Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
That made a sick sort of sense.
“And Tobias?” I asked nervously this time.
He had to be okay. He had to be okay.
He shook his head. “He’s hurt. I saw him crawling toward the car that was acting as a shield to the car that the shooters are in,” he answered. “He didn’t look good, but at the time, he was still conscious.”
My stomach dropped.
“At the time?”
He nodded again.
“He’s hurt. Really bad, by my guess.”
“Oh, God,” I replied shakily, blowing out a breath. “Go help him.”
He stared for a few long seconds.
“I’ll be okay,” I whispered. “Do you want my gun?”
He laughed at me, then got up and walked away, disappearing from my sight in the next moment, leaving me with nothing but my thoughts, and the bursts of gunfire that broke through the silence every few seconds.
Shit.
It felt like hours later when the shooting started.
And not anywhere near the same sounding as the shooting that I’d heard earlier. Not the steady pop-pop-pop.
This one was a rapid staccato of shots. Not just one gun. Many guns.
I had no earthly idea, until later, just how many guns went off.
More like twenty would be my guess.
Whatever happened, I wouldn’t care.
Not at first, anyway.
After hearing all those shots, and then nothing but silence, I didn’t much think there was anything left to happen.
So I got up, despite the way my head throbbed in protest, and started forward.
My concern for Tobias was enough to have me loudly trudging through the woods, barely missing tripping over the fallen branches that Tunnel had so easily carried me over earlier.
I’d just reached the tree line, finally able to see the road in front of me, and blanched when I saw the cruiser I’d come from.
It was bad.
The trunk was just gone.
There was nothing left of it at all.
And the back seat…had there been someone in there at the time of the crash…I shook my head. They’d be nothing more than pulverized meat.
And then I saw the body lying on the pavement, and everything but Tobias was forgotten.
I didn’t once think about the people surrounding the area, or if there was any more danger.
The only thing I had eyes for was Tobias.
My heart was pounding in my chest as I ran, jumping onto the usually busy road and finding nothing there to hinder my path but bits and pieces of stray car parts strewn across the highway.
Something crunched underneath my feet, but again, I didn’t stop.
Not until I was skidding to a stop next to Tobias.
His eyes were closed, and his breathing was shallow.
His face was pale, and I cried out in pain and frustration.
“Toab,” I took in the length of his body, noting the red stains that were bleeding into one big one on both sides of his legs. “Oh, God.”
Something touched my arm, and I looked up to find Tobias’ staring at me.
“You look like Carrie,” he said. “It’s the blood on your face and running down your shirt.”
His eyes took in the length of my body, much the same way as I’d just done to him, and he stopped on something in the middle of my chest.
His hand came up, and he ran one large finger over it.
I looked down, too, and paled when I saw the hole in my Kevlar vest.
“What’s that?” I asked, poking the same spot he’d just fingered.
“Gun…”
I looked up, expecting him to finish his sentence, only to see his eyes rolling back in his head as his body started convulsing.
I screamed.
***
We arrived at the ER thirty minutes later.
Tobias was rolled into surgery immediately after that, Tommy Tom, doing chest compressions.
That was the last clear view I had of him.
He’d been lying on the gurney.
One arm was dripping blood from his fingertips, and falling off the side of the gurney.
His head had been held still by the paramedics yellow cervical collar, and he’d had a tube down his throat with a nurse running beside the gurney—another Dixie Warden’s wife—Tommy Tom’s wife—doing his breathing for him.
His pants had been cut from his legs, and I was now the guardian of the belt that’d been around his waist until about two minutes before.
I stood there, looking at the belt, wondering how Tobias had walked around with it on when it weighed so much.
With nothing else left to do with it, I untied the belt and looped it around my waist, then tightened down the belt much further past where Tobias wore it.
Something fell to the ground, and I bent down to pick up the gold badge. The one that’d been over his chest, right over his heart, every single time he went out on shift.
And I broke.
I fell to pieces, right there in front of every single police officer who was in the vicinity and not currently responding to a call.
Nothing, I’d heard, brought the LEO—law enforcement officer—community together like when one of them was injured.