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My ears pinpoint on a distant, shrill sound after feeling blown out by that explosion.
Vicki Watell, shrieking just feet away from me. Her legs are gone.
She howls like she’s possessed by the pain, a puppet of agony with stark-red death pooling under her.
I try to crawl forward, to help her stop the bleeding, but a bullet cracks past my head. It grazes my helmet, making a deafening noise that makes me think my eardrums just ruptured.
“Vicki!” I roar, finally reaching her—
Just as another bullet cuts by and another airstrike detonates the world around us.
I think I black out for several seconds.
Her screams have stopped by the time I’m conscious again. She isn’t moving now. There’s just more blood, this time running from a fresh hole in her head.
“Fuck!” I smack myself on the side of the face.
Once. Twice. Three times.
I’m grateful Aunt Faye’s too out of it to see me going to pieces when she needs me most.
She needs me in the here and now.
I keep talking to her softly, holding her hand, letting her know that help is coming, running through my entire litany of ultra-dumb dad jokes.
Meanwhile, I scan the area as I count my breaths and hers, trying to figure what the ever-living fuck just happened.
Was it really an intruder? I notice the corner of the rug turned up. She might’ve tripped, hit her head on the coffee table...only, it’s too far away.
If it was a freak accident, she wouldn’t be lying here, so near the fireplace.
Then I see the broken vase—all heavy crystal blown apart like pearls. She could’ve been carrying it, but it’s near her feet. Further scanning doesn’t show anything out of place.
Damn. Why didn’t I activate the new system earlier?
Because I couldn’t until she decided on the code she’d remember.
She wanted it to be something meaningful and asked me to wait till she was home from Amelia’s.
Flustered, I pick my phone up off the floor where I’d set it down after calling the ambulance and punch Uncle Grady’s contact.
“Weston?”
“It’s Aunt Faye,” I tell him. “She’s unconscious and bleeding. Come now.”
21
Sweating Like A Pig (Rachel)
Will this joke of a day ever end?
After driving over to Faye’s and apologizing, which she gracefully accepted with her own sage advice about life, I came home with plenty to think about. That’s been my entire day.
Thinking.
Since there was only one guestroom still occupied by evening—guess whose—I kept myself busy by scrubbing the grout in all the bathrooms with a cleaning paste I’d found while cleaning out the storage closet.
The grout is now pearly white and sparkling like a cleaning commercial. Not that it was in bad shape when I started. I just wish it gave me a better distraction from the anxiety stomping through my mind like a herd of hungry bears.
