Read Online Because You Exist by Tiffany Truitt - Free Book Online Page B

minutes were up.
    Gotta love how timing works out sometimes.
    I wrapped my hands around the bulky metal. With a loud grunt, I yanked it from the ground. Once the box was out of the ground, Josephine pushed my hands out of the way.
    “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” one of the men called out. He sounded awfully close.
    “If the future is only full of clichés, I am certainly not going to help save it,” mumbled Josephine as she pulled something dark from out of the box. Her back was towards me, so I couldn’t see what the treasured object was. Josephine stood up and I followed.
    “What do we do now?” I asked, still struggling to catch my breath.
    “We wait.”
    “Um. What?”
    “They’ll come to us.”
    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I replied.
    We didn’t have to wait long. Two of the men jumped over the fence and stalked towards us. My heart began to pound once more. I looked over at Josephine. Her calm façade from earlier was back.
    “I expected a little better from a pair of shifters. It wasn’t hard to find you at all,” said the man who not five minutes earlier had been pushing my face into the cement.
    “We’re just kids,” I replied.
    We were. We were just teenagers. This wasn’t right. Why us? What kind of world was this that we lived in, and how much darker was our world destined to become?
    “Boy, the moment you shifted your childhood was over,” the man replied. “We’re going to kill you, and then we’re going to play with her. Unless we make you watch first.”
    Before I could reply, a loud noise busted through my ears. It sounded hollow, but coursed along my veins causing my teeth to rattle together. The face of the man in front of me contorted in pain. His eyes widened and a strangled scream issued from his lips. He crumpled to the ground and grabbed onto his leg, which was now bleeding profusely. His companion, the one who kept repeating the nonsense about the light one, charged towards us.
    He didn’t get very far. The loud, jarring sound rang through the air again followed by a metallic smell that began to burn my nose. Like his friend, the man crumpled to the ground holding his leg. I looked over at Josephine.
    She was pointing a gun right at the men.
    I began to put it together.
    The noises were shots.
    Josephine had just wounded these two men. The two men who now began to call out for their leader, begging him to come take care of the boy and his bitch.
    Why would Josephine bury a gun in the backyard of her old house?
    How did Josephine even know how to use a gun?
    How could she shoot these men without even flinching?
    I felt nauseous.
    This wasn’t right. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t right. She had just shot two men. Granted, they had been trying to torture and kill us, but I had never even seen a real gun before. It wasn’t like the movies. Blood was thicker and darker. It ran from their legs onto the grass, clashing violently with the green of the lawn.
    “Let’s go, Logan,” said Josephine. Even her voice sounded dead.
    I couldn’t move. I wanted to go back. I wanted my life back. I didn’t do anything to deserve this hellish existence, to be trapped in this place. Maybe I was a bully. Maybe I didn’t go to church as much as I should or wasn’t particularly nice. But I didn’t deserve to be a part of this world.
    We were running again. I didn’t know where we were going, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to follow Josephine anymore. Who was this girl? I kept telling myself that she did what she had to do. If she hadn’t shot those men I would most likely be dead, and they would be doing God knows what to her. She hadn’t killed them after all. She only wounded them.
    She had saved us.
    For now.
    I just didn’t know if I would ever be capable of pulling the trigger.
    I was so focused on trying to convince myself not to be petrified of the girl running in front of me that I never saw him coming. The leader of the band of survivors tackled me to