Promise Me Once

by Paige Weaver

  I started searching the floorboard for my phone, seeing stars with the effort. Finally, I found it under my feet. I grasped it tightly in my hand and eased out the door. Pain radiated up my left leg as soon as my boots hit the ground. I felt a rush of warmth run down my leg, but that wasn’t what held my attention.

  It was the pandemonium on the highway.

  Vehicles were everywhere, strewn all over the place under the moonlight. A semi lay on its side. Boxes tumbled out of its trailer. Another had a dark liquid leaking from it, pooling on the concrete. Cars and trucks were scattered all over the freeway, some of them overturned. A couple of people were climbing out, looking confused and dazed as they glanced around. Further down the highway, I could see the same thing – vehicles stopped everywhere, many of them wrecked or overturned. The strange thing was, none of them had their headlights on.

  What the hell?

  I started to rush to the road but agony shot up my leg. I hissed and grabbed hold of the truck for support. Shit, whatever was wrong with my leg hurt and was causing it to bleed.

  Taking a few deep breaths through the pain, I returned to the driver’s side door, gritting my teeth against the throbbing in my leg. Wedging myself in the small opening, I reached inside, searching for what I needed.

  The blanket behind the seat.

  I tore a length from it and tied the scratchy material around my thigh to staunch the bleeding as much as I could. Next, I reached inside and grabbed my cowboy hat. It had been through hell and back with me. I considered it my lucky charm and wouldn’t leave it behind, even if it was just a damned hat.

  My fingers curled around the brim. I stuck it on my head then leaned against the truck, favoring my left leg. I was still holding the phone, gripping it tightly in my hand. I glanced down it. Only a black screen stared back at me. It was dead. I hit the power button. Nothing. Not even a flicker of light. I stuffed it into the rear pocket of my jeans, forgetting about it for now. That’s when I heard it.

  A bloodcurdling scream.

  A girl not much older than myself was standing outside a vehicle a few yards away, screaming her head off. One of her flip-flops was gone and blood trickled down her face in a slow river.

  Without thinking of my own injuries, I broke into a shuffling run, hindered by my leg. I felt blood run down into my left boot, but I clenched my teeth and kept my eyes on the girl.

  My chest rose and fell quickly, my lungs drawing in short, quick puffs of air as I raced toward her. I remembered what my dad had told me once – “You see someone in trouble, you help. You see someone suffering, you stop and give them what they need. You be the better man, Cash. That’s all I want you to be.”

  It was him I was thinking of as I limped quickly toward the car. His words that pushed me on.

  “Help them! Help my friends!” the girl cried when she saw me running toward her.

  I stumbled past her and over to the driver’s door. A man was behind the wheel. He was unconscious. Blood dripped down his forehead from a deep gash in his hairline. I glanced into the backseat, ignoring the loud cries of the girl standing behind me.

  There were two girls in the back, probably in their early twenties. One was unconscious. The other was waking up, her eyelids slowly lifting. I turned my attention back to the man behind the wheel. He was a kid, really, maybe eighteen. I reached out and pressed two fingers against his jugular.

  The girl behind me grabbed my arm in a strong grip, hysterical. “Is he dead! Oh my gawd, is he dead?” she screamed, her fingers biting into my bicep.

  “No, he’s alive,” I answered, feeling a weak but steady pulse. I unhooked his seatbelt, probably the only thing that had kept him alive.

  The man grunted with pain and his eyelids started to open.

  “Stay with him,” I told the girl.

  I limped around the car, glancing around at the other mangled vehicles nearby. Holy shit, what happened? I didn’t have time to wonder. I could only deal with one thing at a time.

  When I got to the passenger side of the car, I pushed the seat forward and wedged myself into the backseat, wincing when my injured leg hit the metal frame of the vehicle.

  Fucking two-door.

  But I forget about my leg a second later. The girls in the back were a mess. They were covered in blood. I focused on the unconscious one first.

  Blood oozed from a gash on the top of her head. I touched her neck, finding her pulse. It was surprisingly strong. She was alive. I grabbed a fast food napkin that was on the floor and pressed it against the wound on her head. It must have hurt because the girl’s eyes opened.

  “Ouch,” she whispered, wincing when I pressed harder.

  “I know it hurts.” I hated that I was adding to her pain, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  The girl beside her shifted and gasped. I glanced at her.

  “What…what happened?” she asked, looking very confused.

  “Don’t know,” I answered, glancing over her quickly for injuries. She had a split in her head near her temple and a cut above her eyebrow. Nothing serious, from what I could tell. I would say they were lucky, but something was telling me the danger that had caused the chaos was not gone.

  In under a minute, I had them both out of the car. Blood still trickled down my leg, but saving whomever I could was my first priority.

  All around me, men and women were crawling out of their vehicles. Some were crying, others were shouting for help. Many were walking around, looking puzzled and lost.

  But it wasn’t the people and wrecked cars that caused a foreboding feeling in me. It wasn’t the soft rain that I noticed or the blood trickling down my leg.

  It was the quiet and the unnatural stillness that sent unease down my spine.

  Something bad had just happened. Something really bad.

  Chapter Twenty–One

  Cat

  I held the phone to my ear, hearing only static.

  “Cash!” I shouted, but there was no reply. We had a bad connection.

  We were a bad connection.

  I hit the end button on my phone and shoved it into my pocket. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

  I grabbed the bottle of tequila and poured another shot, splashing the liquid over the rim with sloppiness. With a silent goodbye toast to Cash, I tossed back the drink.

  And that’s when the room went pitch black.

  Shouts and silly, girly screams filled the air. I scoffed and reached blindly for the tequila again. Didn’t they know a power outage when they saw one? I didn’t need electricity to get drunk anyway. All I needed was a bottle.

  The kitchen was dark and packed full with students. I grabbed the tequila and started toward the doorway, bumping into a few squealing girls along the way. I rolled my eyes and elbowed past them. I just wanted to find a nice, quiet corner where I could snuggle with my new best friend – my bottle of tequila – and get to know it better.

  I pushed my way into the living room¸ stumbling on my feet. Hot air hit me like a hammer as soon as I made it there. Without electricity, there was no such thing as air conditioning. The press of warm bodies only added to the suffocating heat.

  I moved on, looking for a private spot. The music had stopped, but in its place was chatter.

  “Power’s out again. Happens during storms.”

  “There’s no storms tonight, idiot.”

  “Yeah, on my weather App it says—”

  “You’re a dumbass. Someone go flip the fuckin’ breaker!”

  “Holy shit, the lights are out everywhere in the complex! Piece of shit custodian.”

  “This party is epic, man…”

  The voices blended together in my head. I shoved past guys and girls until I came to a wall. I fell against it, cradling the tequila close to my chest. The darkness combined with the alcohol was messing with my equilibrium. I pulled out my cell phone. It had a flashlight on it. Why the hell is no one using theirs? I tried pushing the ‘on’ button but nothing happened. I tried
again. Nothing. There was no light. No bright home screen. No little battery picture letting me know that my phone was dead. It didn’t make sense. Oh, well. I was too tipsy to care.

  I pocketed the phone and leaned my head back against the wall. The music might have been dead along with the lights but the party still raged on around me. I wondered briefly where Keely and Nathan were and if Tate was okay back at my apartment, but the alcohol was making it hard to form a coherent thought. It was just what I had wanted. Oblivion.

  I took a long drink from the bottle of tequila. After the second one, I slid down the wall, needing to sit down.

  My butt hit the carpet and my hand fell to my side. The bottle rolled away from me, spilling liquor on the floor. My head fell back against the wall with a thud, my body going numb. The alcohol was doing its thing. My eyes started to close, but I forced them back open again.

  If I passed out, I could forget about Luke and Jenna’s death. I could forget about what kind of person I was and how I was so afraid to feel anything for someone ever again.

  I could forget about Cash and the threat he poised. About the way he had made me feel or what he had done to my body. I could forget about what I didn’t deserve. What I couldn’t allow myself to have.

  So I did what I needed to do. What I had to do to survive the pain in me. I let the alcohol pull me under and I passed out.

  Only darkness surrounded me.

  ~~~~

  I dreamed. I was in the woods, running. Chased by something faceless. The air was thick, the heat harsh. I was sweating, trying to escape from whatever was after me. I heard someone calling my name. Beckoning to me. I swung around. Looking. Searching.

  "Cat, wake up."

  There it was again. The voice. I needed to hide before he found me, but heaviness kept me prisoner.

  “Cat.”

  My name pulled me to the surface. I groaned, fighting it. The sound crashed into my brain and caused agony.

  "Cat, you need to get up. Now."

  This time the voice was soft. Whispered. Almost gentle.

  I peeled my eyes open to only mere slits. It was the best I could do. My eyelids felt swollen and raw, like someone had rubbed sandpaper on them. Mascara caked my lashes, sticking them together. I tried to remember where I was and what had happened, but I drew a blank.

  My tongue felt thick. I groaned and licked my dry lips, instantly recognizing the taste of alcohol. Then I knew.

  I was hungover.

  I forced my eyes open some more, expecting to be blinded by sunlight or artificial lighting. Both would be excruciating, like needles stuck in my eyeballs, but neither greeted me.

  "What's going on?" I asked, wincing when the sound of my own voice hurt my head.

  No one answered as I pushed myself to my elbows. Tate was sitting on the foot of my bed, chewing on his thumbnail and watching me with a worried expression. Keely sat near my side, one leg tucked underneath her slim body. She played nervously with a wrinkle in the sheet and stared at me with concern. I followed her gaze when she turned to look behind her. I found Nathan sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner of my room, looking at me intently.

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "We've got a problem, Cat."

  I pushed myself to a sitting position and brushed tangled strands of hair out of my eyes.

  "If it has anything to do with what I did last night, I don't want to hear about it," I moaned, rubbing a hand over my forehead.

  Keely pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. “You passed out, Cat.”

  “Duh,” I said, glancing at her from underneath my matted mascara. God, even that hurt to say.

  She frowned at me and all the memories of Cash came back. It hurt more than my hangover. Keely looked so much like Cash that guilt and remorse consumed me. It wasn’t her fault that I had fucked her brother and fallen for him.

  It was mine.

  “Enough, Cat,” Nathan snapped, looking tense and ready to explode. “Like I said, we’ve got a problem. We don’t have time for your mouth today.”

  I scowled at him but then backed down. He was upset about something and not much freaked him out. Something was wrong. More than likely I was the cause of it.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t bad. Did I vomit in his car or dance on a table again? Did they find me half-naked somewhere? That would be the worst. I scrunched up my face, trying to remember, and caught a whiff of something in my hair. I grabbed a strand and studied it. Is that fucking dried beer in my hair?

  Nathan let his hands drop between his knees. “Cat, goddamn it, pay attention! Do you remember the lights going off last night?”

  I dropped the strand of hair and looked at him. “Yeah. It was a power outage. Happens all the time here.”

  If they thought a loss of electricity justified pulling me out of a dead sleep, they were wrong.

  And all very much on my shit list.

  Nathan shook his head, looking suddenly tired. “The power is still off and there’s more.”

  He sounded so bleak that chills went up my spine. I shook the feeling off and reached over to yank the little gold chain that dangled from my nightstand lamp. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing.

  A feeling of uneasiness slithered between my shoulder blades. I dismissed it. The lamp’s just not plugged in. Everyone sat quietly and watched as I leaned over, checking to make sure the plug was in the wall socket. It was. Hmm.

  I pushed myself back up, feeling a little green. Moving made me want to hurl.

  “Okay. So let’s call the apartment manager. The guy’s a sleazeball but he’ll know what’s going on,” I said, picking up my cell phone from the nightstand, wincing when my head pounded and nausea rolled through me.

  Keely spoke up, her voice sounding too chipper, all things considered. Like my headache.

  “I put your phone there last night when Nathan carried you in. I knew you would want it this morning but…but it isn’t working either,” she said with a shrug.

  I didn’t believe her. It was the latest iPhone, brand new, expensive, and encased in a gold cover. Something that had worked like a charm last night until...

  All the blood drained from my face. My phone had worked great until I had called Cash. Oh, shit. I called Cash. I suddenly remembered his voice, his words. The warm, tingly feeling that had washed over me when I heard him on the other end of the line. It all came back to me like a bad dream. Static had ended the call.

  But I never should have placed it in the first place.

  My face grew hot, guilty for making the one mistake a girl like me never made - calling a hookup afterward.

  I looked down at the phone in my hand, my dry mouth suddenly drier.

  I had been drunk, I reasoned. People made stupid, dumb phone calls when they were blitzed, calls they would regret in the morning. I regretted this one big time because one-night stands didn’t get phone calls afterward from me. It was the golden rule and I had just broken it.

  I tried turning on my phone, but it didn’t light up. I tried again.

  “None of them work, Cat,” Nathan said, his voice sounding so hopeless that I snapped my gaze up to his. Nathan didn’t do hopeless. That was my role.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I muttered. “It’s a brand new phone.”

  Despite the hangover that was killing me, I threw my legs over the side of the bed and tossed the covers back. The world spun when I climbed to my feet but I held onto the side of the bed and stood up.

  “What are you doing?” Tate asked around his fingernail as I went over to the corner of my room and started tossing clothes out of the way.

  “Looking for my charger. My phone’s just dead,” I answered.

  “It’s a waste. I told you, none of them work,” Nathan grumbled. “Believe me. We checked a million times while you were sleeping off your shit-faced binge from last night.”

  I felt my face turn bright red with anger.

  “
Are you really going to give me a hard time about getting wasted, Nathan?” I asked. “Keely, ask him about the last time he got drunk. It’s a great story that involves him face down in a stranger’s yard with his pants missing.”

  Nathan rammed a hand through his hair in frustration. “You’re such a goddamn pain in my ass, Cat,” he muttered. “Listen to me. The phones are fried, the electricity’s off, and I have a feeling we’re screwed.”

  He said it with so much finality that it made me madder than hell. Nathan had never given up and he couldn’t start now. I gave up. My parents gave up. But Nathan never had. He was a fighter. A warrior. A goddamn machine. If he gave up, we were screwed and that made me steaming mad and scared.

  I frowned at him, trying to ignore the feeling of fright growing in me. “Don’t be such a drama queen, Nathan. It’s just a power outage. Maybe some cell towers were affected. So what? We’re not screwed. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Nathan shot to his feet (I did say he was a fighter) and charged across the room. He grabbed my arm and gave me a good shake.

  “We’re not screwed, huh? Let me just show you how not screwed we are.” He started hauling me from the room, dragging me toward the door.

  “What the hell, Nathan? You’re hurting me! Let go!” I screeched. His fingers were leaving imprints on my skin, biting into me. I tried to twist away as he pulled me from the bedroom and through the living room but it was no use.

  Tate and Keely followed us as he pulled me toward the front door. I tried prying my arm from him but then I noticed something. The apartment was quiet and, god, was it hot. The air conditioning didn’t hum. No light bulbs buzzed in the light figure.

  My t-shirt quickly became stuck to my damp skin. My hair curled up with the humidity. I tried to grab some footing as Nathan pulled me along but it was no use. He was strong.

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, let me show you,” he roared, flinging open the front door.

  He jerked me out into the blistering heat. Sunlight blinded me, feeling like multiple arrows shot through my eyes. I squinted and grimaced, stumbling with the pain that exploded in my head.