Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder Read Online Free Page A

my head to see my mother leaning against the doorframe. Her face was half hidden in shadow by the early morning light, but I could read the anguish there.
    “Just how many battles, Lucas? And please, tell me the truth this time.” Her voice was raw and tinged with painful emotion. My mother was a peaceful soul, a teacher and a nurturer, not like my dad. Or like me, apparently. Claire Messner wanted to see the good in people, the best they could be. The eternal optimist there to balance my father’s pessimism. She loved Shakespeare, while ignoring some of his more blood-bathed plays, and Dylan Thomas and the like.
    She taught high school English and seemed to inhabit a more cerebral and calm universe than the rest of us. I think she developed that Zen state while waiting for “the visit” while dad was deployed. You know, the one where an unknown officer and a few enlisted drop in unexpected, all wearing dress uniforms. Where they regret to inform you of a loved one’s death while delivering platitudes about a dead Marine none of them ever met. Obviously, it didn’t happen in our household, but I knew a few where it did.
    She was seeing me in a new light, and I worried about what she would feel toward me from this point forward. Heck, she was the reason I went so light the first time I recounted our journey. I wanted to spare her, and Paige, that trauma. And now they knew at least part of it. I thought back to my concerns of just a few minutes ago, not wanting Mr. Sheldon to know, but really, my true fear was coming to pass.
    “As many as needed, Mom. I didn’t go looking for trouble, usually, but there’s plenty to go around out there. You know that,” I replied in a neutral tone, not wanting a scolding, of all things, from my mother right now. “You’ve seen it here. I know you’ve had to fight to survive. We all have, or we wouldn’t be here.”
    “He saved my life, ma’am,” Amy said, looking at my mother with her blue eyes flashing. “He didn’t even know me, but he killed to protect me. I know they would have raped me, and probably killed me, when they were done.”
    “Me too,” Lori volunteered. “After some men sold me off to be a…slave, he was one of the ones that freed me. He also saved my sister by going into that school in Arkansas to get her and the other girls out. Ma’am, you should be proud of Luke. He saved so many lives out there. You have to understand that.”
    Lori did not bother to explain that I didn’t exactly perform this heroic deed alone.
    My mother nodded, and as the unfiltered stories continued, I could see she was still trying to process all the news we brought with us. But I was her little boy, her son she carried inside her for nine months, and then tried to civilize ever since. As we moved around from one posting to the next, I noticed sometimes that I seemed a bit different than the other kids.
    I felt things, had the same emotions everybody else did, but somehow I was able to control them better. Store up the hurts and disappointments that other kids my age bawled about. And I could focus, drawing all my attention to the matter at hand and tune out the other crap going on around me. That’s how I became such a good shooter and how I managed to hold my shit together out there when the lights went out, I guess.
    No, my mom tried, but I don’t think she really understood me. Even before I left for Chicago on that flight from Dallas. I had too much of that damn Messner determination in me, or pig-headedness, as she often complained about when Dad got on her last nerve. She loved us, and I think at that moment she realized that her first born wasn’t her little boy anymore.
    Of course, my mother also learned some other things that managed to horrify her to no end. That elements of the state and national governments were at odds was not what Mom was waiting to hear. Again, she wanted to think that those who were entrusted with power would work for the greater good. I