“We don’t know yet.” He looked like he was about to cry himself. “The tanker was transporting flammable material. It went up like a… it blew up,” he said. “It’s burning still, right now, but we wanted you to know before you saw it on television.”
My parents.
Oh, God.
Aurora.
She was with them, too.
They’d all gone to the SWAT competition. I’d gotten the text about twenty minutes after Sammy had left.
Aurora went because Sammy had asked them to go and take photos for me. My dad went because my sister didn’t like driving herself.
I’d bailed out this morning when I’d found out that there was something seriously wrong with the book that I had set to release in three days. I’d spent the better part of the morning fixing it and had told Sammy and my parents that if I could make it after getting it fixed, that I would drive there on my own.
My hands lifted to my face to shakily cover my mouth.
Tears started to leak out of my eyes.
“They went because of me,” I whispered. “I told Sammy how cool it was. How cool it’d be to see him compete. Pew, pew, pew.”
The moan had Tristan’s eyes coming to my face.
“Don’t blame yourself, honey,” he murmured softly. “That’s not what happened and you know it.”
But it was.
That was exactly what happened.
They—none of them—would have gone if it wasn’t for me.
“When will we know?” I whispered brokenly.
Trist shook his head. “I don’t know. Whatever chemical they were carrying was bad. And then it mixed with another eighteen wheeler’s contents. It’s… fuck. I don’t even know if the road’ll be open in the next eight hours. They’re having to reroute traffic for eight miles.”
I closed my eyes as the pain started to barrel through me, taking down every single thing in its path.
I felt my knees shake as I turned and walked woodenly to the television, hoping news of what had happened would be on now.
It was.
“Reports show that there were eight members of an inter-department SWAT team that were killed in the crash,” the news reporter said.
My mouth fell open as I whipped my head around.
“What?” I gasped.
Trist’s eyes looked even more haunted.
“They left out from here in a huge convoy. We don’t know anything yet, but honey, it’s not looking good.”
***
Hours later, I’m glued to the television.
One by one, the men of the SWAT team had made their way out of the fire.
All of them dirty, sweaty, covered in black, and alive.
All of them but one.
My guy.
I was in the waiting room at the hospital with the rest of the ladies that belonged to the SWAT team.
Rowen and their infant were the first ones to see their guy.
Then there was Amelia, taking Adam.
Ashe had stood up just a bit later the moment Ford came through the doors, causing his woman to waddle as fast as she could toward him.
Over and over it went, taking Avery, then Ares.
After their reunions were through, they came to sit with me as we all waited.
“Any news?” I heard someone ask.
One of the guys.
I wasn’t sure which.
“No,” another replied. “Can’t fuckin’ believe that man is there acting the goddamn hero.”
I watched the ‘man’ under question.
Patman had, apparently, been broken down on the side of the road.
The accident had, according to him, happened right beside him.
He’d been able to help a lot of the victims get free, some of those being members of the SWAT team, before everything had exploded.
Patman was still helping according to the reporters that were still covering the accident.
“Makes him look good, that’s for sure,” I heard one of the men reply.
“Sure fuckin’ does,” the two men continued to converse. “Let’s not forget about the fact that he’s an asshole and tried to hurt my wife. Did hurt Sammy’s girl. They’ll only remember him for his ‘good deed.’” Ford paused. “I would just like to point out that I was getting out of my vehicle just fuckin’ fine.”
I would’ve laughed had I had the energy.
God, I loved these men.
They were so much like Sammy that it hurt.
All brass and rough around the edges, but they had some really soft hearts underneath all the body armor.
Patman walked across the screen that I was watching, and I narrowed my eyes as he walked to his truck and got inside.
For him being ‘broken down’ on the side of the road, it sure looked like his vehicle worked just fine.
I wondered what had been wrong that had caused him to be considered ‘broken down.’
When he got his truck started, he glanced at something in the back of his truck and reached down, almost as if he was punching whatever the hell it was in his back seat.
I frowned in concentration as I tried to get a better look at what he was doing, but before I could get any better of a look, he was zooming off while talking to himself.
Asshole.
I was so numb, so disconnected from everything, that I didn’t notice at first the woman walking through the door until she was right on top of me.
I looked up into the eyes of my mother.
“MOM!” I cried, launching myself out of the chair.
I didn’t even realize I was crying until she was wiping away my tears and cooing to me softly.
“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay,” she promised.
And I wanted to believe her.
But as the hours passed, the worry started to rise.
It’d been over two hours since the fervor had died down at the scene, and not once had a familiar face that belonged to me in some way come out of the smoke like the rest of the SWAT men did.
I pressed my hand to my belly as the cold chill inside my belly made itself known once again.
My mom being here was great.
But I was still missing three of my people.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t get here earlier,” she whispered into my hair. “I’ve been throwing up for hours. And since we stayed at the cabin last night, I didn’t know until I got home and there were police cars at the house. God, baby. I’m so sorry for scaring you. I’m so sorry.”
I had a feeling she was apologizing for more than just scaring me. She was apologizing because of Sammy.
I felt the tears dripping down my face as I said, “I’m scared.”
“You know your father,” she said, hope in her voice. “He probably stayed to help until the last person was taken off scene. He’s okay.”
I wished I had her optimism.
With it being so many hours later, I wasn’t sure that there was anything else left that they could do.
And surely they would’ve borrowed a phone by now to call.
Right?
No, I didn’t have my mom’s optimism.
My sister, father, and Sammy were dead.
I felt it in my soul.
“Okay,” I said, even though I didn’t feel the surety that she did.
I was just about to pull her to me and retake the seat when a familiar face walked into the room.
Chief Luke Roberts.
He walked directly to us.
Or to me.
He stopped just inside the small waiting room that we found ourselves in and glanced around, doing a roll count in his head.
Behind him came Miller, Mercy, Blue and Sierra, Sammy’s family.
Mercy had tears running down her cheeks, and Sierra looked like she was seconds away from bursting into tears. Blue looked…lost.
It was Miller’s red eyes that were brimming with his own unshe
d tears that nearly broke me.
I swallowed hard when those eyes, so much like Sammy’s, came to rest on me.
My breath stalled out in my lungs and I knew.
I knew before Luke said a single word that it wasn’t good.
Miller held my eyes as Luke spoke.
“As of now, we’re no longer looking for survivors at the scene,” Luke said. “Now it’s a body recovery.”
Body.
Recovery.
My mother gasped and pressed her hand to her heart.
“There aren’t any more survivors?” I felt a cold hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t look over, but I somehow knew that it was Amelia.
“No,” Luke said. “There are no more signs of life.”
Something squeezed in my chest as my mother gasped, her breath hitching.
Still, I held Miller’s eyes.
I wanted him to say he was joking.
I wanted him to tell me that this was all some sick, twisted dream.
That this wasn’t really happening.
Not to me.
Then Patman came in the room with a smile on his face as his ‘rescuers’ thanked him.
I wanted to vomit.
“You’re sure?” my mother croaked one more time.
I finally tore my eyes away from Miller to see my mother’s face.
“We’re sure, ma’am,” Luke murmured softly, trying to soften the blow that his words would cause.
My mother fell to her knees then, her hand on her chest still.
“Ma’am?”
My mother fell back on her ass.
Then, eyes on me, her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell backward with a gasp.
“Mom!”
***
“I honestly have no clue how she managed to stay standing as long as she did,” I heard the doctor say. “She was having a massive heart attack. Probably had been all day. That would account for the vomiting.”
I looked at my mother’s hand as it hung off the gurney.
Her wedding ring was nearly slipping off her quickly darkening finger.
Was it normal for people to look dead so fast?
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” someone said to me as they picked up my mother’s hand and placed it on her chest.
The ring fell to the floor, and just like everything else that day, it was the perfect ending to a perfectly shitty day.
Landing in the massive whirlwind of trash that had amounted over their efforts to save her, I almost didn’t even ask for it.
Almost.
It was my mother’s, though.
And I wanted it.
I walked over to it and picked it up, curling my fist around it.
“Is there anyone I can call?”
Miller.
I swallowed hard.
“Suzanne,” I answered softly. “She’s all I have left in this world.”
Miller’s arms came around me and he pulled me in tight, squeezing me harder than I think he realized.
“You’re not alone, honey,” he said. “That baby inside of you is my boy’s. You’re carrying something that means the whole world to a lot of people. But, even if you weren’t, you’d still be ours. You’re not getting out. But I’ll call your person. Make sure she comes.”
I didn’t say a word.
Couldn’t.
I was all out of breath.
***
It took her six hours to get to me.
As I sat on my front porch, shivering and refusing to go inside because it would smell like him, I saw a car race up to the curb.
I stood up and knew it was my friend.
We’d only really seen each other in person a total of eight times.
But you wouldn’t know that was all.
She was my best friend.
My confidant.
The only person that I had left.
The car had barely rocked to a stop at the curb before she was out and hurrying toward me.
Her curls bounced as she raced to me, her arms outstretched.
And I fell into them.
I cried.
And I cried.
And I cried.
I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.
And still she held me.
Chapter 22
I act like I’m okay, but deep down I need my nails done.
-Hastings’ secret thoughts
Hastings
I ran my fingers over the light wood that the preacher stood behind at weddings.
I couldn’t even recall what it was named.
And normally something like that would be important. I was a writer, of course. Words were important to me.
But today?
Not so much.
“I had a book release today,” I said to nobody in particular.
Suzanne’s breath hitched.
“When I first was told that my father, mother, sister and future husband were in an accident,” I said softly, “I thought, surely God wouldn’t take all of them away from me.” I looked up at the bright lights that were so bright that they hurt my eyes. The pain did nothing to stop the tears from coming. The first tear tracked down my cheek as I said, “Then my mom walked through the doors of the emergency room.” My voice cracked. “She told me that she’d stayed home. She’d had a bad stomachache the night before that’d turned into the stomach flu. And she’d stayed.”
My voice resembled something out of a horror movie as it cracked every couple of words. My breathing was labored, and I couldn’t find the ability to draw in a good breath.
“That tractor-trailer fell onto my dad’s car, killing my sister and dad instantly.” I licked my lips.
At least, that was what the accident investigators assumed had happened. At this point, it was only speculation when and how they were killed.
The bodies still hadn’t been recovered. There just wasn’t anything left.
According to the people that I spoke with, it would be a couple of weeks before they could identify any of the remains.
The accident was cleared from the highway.
Things had resumed as normal.
Well, things had resumed back to normal for everyone else.
For me?
Not so much.
The chemical that the first truck had been transporting had been gasoline. When that truck had exploded, it’d caused another tractor that’d been carrying some other hazardous material to explode right along with it.
The blast had been so big and deadly that everyone in a mile range after the accident had been affected.
Thankfully, the man that’d been driving the other tanker had been aware enough of what he’d been transporting to tell an officer that’d arrived on scene.
They’d evacuated everyone that could move.
Over nineteen people had died.
My father, sister, and Sammy among the nineteen.
I looked over at the large photo of my mom. The one that I’d taken with her at the Back Porch just a few short months ago after coming home from Alaska.
She’d been one of my biggest supporters when it came to my career.
The tears that I’d started to get ahold of broke free again.
“When my mom suffered a heart attack later that day,” I said, “I thought, surely not. I already lost my dad. My sister. My fiancé. And now my mother?” I looked down at the podium. “The doctors said that it was so fast that she likely didn’t feel a thing.”
And she was with my dad and sister now.
I looked at the one lone casket next to the two urns of ash that might or might not have my sister and father inside.
They weren’t quite sure when they’d handed it to me.
I drew in a breath past the lump in my throat that hadn’t quite gone away since I’d found out about the accident five days ago.
“I don’t know what to say.” I looked at the one single pers
on that was in the sea of empty pews. My best friend, Suzanne. “I’m not even making sense. If I don’t make sense now, how am I going to make sense in an hour when I have to do this to a room full of thousands?”
Thousands of people were here for my father. He was an officer, after all. Police officers supported their own.
Suzanne gestured for me to come to her, and I did.
Wrapping me up in her arms, she pressed her face against mine and said, “You don’t have to talk at all.”
So I didn’t.
I didn’t say a freakin’ word.
Suzanne sat on one side of me and held my hand while Sammy’s mother, Mercy, sat on the other and did the same.
Together they held me together.
Together, they watched as my parents and sister were laid to rest.
Together, we all stared, now dry-eyed, as the officers and the people walked by and paid their respects.
I didn’t say anything to any of them.
A fluttering sensation filled my belly.
A short time later they led me outside.
I licked my lips and stared at the sea of people.
I was numb.
Physically. Emotionally. Mentally.
There was nothing in my body that felt even a single piece of happiness right now.
Not even the baby doing somersaults in my belly could make me crack.
Boom.
More research baby?
Boom.
Come here.
Boom.
You’re so beautiful.
Boom.
I can’t wait to see who the baby looks like.
Boom.
When I close my eyes, you’re all that I can see.
Boom.
I want to be married to you. I want the baby to have my last name. I want you to have my last name. Hasty Spurlock. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Boom.
I can’t sleep. So I was looking at you.
Over and over the blasts went off.
I flinched for all twenty-one of the blasts from the twenty-one-gun salute.
Chapter 23
Do I look like a fucking people person?
-T-shirt
Hastings
Sammy’s parents had decided to have his funeral in a field that would accommodate all the people that would be there.
Yet again, all the officers that had come down for my father’s funeral yesterday, were once again at my fiancé’s. They’d stayed the night.
Say It Ain't So (SWAT Generation 2.0 Book 9) Page 18