chapter Six
“You okay? You look a little pale.” Death leaned toward Casey. “I’m really not so sure this was a good idea.”
Casey ignored the nagging and breathed in the surroundings. It had taken her almost an hour and a half to walk there from the police station. As Watts had said, the accident site was outside the city limits. Not super far, but enough for a good hike. Casey gazed up at the mountains. They remained the same as they always had been. Permanent. Unfeeling. Beautiful. The sky was blue, with puffy white clouds. The trees glowed with autumn.
Their car had been going a decent speed when it went out of control. Not over the limit. Not reckless. Just a normal straight-road kind of speed. One moment they were moving along, singing a nursery rhyme, and the next they were sliding into the guardrail with a clash of metal and glass, hood buckling, tires screaming, leaving their blackened tire trails on the pavement. Once the movement stilled, Casey had glanced quickly toward her husband, confirmed that he was shaken but intact, then yanked off her seatbelt and stumbled out of the car, shoving the door open with her shoulder, calling all the while to her crying son in the back seat that Everything is okay, baby, I’m right here.
But then she wasn’t.
The force of the blast had catapulted her backward, the car’s door a steel wall between her and the shrapnel and flame. When she awoke, the faces she saw were not Reuben’s or Omar’s, but the detached, professional expressions of two paramedics.
“My family,” she’d croaked.
The man holding her wrist looked away. The other one slumped his shoulders only a fraction. But it was enough.
“Reuben!” Casey struggled to break free. The men held her down with hands and even knees, but she wasn’t trained to accept submission. A head butt to the first guy’s nose sent him flying backward into the second, who lost his grip on her legs. The second guy scrambled to grab her again, but a swift kick to his solar plexus stopped him as he buckled in half, gasping for air.
Casey stumbled forward, where firefighters in bright yellow uniforms surrounded the blackened hull of what had been her car. They didn’t see her coming, or they would have stopped her from barging through, from seeing the melted upholstery, the steel frames of the seats, and her husband, still clasping the steering wheel, even though he could no longer see where the car was headed. His hands, charred and exposed, were the last part of him she’d ever see.
The firefighters had wrestled her away, kicking, screaming, and biting, before she could see into the back seat, where her baby had died. The coroner all but refused to let her see him once he was in the morgue, and in her shock and despair she didn’t realize most of what was happening during the next week until it was too late. Her son was buried without her being able to say a last good-bye. She would be thankful after it all that her final image of Omar hadn’t been of his broken, blackened body.
The guardrail must have been repaired some time later. Now it shone silver in the sun, brighter than the sections to the right and left. The burned grass had replenished itself, and the gravel along the shoulder looked the same as all the rest. There were no crosses or plaques or any other outward sign to show that this was where Casey’s life had changed forever. Where she had lost everything.
Except she hadn’t lost her brother. He was something. A big something. And he needed her.
“Okay. I’m ready to go.” Casey turned, expecting Death to be waiting.
But Death was nowhere to be seen.