Deep Shadows (43 page)

“I just heard her, approximately two feet ahead. There must be a pocket. We're going to have to do this carefully.”

“Like pickup sticks,” Parish said. “Or Jenga.”

“Exactly like Jenga.” Very carefully, Max reached for the first board.

S
EVENTY
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NE

S
helby tried to calm her son. Even as her heart broke over Kaitlyn and for her mother, for those with no home, for those still buried beneath the debris… as the sheer hopelessness of it all threatened to overwhelm her, she sought to comfort her son.

She tried to move him away to a safe distance, but he wouldn't leave Kaitlyn. He simply shook his head, held the girl whose life had been struck short, and wept.

Minutes passed as people from surrounding streets flocked in to help. Finally emergency workers arrived to begin triage, but few had yet been recovered from the affected homes. One of the paramedics walked up, crouched beside them, and said, “We should take her now, while we can.”

Carter ignored them, or perhaps he couldn't hear them through his pain.

“You have to let her go now, son. Just… let her go.”

Shelby didn't know how she could persuade him, how to reach him in the depth of his sorrow.

Patrick and Bianca appeared by her side.

“We'll follow them, Carter.” Patrick gently pulled the boy to his feet and nodded for the emergency workers to load Kaitlyn onto the stretcher. “If you want to go with her, I'll take you.”

Carter wiped a blood-covered hand across his face and nodded, though he was still watching Kaitlyn. When they covered her with a sheet, he literally fell into Shelby's arms, shaking and weeping.

Bianca rubbed his back, as Shelby had when he was an infant. Patrick placed his arms around them all, providing a protective barrier to this
most intimate of families. They had shared birth and life and catastrophic changes together. They would accompany one another through this valley too. Shelby realized in that moment that it was only death. Yes, only. She understood, maybe for the first time, that it was a thin veil indeed that separated them from those who had gone ahead.

As sirens blared, people cried, and the assistant fire chief barked orders, Shelby felt, inexplicably, as if she was standing on holy ground.

The ambulance blipped its siren once. Shelby glanced up and noticed that one other corpse had been loaded into the bay. The EMS worker slammed the doors shut and climbed into the front next to the driver. Another ambulance remained to treat the injured.

Carter stared at the ambulance as it moved away with lights pulsing. There was no need to rush, no need to blare the siren while carrying the dead.

“I need to go with them. I need to… to be there when her mom comes.”

“I'll go with you,” Bianca said.

“We both will.” Shelby had an almost irresistible urge to check the vials of insulin in her backpack. Had they burst? Had Max crushed them? What would they do if—

“Shelby, you need to stay here.” Patrick nodded toward her damaged house, and Shelby saw that they hadn't escaped unscathed. Her legs began to shake, and she wondered if she had the strength to face what lay ahead.

As if he could read her mind, Patrick said, “We'll help you.”

She looked at her son. Gratitude overwhelmed her that he was alive, that he hadn't been taken in this tragic accident, and immediately she felt ashamed for thinking such a thing. It was selfish. It was the cry of her heart, but what of Kaitlyn's mom? She would be devastated. It was all so unfair. She thought again of her earlier revelation—holy ground, divided by a thin veil.

“He needs…” She wiped at the tears streaming down her face. “He needs his eye looked at.”

Carter reached up, wiped at the cut, and then he stared at the blood on his fingers.

“I'm okay.”

“You'll need stitches, at least,” said Shelby.

“I'll take him by the clinic,” Bianca said. “Everyone here is going to have their hands full.”

“Here, take my car.” Patrick fished the Mustang's keys out of his pocket.

Carter looked at Shelby once before turning toward Bianca. The grief and confusion etched so vividly on his face tore at her heart as he walked away, Bianca's arm around his shoulders.

As soon as they were out of sight, she dropped the backpack on the ground and unzipped it. Pulling out the old blanket, she unwrapped the top box of insulin, opened it, and confirmed that they were unbroken.

“We're good?” Patrick asked.

She nodded and repacked the supplies. “Where do we start? With the rescue?”

“It looks to me like they have plenty of people doing that. We need to get to your house and see what can be salvaged.”

“Why?”

But she knew why. Already people were trolling through the debris, pulling out what was useful, scurrying away.

“This is going to be a difficult site to contain, at least for the first few hours. If there's anything left in your house that you want, I suggest we get it now.”

“All right, but I'll do it alone.” When Patrick began to argue, she pushed on. “That's my one condition—that you go and check with the firemen before helping me. See if they need you to help look for people or fight the fire.”

The blaze had diminished considerably, but did that mean they were safe? She'd felt safe walking home from work with Max an hour ago, and now her life was in shambles.

Patrick didn't look happy with her condition, but he nodded once, curtly, and strode in the opposite direction.

Shelby hurried over to the wreckage of her home.

Glass crunched beneath her feet as she made her way up the porch stairs. The windows had been blown out. There was no need to put her key in the lock. The front door had been thrown across the living room. And the inside of her house? It looked as if a tornado had passed through. The couch had been hurled against the opposite wall. Most of the pictures were gone, scattered, broken.

She remembered the bins that she had taken to Bianca's only the day before. They were safe. Was that a miracle? She didn't know. She felt numb
as she walked into her office, and a cold acceptance crept over her. Resolve stiffened her spine, and she promised herself that she would not shed tears for this. Not while people were dying just past her doorstep.

The books that once lined her bookshelf were scattered around the room. The computer she hadn't been able to use since the solar flare lay on the floor. How much of her life had she spent in this room, spinning stories, living through her characters? She'd suspected that her old life was over—done and gone. She'd even mentally accepted it when she first saw the aurora, and again when the fire swept through the north side of the square. The first day she'd gone to work at Green Acres, she'd resolutely told herself that no one needed an author now. What they needed was a clean bedpan, fresh linens, a healthy meal. Her priorities has shifted and adjusted and readjusted to fit this thing they were living through.

And now, looking at her office, at the destruction of their home, her heart recognized that her previous life was over.

She was fortunate to be alive, to still have her son, to know a few people she could truly call friends. No family? That might be true, but God had provided others. He had provided.

As she moved through their rooms, making piles of clothes, pictures, even food, she heard a soft rain begin to tap against the roof.

“Thank you, God.” The words slipped from her lips.

The rain would put out the fire. It would save what homes remained on their block. Never mind that it would also soak any items thrown out of the house. They were only possessions—only things.

As for her and Carter? They were now homeless. They'd joined the ranks of the people passing through Abney, the ones who hadn't been able to find a way back to their towns. They were no different from the men and women who had lost their apartments in the downtown fire. Their lives had taken on the same uncertainty as the Mendozas' and Dr. Bhatti's had.

Patrick returned and helped her pack items into pillowcases and laundry baskets. They covered everything with trash sacks and lugged it all to the curb where they waited for Bianca and Carter to return. Max had stopped by to tell them he was going to help in another neighborhood—another area where there had been a gas explosion.

The rain had stopped, but the street still glistened in the last of the day's light. Not even dark yet. How had so much happened in so little time?

As they waited, several of her neighbors walked by—stopped and asked if there was anything they could do, anything that she needed.

Each time, Shelby thanked them and said she was fine.

She wasn't fine, but maybe she would be—eventually.

Until that day she would lean on the kindness of others.

Would they forget these days? In five years or twenty when life had taken on some sense of normalcy, would they push these memories from their minds? Or would they tell their children and grandchildren of the days of tragedy and how the town came together to help the injured and homeless and grieving?

“I need to go back inside,” she said.

“I'll wait here with your things.”

She walked back into her house, through the living room, and into her study. The plastic tubs that held her supplies had been thrown from the shelves, and some were burst open. Still it wasn't difficult to find the one she wanted. Opening it she pulled out first one tablet, and then another.

She might want to write—something. Not the romance stories of before, but maybe a chronicle of what was happening and how they were enduring. Possibly she could write an account not only of their sufferings but of their hope.

When would there be more paper? And what of pens? Were the pen factories still open? She doubted it.

Shelby dumped everything out of her promotional tub—bookmarks and postcards and key chains and business cards. She found a dust rag pinned underneath her printer, pulled it out, and used it to make sure the tub was completely dry. She put the tablets, all of them, inside. Then she searched for the boxes of pens and placed them with the tablets.

She walked out of the room. Slung across her shoulders she carried the backpack with Carter's insulin. Clutched to her heart was the bin of writing supplies.

Shelby didn't look back. She felt no need to study the house that she'd grown up in, the home where she'd raised her son. That was her past. The future, though it seemed heavy and dark, was in front of her.

She would face that direction instead.

S
EVENTY
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WO

C
arter hated the way his mother stared at him, watched him, and checked on him constantly. He was fine. He had lived through the events of the last three days with only four stitches above his right eye to prove he'd even been on Kaufman Street the moment of the explosion.

Three days ago.

His world had tipped, turned, and changed completely.

“We struggle to understand.” Pastor Tony stood in front of the place where Kaitlyn would be buried. He wore a white shirt, tie, and dress pants even though the heat threatened to consume them. Sweat streamed down his face, but he didn't notice. He seemed transported from their presence—his hands on the Bible, his gaze fixed on something Carter couldn't see, something in another place and time.

It was June in Texas, and after the brief rain the night of the explosion, the temperatures had soared to the high nineties. People were literally stroking out from the heat. He'd heard his mom tell Max that two more folks had died at Green Acres. They were succumbing to the harshness of this new life one by one.

That, and the line of open graves that extended to the left of the pastor presented a scene more horrific than anything that Carter had ever seen in a video game or on television. Life was turning out to be harsher than he had ever imagined.

“We weep and mourn, as we should. The Bible tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.”

Kaitlyn's mother began to cry.

Carter wanted to look away, to be anywhere but standing beside an open grave. He wanted to clap his hands over his ears and block out Pastor Tony's words.

“We do.” Tony's voice cracked. “We mourn with you, for Kaitlyn, Mrs. Lowry.”

Their pastor looked down the road, which ran the length of the cemetery. “For each of these, we mourn, and we will remember. We will remember their lives, their smiles, the way they touched our hearts. We will remember Christ's victory over the grave, God's promise of a circle unbroken, and the Holy Spirit's assurance that we will one day see him face-to-face and know—fully know.”

They sang “Amazing Grace,” the words coming to Carter even when he'd rather have forgotten them. His mother stood on his right, singing softly. Max, Bianca, and Patrick were on his left. His friend Jason was even there.