Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  No, the catastrophe had happened in his hometown. Where his girl was. And his family.

  As they got off the highway, Simon and Apollo veered off to check on Gunner’s dad and sister. They’d gotten enough information from the news to know that the farm hadn’t been in the direct path of the tornado, but they’d been close enough that they’d likely taken damage and warranted a check-in.

  The rest of the group headed toward Grant itself. As they got close to town, Rad slowed—he had to; the road wasn’t clear. In some places, the road wasn’t even there. All around them, in a swath wider than the eye could see, the world had been torn up, the earth turned over.

  Gunner slammed the side of his fist into the passenger door window.

  “Easy, Gun.” The shake in Rad’s voice belied the calm he was trying to send Gunner. “You gotta keep it in check if you want to get close enough to know.”

  Up ahead, about a mile from the Grant town square, flashing lights marked the place where the authorities—Gunner had enough reason left to note the irony that Sheriff Lucas was likely in charge here—had set up a roadblock.

  A roadblock. Because whatever lay beyond it was too destroyed for safe passage. As they got close enough to see what was on the other side of those bright lights in twilight, Gunner’s gorge rose.

  Grant was not on the other side. Nothing but mounds of kindling. Mountains of it. Drifts of it. The town that had stood there for more than a hundred years was just gone. Erased.

  Some kind of noise came up his throat and out of his mouth, and Rad reached out and actually grabbed his hand. “Stay with me, brother. Stay with me.”

  He pulled off the heaving pavement and parked. Though violent explosions racked Gunner’s insides, his outsides were completely numb—he couldn’t feel his feet on the ground, couldn’t sense his legs moving, but he was. Moving alongside Rad toward the roadblock.

  A deputy—it was Cal, noted the stenographer in his head, taking down information for later—came toward them, gesturing that they needed to turn around. He was wide eyed and shaken, and he came toward the Bulls with no aggression or hostility, despite their history with him.

  “You gotta turn around. Only emergency access from this point.”

  Gunner couldn’t make his mouth work, but Rad responded. “We got family in there.”

  Cal shook his head. “You’re not the only ones. You gotta wait.”

  “We can help,” Delaney had stepped up. “Five strong men standing here. I know you need volunteers for search and rescue.”

  “Let ‘em through, Cal,” Sheriff Lucas came up behind his deputy. He was pale and sweating, despite the post-storm, late-October chill in the air. He didn’t look at Gunner, but he nodded at Delaney. “National Guard is on its way, but we need help right now. People are yelling and screaming, buried in the rubble.”

  Those words formed a horrendous image in Gunner’s head and broke through the numb that had taken him over. He shook free of Rad’s grip on his arm, vaulted over the hood of one of the cruisers forming the road block, and ran toward the church.

  ~oOo~

  The first most horrible thing Gunner saw was Leah’s car. That ridiculous yellow convertible she called Harvey. Or what was left of it—two blocks from the church, buried to its windshield in the ground. The tornado had flung it across town and planted it like a post in George Coleman’s front yard. Most of the yellow cladding had been stripped from the chassis. A single remaining scrap of its black top fluttered in the light breeze.

  The umbrella she kept in the back seat—bright red with white polka dots—lay innocently, still furled and seemingly unharmed, beside Harvey’s buried front wheel well.

  Harvey was dead.

  Any question of whether Leah was safe after all was answered. No, she most certainly was not.

  But he didn’t think she was dead. Knowing it made no sense but sure anyway, the same way he’d felt sure she was hurt, long before he’d arrived in Grant, he believed that he’d know if she was dead. The way he’d known the moment of Martin’s last breath.

  It gave him hope, and it gave him focus. She was hurt, but still with him. He needed to save her. He turned from her car and ran toward the church.

  Heartland Baptist Church had stood in Grant for as long as there had been a Grant to stand in. Bright white, with glossy red front doors, a high peaked roof and a charming steeple that still housed an old-fashioned church bell, the pretty, quaint building had featured on just about every kind of promotional material for the town, for as long as Gunner could remember and probably much longer than that.

  On this day, when Grant no longer stood, neither did the church. Gunner turned the corner and saw nothing but a vacant lot. No—it was like a field, tilled and ready for sowing.

  No one had come yet to the church to help. They probably thought that there was no one here to save. And maybe there wasn’t—maybe Leah had gone to her father’s house to wait out the storm.

  Her car. Harvey. Its path to Mr. Coleman’s yard was more direct from the church than from the house on Nightingale Lane, nearly a mile away. That didn’t necessarily mean anything to a tornado, but Gunner felt sure Leah was here, where the church had stood.

  He ran forward, sensing his brothers following.

  The church had stood on a rise, and once Gunner was on high enough ground, he saw what was left of it—only the foundation, seemingly filled with debris. The wind had nearly leveled it off.

  “LEAH! LEAH!” he shouted, skidding to his knees at the concrete rim of the foundation. “LEAH!”

  Rad and Eight Ball came up on either side of him, adding their voices to the chorus. “LEAH!”

  Thinking he heard something, Gunner shouted, “Wait! Shut up!” and they all went silent.

  Nothing. All around them, at a distance, he heard the sounds of search and rescue, but nothing in the rubble of the church.

  “Shit! LEAH!”

  Here, a voice called, far away, deep down. Weak. Here.

  Not Leah’s voice. Her father’s.

  “Reverend!”

  Here.

  Pinpointing the faint hope, Gunner lunged in that direction and started yanking debris away. Rad and Eight were right with him.

  “Griff! Tell ‘em we’ve got somebody over here!” Delaney yelled. Then he was pulling debris, too. “Slow down, son,” the president cautioned. “We don’t want to jostle anything that hasn’t fallen yet.”

  Gunner couldn’t imagine what hadn’t fallen in this flattened mess, but he heeded the words, pulling with haste but more care. “Reverend!” he called out. “It’s Gun—it’s Max! We’re coming! Hang on!”

  Leah…hurry, Gunner thought he heard. He looked up, needing strength, not sure where his eyes would land.

  They landed on Delaney, who nodded. “Focused and steady, Gunner. Focused and steady.”

  A rescue crew arrived, driving up on the destroyed lot, and two men in search and rescue gear—hard hats and belaying rigs over their fire department uniforms—ran up with a backboard. “What we got?” one of them barked.

  “Two people, right here,” Rad answered. “One of ‘em’s conscious.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” the other said. “Wait up.” He put his hand on Gunner’s shoulder, and Gunner whirled and lashed out. But Eight grabbed his arm before it could connect.

  The guy threw up his hands. “Easy, buddy. You gotta move the debris careful. They shut off the gas main, but we don’t know how stable the debris field is. You gotta watch and listen. Just…let us show you.”

  Gunner had already lost his shit. Whatever was going on inside him now was an empty spiral of insanity, but he let Eight and Rad pull him back and follow the trained rescuers’ lead.

  It took forever. Another crew arrived, and the scene became an organized rescue operation.

  It was full dark, and they were working in the bright glare of emergency lights, and the beams on the hard hats of the rescuers, but they finally put eyes on a body. Leah’s father was p
inned under a crosshatch of fallen beams.

  “Reverend!” Gunner yelled, at the same time one of the Search and Rescue guys called, “Sir?”

  “Hurry…please…Leah…” His voice was faint and fading. Gunner saw blood, muddy with dust but gleaming in the harsh beams of flashlights. A lot of blood, coming from Reverend Campbell’s head. Or neck.

  He didn’t see Leah. “Reverend! Where’s Leah? I NEED LEAH!”

  No answer.

  When enough debris was clear, one of the rescuers—they were EMTs—worked his way down, and the backboard followed. Working together, they brought Leah’s father up into the night. As he began to emerge from the hole that had been his church, the EMT in the rubble called up, “We got another! Female! Unresponsive! She’s warm, but I can’t get a pulse down here!”

  Gunner peered into that black abyss. The sweeping arc of the EMT’s headlight caught fragments of a person: A piece of a striped top. A pale leg. Blonde hair. Blood. Her father had been lying over her. Shielding her?

  Unresponsive, the EMT had said. Unresponsive. No pulse.

  She wasn’t dead. He’d know if she were. She wasn’t dead. No. But she would die if they didn’t save her.

  “LEAH! LEAH!” He tried to dive into the hole.

  Rad grabbed him around the waist, turned, and threw him on the ground. “You stay down,” he growled. “Let ‘em work.” When Gunner scrambled right back up, Rad shoved him hard and knocked him down again. “I will knock your ass out, boy. Stay down and wait.”

  Leah’s father was strapped to a backboard, on the ground where the parking lot had been. Two EMTs were working on him. Gunner stared, not really seeing anything at all. Something about the Reverend’s body seemed wrong, but he couldn’t think straight enough to understand what it was.

  Commotion in the debris pulled his attention back, and he stood, warily, his hands up, letting Rad know he wouldn’t get in the way again.

  They brought Leah up in the same way they had her father: strapped to a board, her neck immobilized. This time, when he ran to her, Rad didn’t get in his way.

  His sense of protection injected some control, and he stopped before he impeded the EMTs. Standing over them as they worked, he watched her filthy, still face in the bright gloom of the night.

  “Leah, Leah, Leah.” He knew she couldn’t hear him; the rescuers were both talking, rattling off medical jargon as they worked on her. One of them ripped open what was left of her striped shirt, showing her bra—her dark blue silky one. One of the straps had snapped, and her shoulder on that side was bruised and bloody. They cut the middle of her bra, and her breasts were exposed.

  He hated that and must have made a move, because Rad was right there again, grabbing his arm. They watched as one of the EMTs got those heart paddle things out.

  Her heart? Wasn’t beating? “No,” he breathed.

  The EMT with the paddles said, “Clear,” just like on television, and put them on Leah’s chest. The sound that happened was so much louder, and the impact on her body so much more violent, than anything on television that Gunner shouted as if the volts had gone through him. He almost felt as if they had.

  “Got her!” the other EMT said. “Tachy, but sinus. 150 bpm. We need to get her outta here.”

  “I go!” Gunner shouted and surged forward.

  The EMT who’d shocked her looked up at him. “Who are you to her?”

  “Her husband.” The word was there without his thinking about it.

  The EMT glanced down at Leah’s filthy, bloody, but still obviously young face. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Rad growled.

  Considering both men, and scanning the area, seeing more like them, the EMT nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

  They picked her up on the backboard and ran to an ambulance that had arrived on the scene, down on the broken street. Gunner ran with them.

  They passed the board on which Leah’s father lay. Alone, with a dark sheet covering him completely.

  The way they covered the dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Her father was dead.

  Leah sat in the weird green vinyl chair and stared out the hospital window at the bank of windows across the way. Every one the same, the only variation in the adjustment of identical mini-blinds. Hers were drawn all the way up; Gunner had tried to make the room as bright as he could.

  He was downstairs, trying to find something in the cafeteria she’d eat. He refused to believe that she simply wasn’t hungry.

  But she wasn’t. She was too numb to be hungry.

  I’m here, angel. It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.

  Her father’s last words, repeated over and over again as the whole world had pounded down on them and her lungs had seemed to fill with black tar. Repeated as his blood had poured down over her. Repeated as she’d faded away into bright, warm light.

  I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

  Now she was here, and her father was not.

  They hadn’t been okay yet. Everything had been wary and awkward as they’d felt out the new boundaries between them. He hadn’t told her yet who Joan was to him, hadn’t confided in her, though she’d worked it out for herself and felt both relief and jealousy to think she’d been replaced with a more appropriate model.

  He’d only made the first, tentative steps toward accepting her as she was. He hadn’t come anywhere close yet to accepting the life she’d chosen or the man she’d chosen to spend it with.

  And now he never would. They would be broken forever.

  I’m here, angel. I’m here.

  He’d covered her body with his own. Protected her. Sacrificed for her. But he’d been protecting the Leah he’d wanted her to be, not the Leah she was.

  “Hey, baby.”

  Gunner was calling her ‘baby’ all the time now, and she didn’t think he quite realized it. She didn’t mind anymore. When she’d woken in the ambulance, he’d squeezed her hand and smiled frantically down at her, his face filthy and his hair stiff and wild around his head, and said, “Hey, baby. Love you. Don’t you leave me.”

  The words had felt like an anchor then, and they still did now. All she had in the world was Gunner now. No church, no home, no father. No past. All lost. Forever.

  All she had was this man, crouching beside the chair, holding out a doughnut with white frosting and rainbow sprinkles, on a small paper plate perched on his hand like an offering.

  “Look what I found. And…”—he rooted around inside his kutte and pulled out a paper carton—“chocolate milk! Don’t tell me this doesn’t look good.”

  Sprinkle doughnut and chocolate milk. Both favorites. Hardly the breakfast of champions. Or adults. But it did look a little bit good. Leah gave him the smile he needed to see and took the plate from him. Returning her smile with a relieved grin of his own, he opened the carton and set it on the bed table beside her, next to the vase of sunflowers he’d set there so she’d see them as soon as she’d woken that morning. Sunflowers were her favorite, too.

  As she took her first bite, he said, “There’s somebody in the waiting room who wants to see you. I guess it’s Ashley.”

  Leah swallowed. “Ashley? You guess?” She hadn’t seen or spoken to Ashley in months. None of her calls had been returned, and she’d just given up. Over time, she’d come to wonder just how much of a friendship they’d ever really had. In retrospect, she’d begun to think that maybe she’d been some kind of social experiment for Ashley. A twisted kind of Pygmalion: turn the proper good girl into a druggie sex freak.

  “Never met Ashley. But she says she is, and Deb says she recognizes her from the market. I just…” he let the sentence fade out with a shrug, but Leah knew him well enough to finish it. He didn’t want Ashley to come in. Leah had been hurt, and he didn’t want any person who’d hurt her to get close.

  But Leah had hurt Ashley, too. Or at least let her down. She set the doughnut aside. “Okay. She can come in.”

  Gunner shook his head. “Not unti
l you eat. You heard the doc say they won’t let you go home until you start eating.”

  Doughnuts and chocolate milk was probably not the meal the doctor had in mind, and Leah had lost that scant moment of interest in it, but she complied. When the food and drink was gone, Gunner kissed her and gathered up her trash.

  “I’ll go get her.” At the door he stopped and turned back. “Everything’s gonna be okay, Lee.”

  She believed him. Things weren’t okay now, but they would be. Someday.