Rage's Story (Vanish Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

out.
    I feel weak. My eyes flicker and I stumble forward.
    I don’t feel the impact. My hand feels the pavement, though, I’m on the ground. The rain patters against my skin. Then I feel something else. Warm, spreading on my shoulder. It shakes me and I turn my eyes up into Auna’s brown gaze. She’s staring down into my wavering eyes.
    “Wes?!” Her voice comes from a muted distance, at the end of a tunnel.
    “Auna,” I return, or at least, I think I did. I can’t feel my lips.
    She pushes against my shoulder, trying to rouse me. I push with all my remaining effort to stand. I falter for a moment, leaning into her, but she keeps me from falling over again. I hobble with my arm draped over her shoulders for support towards the end of the parking lot where she sets me into the passenger side of an aging coup. The door closes, the rain stops. I hear it softly trickling on the roof. I could fall asleep right now...just...close...my eyes…
    The door opens. “Wes!” she shouts.
    My eyes blink several times in quick succession, opening and closing on the image of an apartment building standing before us. Did we arrive? Time is slipping through my fingers. She pulls me out of her car and leads me into the building. The world has shrunk into a pinprick, sound comes as light as an ant’s footsteps, and all is drowned in a euphoria I feel sweeping me out of this life.
    No.
    I cough profusely, and it all rushes back in. It’s a tile floor and cabinets and a sink and a running faucet. My eyes whirl around in my head and I can see I’m on the floor of Auna’s cramped kitchen. My side is killing me. She’s got my shirt lifted so the wound isn’t obstructed. What does she have in her hands? Oh fuck.
    “Auna,” I call out weakly as I feel it plunge into my body. A pair of tweezers, straight into the hole, digging, searching for the tiny bit of metal. Shit, I can feel it make contact. I thought it had passed through. She pulls it out. The pain is excruciating, but I’m past the point of passing out. I’m wired and I can’t stop watching. My jaw clenches against the sensation my nerves firing off, throbbing around the wound, radiating into the rest of my body.
    “We got it, Wes,” she reassures me. Her hand swipes the sweat away from my brow and cups my jaw. Her thumb rubs affectionately against my cheek before her hand runs through my hair. “Now I need to stitch you, okay?”
    I sigh deeply. Then I nod.
    I look down and see her free hand shoved against my side, keeping the blood from gushing. Beside her on the floor she’s got her kit. A needle, a spindle of thin twine, and a bottle of vodka. She untwists the top and pours it over my wound. The sting strikes me, but it doesn’t compare to the bullet being pulled out, and the two of those completely numb me from the pain of the needle as it sows shut the hole in my side. I watch her thin fingers pass the needle through my flesh and admire it, the calm she displays dealing with the surely absurd situation in her life.
    But she took me home, not the hospital.
    She put it together this damage was done on the other side of the law. She must know I live there, in that dark territory behind the gaze of authority, where monsters grow from greedy men. I see his face, Mike, flash before my eyes, the pistol fire, and then dark.
     
    I’m warm. It’s the first thing I feel. My eyes open and I can see her, seated on a recliner across from me, bundled in a blanket, cup of coffee held near to her lips, just watching me, eagerly. I’m on her couch, bundled too. She’s dressed my wound, removed my shirt, and somehow gotten me onto the couch. I don’t remember that. A layer of sweat covers my upper body and my face, I can only imagine in a delirious fever I came to and she managed to calm me and move me to the couch, where I slipped into slumber.
    I rub my face dry with the palm of my right hand while my left pushes me into an upright position, emerging from the blanket to feel