Silas nodded. “Yeah, the fire station was the first place we came to, and everything in about a three block radius has been checked.”
He waved his hand to someone, and I turned to find Trance with his own dog.
“Find anything?” Silas yelled.
Trance shook his head. “No.”
Silas nodded and continued walking, still keeping a hold of my arm.
It was surprisingly comfortable, despite the way he gripped it like I was a criminal.
I doubted he even realized he was doing it.
“We’ve found more alive than dead. Six casualties so far. Twenty-four rescues,” he said.
Six deaths.
Holy shit.
“This is where we’re searching right now. The white X indicates the property has been searched. Red circles mean the property is unstable and don’t go near it. Okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Call me if you need me,” he said. “If you find something, or Belly finds something, just holler and they’ll come running, okay?”
I nodded again, suddenly very nervous to be left alone.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. “Promise.”
Then, with a kiss to my forehead, he was strolling down the street, and I was left with a dog that looked very eager to get started.
“Alright, Belly, let’s do this,” I said, giving her a pat on the rump.
She licked my hand in response, and we got started.
***
It was forty-five minutes into my search that I found my first victim.
Or, I should say, Belly did.
She started barking like crazy at a pile of rubble, debris and dirt.
“I need help!” I yelled, walking forward until I was standing directly in front of the pile.
I didn’t know what to do, though.
So I gingerly started to pull off pieces of wood that I could reach without actually standing on the pile.
If there was a person under all that, they probably wouldn’t appreciate me standing on it to help them get out.
As suddenly as Belly had gone crazy, I was surrounded by huge, hulking men.
Some of them wore official-looking clothing, but most of them were in what I assumed they had most likely been wearing the night before.
“Back up, sweetheart,” one burly old man said softly.
I blinked and looked up at him.
He wasn’t ‘old,’ but he wasn’t young, either.
He was huge, though, so I took his direction and backed up to let the men work.
It was ten horrible minutes later that a shoe was uncovered, followed by the foot that shoe was attached to.
But that foot wasn’t moving.
Fuck.
Please be alive, please be alive, I chanted in my head.
My wish wasn’t granted, though.
By the time they had fully uncovered the man’s body, I known that he was dead.
No doubt due to the sheer volume of debris that was lying on top of him. Crushing him.
Then my eyes narrowed in on the bottle that the man still held, even in death.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed. “There’s a baby in there. There’s a baby!”
I hadn’t meant for it to come out sounding so scared, but it did.
One of the men turned to me, the big one with brown hair styled into a mohawk. The same one who served me at Halligans and Handcuffs.
He was wearing a Benton Fire Department shirt and was looking at me like I’d grown a second head.
“He has a baby’s bottle in his hand,” I said desperately.
He looked down, and the explicative that was propelled out of him spurred the rest of the men around him into a frenzy.
I walked around them with Belly, heading through a small path between debris piles.
I wasn’t sure how it was made, but I was going to use it.
Belly sniffed and sniffed, walking this way and that, until she came to a stop beside smaller pile of what resembled wood shavings and splinters.
She started barking.
“Over here!” I yelled, bending down to grab a piece of wood.
I was pushed back once again by the older burly guy and the Mohawk guy.
It still wasn’t the baby. I could tell that the moment they pulled off what looked to be half of a wall.
It was the mother.
She had what looked to be a teddy bear clutched tightly to her chest.
And she was dead, too.
I could tell that when Mohawk Guy pressed two very large fingers against the woman’s throat, just under her chin, and then shook his head.
“Shit,” I hissed. “Let’s go, Belly.”
Two dead people in one day.
How positively horrible.
Tears clogged my throat, and it took everything I had to stop them from leaking out and running down my cheeks.
Once again we started searching the house, but found nothing.
Belly and I, reluctantly, moved on to the next house.
Or some semblance of what was once a house.
We found two more who had perished before we found our first live one.
I’d just given the signal, and this time Trance and Mohawk Guy, as well as the big burly guy, showed within seconds of my call. Immediately, they started searching, getting down to the bottom of the rubble and unearthing a police car.
The guy inside was alive.
I could see his chest moving.