instant capture. My momentum carried me farther away, but he stopped me with a jerk, like a leash on a dog.

He
drank in my fear through dilated pupils sharp as flint, and, yes, he liked it.

Every girl
imagines this situation, whether prompted by a movie scene or a story in the news. I don’t know about other people, but I always thought I’d turn into a wildcat if any man put his hands on me without my permission. Instead, paralysis threatened. My feeble tugs amused him. I barely squeaked “No,” as he yanked on me again, hard, a caveman’s warning to submit.

A shout came from
the driveway. I glanced over in time to get an impression of Boone in his football past, ready to clean somebody’s clock on the gridiron, and then he shouldered between the stranger and me and popped his palms hard on the guy’s chest. Water bottles scattered as the stranger stumbled. When the pressure on my arm released, I scurried backward and rubbed at the bruise. Dad and Mom rushed up to flank me while Boone stood his ground.

Dad
yelled, “What are you doing? Get away from her.”

The man’s resentful stare stayed on Boone for a few seconds before he adopted a pleasant mask for my dad.

“Bro, she tripped over something. I tried to keep her from falling.”

I shook my head while Boone spat, “Liar.”

“Gather up your things and get out of here,” Dad said evenly. Calm, steady Dad had already returned, the man who never courted trouble. He sounded more like a social studies teacher threatening the backpacker with detention than anyone who might enforce his expectation.

“Sure
, bro, just let me fill up my jugs.”

“No, we’d rather you leave,” Dad said.

“I’m going to call the cops,” Mom said, though she stayed put with her arm protectively in front of me as if we were coming to a sudden stop in the car.

“Cops,” the man scoffed. “They aren’t driving all the way out here for a trespasser, bro.” He
made a move to reach into his pack.

Boone stepped forward. “
Listen,
bro
, take your hand outta your bag and start running. You have fifteen seconds before I kick your ass all the way to the highway.”

The man froze, his fingers poised at the top of the pack
. He couldn’t hide his anger at Boone. I wondered what he was reaching for, what Boone thought he was reaching for. I wished for a sick second Boone had his gun, immediately horrified by the idea of a shootout right here by our driveway. Boone’s silence apparently conveyed some kind of crazy warning that didn’t require hardware to back it up. The intruder’s expression changed from challenge to uncertainty to resignation.

The man laughed
it off. “So much for humanity. Screw helping your fellow human survive.” He tossed his containers into the top of his pack, tugged the drawstring tight with a disgusted flourish, and slung it over one shoulder. Boone tailed him all the way to the end of our driveway.

He stood
there after the creep had been out of sight a long time. Long enough for Dad to ask me a hundred times if I was okay. Long enough for Mom to semi-drag Dad to the house so they could call the cops. Long enough for me to wonder if I should go to him then decide he probably stood down there for a reason. I started washing my jeans again, shaken up by more than the stranger’s visit.

At the rest stop during our drive home, when the gas thief hadn’t come within twenty feet of me, Boone hurried to comfort me. Now he held himself apart. Did he blame me? Had I done something wrong, or did he
simply need some time to calm down?

I scrubbed at the denim until my hands were numb and the fabric
was as clean as it would get, reluctant to go inside before he’d returned to me.

I rose on shaky legs when he
stalked up the driveway, jaw thrust forward. He stopped ten feet away. I wrung water from denim. “I guess now I understand why Grampa needs to sit on the porch with his gun,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Maybe I should start to carry one, too.”

Boone turned to look into the woods. He shouted the F-bomb. I stared, speechless
. It echoed back to us. Then he shouted it again, louder.

I dropped my jeans and picked my way through muddy, churned up grass to
wrap stiff wet hands around his fleece-covered arm. His warmth radiated above cords of tension. “Boone, what is going on? You’ve been acting so strange this afternoon. I mean, I know this whole situation was pretty strange so I get that part, but I’ve never heard you say the F-word and you’ve been skulking around with my parents….” My hurricane of worried observations died down.

He turned his head to look at me again, his forehead wrinkled, stricken with anguish. “I’m leaving,” he said.
 

“Wait. What?” I searched his face. “What do you mean? Because of this?” I gestured around to indicate what had happened at the spring.

“No,” he said. “I finally got a call through to Iowa this morning. My parents aren’t there. They never told the cousins they were
coming.” He ran a hand through his hair. He needed a trim. “I think my parents lied to me. For all I know, they stayed at the ranch. They told me a story to keep me here, or at least keep me away from Nebraska.”

“But, you can’t
go
,” I said, knowing the words were nonsense as I spoke them. Of course he could. “
Where
will you go? If you don’t know where they are, what are you going to do, wander around the country hoping to run into them?”

“Violet,” he said, “they’re my parents. My dad is almost as old as your grandfather. You’ve seen the news. People are getting carjacked. There are murders at rest stops over a few gallons of water. I can’t stay here, knowing they
’re out there, somewhere, dealing with all that. I should have left the day I talked to them. No, I should have gone home before school even closed. Grr, they’ve made this so much worse.”

I blinked
away the threat of tears. A rapist couldn’t make me shake, but the prospect of this separation had me rattled. “When?” I croaked, feigning indifference by walking away to tuck my fingers into the soggy foot holes of my sneakers. Water drained out of the toes like blood from a chicken’s slit neck. I wondered how it felt to be hung upside down in a cold metal cone. If, at first, your head throbbed with blood running to gravity, to the incessant pull from the center of the earth, then you got swoony as it dripped, hot and red, down your cheek until your eyelids half closed in permanent unconsciousness.

“Day after tomorrow,” he
murmured. “Your parents want me to take some supplies. That’s what the skulking has been about. I need to find gas tomorrow. And I’m gonna try to get a deer for your family.”

My head spun
like I might pass out. I knew any relief unconsciousness brought would only be temporary so I gritted my teeth and bent over for my jeans. They felt a hundred times heavier than they should, even wet. “Makes sense. You should take Grampa’s camper,” I said, trying to flay him with my detachment. If it worked I’d be eligible for an Emmy. Would another glamorous awards ceremony ever be held. Did anybody still film movies or record albums?

“Too much weight to haul.”

I closed my eyes. He had volleyed back with his own indifference, the neatly formed plan of his calculated departure. The camper had been thought about, discussed and dismissed while I plucked stinky chickens.

“Violet,” he said
, repentant. He curled his arm around me, pulling me sideways until my shoulder ground into his chest. My sopping wet shoes were probably wetting his thigh. “I wish we had more time,” he said against my temple. “But I have to do this. They’re my parents. How would I live with myself if I don’t try to help them?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered.
Agreeing with him tore my heart out. Of course he had to go. His parents were, well, his parents. They’d loved him and taken care of him his whole life. I was some girl he’d been dating for two months. A girl who’d been blown out of college by a volcano fifteen hundred miles away, forced to return to Sycamore Springs, Indiana, where the only bright spot had been a boy from Nebraska who, it turned out, was passing through like a shooting star, as she’d suspected all along.

You’re a gift I’m not going to get to keep.