by Hunt, Jack
“I’ll let her know.”
He nodded as Damon returned to tell the lady. Her cries cut into the night, and that’s when he knew that the situation was far bigger than they could handle. Even if they could drag people out, or manage to perform CPR on them. What then? There were no ambulances, at least none he could see. Maybe farther down? Still, there was no one that could rush away the seriously injured, and he wasn’t a doctor. Self-preservation began to kick in. The thought of what might have caused this and whether there were any further threats.
Chapter 5
On the outskirts of Lake Placid, Rayna Wilson had been in the middle of tucking her daughter Lily in for the night when all the lights went out in the house.
“Mom?”
“It’s okay, it will probably come back on in a minute.”
She remained beside her daughter’s bed and tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Lily laid back in her bed but looked worried. Ever since their father had left, her kids had changed, become more clingy, worried and scared of the darkness. The door creaked open and Evan walked in holding a blanket around him, and a flashlight in his hand.
“You think I can sleep in here tonight?”
“Of course you can.”
“Mom?” Lily protested.
“It’s just for the night.”
“And then the next. You know how he is.”
“Lily, just go to sleep.”
Rayna got up and gave Evan a nod before she went into his room and dragged his mattress into her room. She dropped it on the floor beside Lily’s bed and returned to grab a few more blankets. Once he had everything he needed, she told them to go to sleep.
“You not sleeping in here tonight?”
“I think you two are big enough you don’t need me anymore.”
She smiled, reached down and picked up Evan’s flashlight.
“I need that,” he said.
“So do I. I’ll bring it back, okay?”
He nodded and leaned back on his pillow. She closed the door behind them and headed to check the garage for another flashlight. Before heading in she flicked the light switch on and off just to be sure that it wasn’t a fuse that had blown and then she went and checked the breaker box. This had always been Elliot’s job when he was around. However, she’d learned how to run the house without him while he was on deployment in Fallujah, Iraq. Stumbling around inside the garage she located the second flashlight and switched it on to make sure it was working. A large beam lit up the inside of the two-car garage. The house was too big now that he was gone. It had been a year since he’d walked out and left them behind. Even though she’d seen the writing on the wall months before that, she didn’t think he would do it. In many ways she blamed the military. She’d attended the Yellow Ribbon ceremonies and listened to the information which educated spouses on deployment and what to expect when they returned home. She only wished they had provided more information on PTSD. After he had been away for an entire year, she was ecstatic to get him home. There would be no more stress, no more single parenting the kids, no more communicating over the internet and well sex, that was just the cherry on the top. At no point had she worried about how much he’d changed.
Rayna used the flashlight to search for a box of candles and then made her way back into the three-bedroom cottage. She glanced down at his boots that were still where he’d left them after the last time he’d been in the yard. She stopped by his jacket and smelled it just so that she wouldn’t feel so alone. As she went about lighting candles and placing them around the house, she thought back to the first few weeks after he got home. She noticed the small things but just notched them up to him trying to readjust to life after being overseas. As the months went by, she began to notice that he was sleepwalking more, his mood would be fine one minute and terrible the next. Then there were the sudden outbursts, avoiding others, anger over the smallest thing going wrong and freaking out when he heard a loud noise. These were just a few of the many things she’d noticed.
Soon the waters in their relationship became rocky as arguments started, and then he lashed out a few times. Not at her but at the wall, leaving huge gaping holes in the drywall. Arguments led to distance between them and before long it felt like she had a stranger in her home.
Rayna lit a candle, and it illuminated a photograph of the two of them from better days — a few years after they’d got married. Life was so different then.
After returning from deployment it all changed.
She remembered him jumping from his bed with his gun in hand and the one time he fired it above Evan’s head. As hard as it was to get through that, that still wasn’t the worst of it. Rayna had suggested he get help, and he did. For a short time he reached out to Veterans Affairs, and they offered help and treatment options for post-traumatic stress disorder, that’s what they were calling it. Apparently, it was common in those who returned. Out of every hundred veterans, eleven to twenty suffered with it. But even with all that information and help available, it was still a struggle. There were days when he appeared to do a 360-degree turnaround and life seemed fine. There were moments when she thought it was just a matter of time, and that eventually it would pass, but inwardly she knew it wasn’t going to go back to the way things were. She tried to get him to open up, and tell her about what had happened over there, but he wouldn’t talk about it. She assumed he’d seen the worst of it being a combat medic, and that eventually he would come around, but the reality was, for all her pushing to try and get him help it had only made it harder.
She stared at the photo and picked it up. God, she missed him. Not the man who returned from war or the one that walked out the door on her, but him, the guy before deployment. She’d chided herself on numerous occasions for not trying hard enough, usually when the kids got home from school and needed help with their homework. That had always been Elliot’s thing. He’d been a whiz at helping them while she took care of the home and made sure all their doctor appointments and after-school activities were arranged. She wished now that she’d told him that whatever had happened over there, it didn’t change how she felt about him. She would still love him and was there whenever he needed to talk. Instead she had pressured him to talk about it and even blamed him when he refused to speak. She placed the photo frame back down. How did she expect him to react?
She turned to reach for her phone, instincts kicking in to call Gary Westin, a police officer and a good friend of Elliot’s. Gary and his wife, Jill, had been lifesavers after Elliot had left. She’d even come to realize that Elliot’s leaving wasn’t uncommon in the world of PTSD. Jill was a veteran’s wife, and she’d gone through it with Gary, but they’d weathered the storm together. Before joining the police, he’d done eight years in the Marines. After he returned, it had been almost every other day he would say he was leaving and that he’d be back for the rest of his stuff. Jill was full of advice, but it was a little too late.
She glanced at the phone, pressed the button but it was dead.
What on earth was going on? It was a little after nine.
She went over to the window and glanced out. The neighbor’s home across the street was dark. Rayna contemplated ducking out and driving over to Jill’s. They lived a fair distance from them but she didn’t want to leave the kids alone. Even though Lily was fourteen now, and Evan thirteen, losing their father had made them shrink back into their shells. They were much more fearful than they had been before. Of course, in the day they acted as though none of it got to them, but nighttimes were different.
“Why can’t you just go get him?” Lily would ask.
“And I miss him, Mom,” Evan said often.
Neither of them fully understood what had taken place or what had led up to the incident on the night he left. Only a few knew. Moving away from the window she went back into the garage to check the breaker again. She shone the light inside the metal cupboard and flipped the switched a few times. Everything looked okay. There was no burnt smell
and no wires hanging loose. Rayna went back inside and slipped on her coat, she unlocked the front door and was careful to close it quietly behind her before she jogged down the small driveway to the edge of Mirror Lake Drive. She squinted down the tree-lined road towards the home of the Thompsons. It was tucked just back from the road but she could usually see their living room through the branches and bushes. Their lights were out too. Rayna frowned. There were no vehicles on the road either. Strange. She headed back to her home and locked up as soon as she was inside. It wasn’t the first time the power had gone out. The longest had been two hours after a vehicle had crashed into a transformer pole down the road, but even then she remembered her cell phone working. She stood there in the hallway of her home for a few minutes contemplating what to do before turning in for the night. It wasn’t like she had plans to see in the New Year with anyone. Gary and Jill had invited her over to their place but she declined.
* * *
Fourteen miles away in the small town of Keene, just southeast of Lake Placid, Cole Tucker was sitting around a card table in the back of his auto repair garage with his pals when the lights went out. He’d planned on seeing in the New Year with a lot of drinking, drugs, sex and a few laughs with Devin, Sawyer, Magnus and Tyron. He’d wrapped up the previous day’s work with every intention of going and picking up Damon in the early hours of the morning, but one thing had led to another, and after a new batch of coke had come in, he’d ended up overindulging and losing track of the time. When he awoke on New Year’s Eve it was almost midday, certainly far too late to pick up Damon. He’d checked his messages and found three from him. He figured he would make his own way home. Sure, he’d be pissed but what was he supposed to do? There was no point phoning him as he’d called from a phone booth and he didn’t have a cell, and even if he did, that would have only ended in an argument.
Sitting in total darkness, he waited for a few seconds thinking it was just a glitch.
“Damn it! What the hell?” He got up holding his cards. He wobbled a little, feeling intoxicated by the last three beers. “Don’t touch the money. I’ll go check the fuse box.”
“Cole, you did give those ladies the right address, didn’t you?” Magnus asked oblivious to the fact that they were now dealing with a blackout.
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, it’s just they were supposed to be here by now.”
“Perhaps they got stuck in traffic,” Tyron said.
“In a town with less than a thousand people? Doubt it. Idiot!”
“Hey, I’m just saying. It’s New Year’s Eve. People want to celebrate.”
“People don’t do shit in this town,” Devin added.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Sawyer muttered tossing his cards down.
Cole kept a good eye on his cash as he checked out the fuse box at the back of the garage. He didn’t trust his buddies at the best of times but after they had a few brews in them, and had been snorting the good stuff, they wouldn’t think twice about swiping a couple hundred.
He fished around in a cupboard for a wind-up flashlight and gave it about twenty turns. Light filled the end of the garage revealing three vehicles they’d been working on. After seeing that everything was okay in the fuse box, he turned back to the rest. All of them were employed by him. It was a legit business but with their drug business doing well, they were picky about whose vehicles they worked on. He did just enough to keep the cops from sniffing around his place. Five years of bringing in coke from New York City, he’d never once been caught. The closest he’d come was a year ago when he’d gone with a new supplier and hadn’t vetted him. He had no idea that the cops had their eyes on him until it was too late. Of course Damon wouldn’t see it that way. He thought Cole had set him up and since he’d gone away, Cole had been counting down the days to his release, figuring that he would retaliate in some way. In all honesty he thought he would have ratted on him when he was caught but he didn’t. That was why he’d promised him a ride that morning. He thought the drive back would give them time to chat, so he could smooth out things. Him and Damon went way back. Long before the drugs, they’d been close friends. They’d grown up together and were almost like brothers. Both of their parents had divorced, and they found solace in the company of each other, going on long bike rides through the region. Years on, it just made sense they’d work together. While the other guys had been gung-ho about earning extra money by selling drugs, Damon didn’t want anything to do with it. He’d even threatened to quit working together if Cole didn’t dial it back.
“Hey, I’m not getting any signal on my phone. Damn thing won’t even turn on,” Magnus said. “Sawyer, you got your phone?”
“No, it’s on the blink.”
“Tyron?”
“On the table,” he said before leaning forward and snorting another line. Magnus scooped it up but got nothing. Cole went over to a mini-fridge and pulled out another bottle of beer. He twisted the top off and chugged a third of it down before wiping his lips on the back of his sleeve. “Sawyer, go check the house.”
His chair scraped back as he got up to go and see.
“Cole, I’ve been thinking about Damon. After all that happened, aren’t you worried?” Tyron asked.
“No, why should I be? He never said anything to the cops.”
“That you know about.”
Cole leaned back against a counter that was loaded with greasy car parts. “No, I know him.”
“Do you?”
“You got something to say, Tyron? Spit it out.”
There was hesitation. He tossed his cards down and under the glow of the dim light he took a drag on his cigarette. “How do you know he isn’t working with the cops? He was caught with a lot of coke and only got eight months. Now ask yourself, have you ever heard of someone getting eight months for that? My cousin ended up doing four years for less than a third of that. Which makes me think he worked out some kind of deal with them. For all we know, we might be under surveillance. The cops might just be waiting for the right time to bust us. Or maybe now that Damon is out they will send him in wearing a wire just so they can bring down the whole operation.”
Cole scoffed. He didn’t buy it. Damon wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t do that. He didn’t mention their names at all. He’d said that he was going to sell the parts privately. They’d set it up, so the parts were not associated with their business. That way if anything did go wrong, the cops couldn’t trace it back to them. He shook his head. “No. He’s good.”
“I hope so, for all our sakes. I’m not doing time. I wouldn’t last in there.”
Devin patted Tyron on the back. “Oh, I’m sure Bubba your cellmate would keep you company,” he joked.
Sawyer returned and shrugged. “Seems the power is out in the whole neighborhood. None of the homes in the area have their lights on, and there are a couple of cars that have stalled further down the road.”
Cole didn’t reply. His thoughts were preoccupied by what Tyron had said. He just assumed that Damon wouldn’t snitch on him but what if he was right, what if Damon had worked out some deal with the cops? Was that why he wanted Cole to pick him up? He figured Damon wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with them after taking the fall. He took another swig of his drink. Well, he would soon find out once he showed his face again. That was if he even showed up. And if he was working for the cops, friend or no friend, he’d regret it.
Chapter 6
Another loud explosion shook the earth, the force sent survivors scrambling for cover. Chunks of concrete from buildings rained down around them crushing many that had survived the first wave. In between the buildings, Elliot saw another downed plane just on the outskirts of Times Square. Instinctively he thought a terrorist attack as he hurried for cover. What else was he supposed to think?
A thick gust of debris from destroyed buildings carried through the streets covering everyone in a layer of white plaster, dust and grime.
He hit the ground, rolled
then waited.
The sound of screams tore through the city. Only the sound of the injured screaming and the fire crackling could be heard. Black smoke, debris and dust carried on the wind like someone had shaken a bag of flour. He coughed and placed his shirt over the lower half of his face, just so he could breathe. The cries of the injured all around him reminded him of Fallujah. The noise, the sight of the dead, it was all coming back to him. He started having flashbacks, the same kind he had not long after returning home. The ones that had led him to retreat inward to try and cope — even after all this time, it remained at the forefront of his mind, tormenting him.
“Elliot!” Jesse cried out. “You okay?”
He managed to summon enough strength to lift a thumb.
He shook his head trying to force the images of the past from his mind. He ran a hand over his forehead and realized he was sweating profusely. As the dust began to clear he could see how the second plane had attempted to avoid the mass of people but had clipped a building and torn a huge hole out of it, then flipped and sliced through more structures before coming to rest and exploding. It was that explosion that shook the ground. He could see people crying for help, and those that had survived were trying to do what they could, but they were overwhelmed by the need.
Elliot managed to stand. He turned to his right and saw a man pressed up against a wall by a signpost that had twisted and landed on top of him, pinning him down. He was groaning, and one of his sneakers had come off. His face was streaked with blood. Even if he could get him out, he would probably die from blood loss or shock. His natural instincts as a combat medic were to help, but how? At least when he was in Iraq he had equipment, he had the presence of mind and the training to know what to do, but this was different. It was well over a year since he’d retreated away from his old life. He’d wanted to forget the faces of his fallen army buddies. It was one of the many reasons that had driven him from his family and into living on the streets. There he could forget, stay away from others, not harm anyone, especially his family.