Brock closed his eyes, sucking in a deep breath. Everything was happening in slow motion, and he was trying desperately to open his eyes and sit up. His movements were sluggish and took every bit of his energy, but it was anything but pain filled. He was all alone in the grass, the woman nowhere to be found. The sirens grew louder and a fire truck came around the bend. Brock climbed to his feet and swayed. There was an ambulance too, screeching to a halt next to the mangled pickup truck right near the bend.
Brock hadn't seen it before. With his eyesight clearer there was no mistaking the scene. It was his dad's truck, all right, flipped over on its side. Paramedics and firefighters rushed to it. Someone stood in front of Brock, asking him a question. Brock didn't answer, just took a step towards the truck.
The man in front of him spoke again. He shone a light in front of Brock. Brock tried to step around him, but another man appeared and pushed his palm against Brock's shoulder to hold him back.
The paramedics pulled a motionless body out of the truck. Brock knew it was his father the second he saw the familiar shape and build.
His stomach rolled and he fell to his knees. One of the paramedics shook her head, her lips drawn in a tight line. Brock didn't need to hear the words to know his father was dead.
The entire funeral was a blur, just as the three days after the accident had been. Everyone said it was a miracle Brock had survived, that an angel of some sort was surely looking after him. But it wasn't true. His father was dead, and no circumstance connected to that could be deemed a miracle. Something had happened out there on the empty Hawaiian highway. That much Brock knew. His body had been wrecked with pain. And then the strange woman kissed him...
She hadn't been a passenger in the other car. The police claimed only one person had been in the vehicle barreling around the bend. A meth head, high on the day's dose. Brock tried not to feel satisfied the man had died in the accident. An eye for an eye made the world blind. That's what his dad always used to say. Brock shut his eyes. He would never hear his dad's voice again. How long until he forgot just what it sounded like?
People murmured around him, ambling off to their cars. Brock opened his eyes. His mother stood a few feet away, gazing up at him. She didn't even come up to his shoulder, but the penetrating gazes she could dish out had always been capable of breaking him in half. She was a woman of fortitude and dignity, the kind of person only someone with a heart made of coal could lie to.
“Brock,” was all she said.
He swallowed hard, pushing the burning sensation back down his throat.
“You can stay here a while,” she softly continued. “I'll be at home.”
He nodded. He'd never been one to say anything but what was necessary. Also, words were difficult to wield. Painful.
She walked away and he turned back to the freshly covered grave. Flowers adorned the circumference of it, looking cheerful in a painfully cruel way. Where the grave yard ended the Waianae mountain range began. Brock's heart jerked. He had been into the mountains plenty of times before, going camping with his parents when he was a kid.
That day something about them was different. They called to him in a new and foreign way. They had a secret they wanted to share with him.
Would it be one that would rescue him from the pain? Placing one foot in front of the other, Brock began walking towards the hills.
Where he was going, he didn't know. What he was looking for, he didn't have a clue. Everything about living suddenly become unbearably, incredibly unfair. Only four days earlier he had gotten the news. He'd been accepted into the Fire Academy. He was going to be a firefighter, just like his dad. They'd gone out to celebrate, just the two of them.
And only one of them came home.
How was it that Brock's body didn't have any signs of being flung from the car? Other than the light pink mark on his leg, which looked more like a birth mark than anything else, his body was unchanged. The paramedics at the scene assumed he had just gotten away scratch free. They knew nothing about the state he woke up in. If it truly was a miracle, it was one enacted by the strange woman who kissed him and then disappeared. Delaying Brock's demise wasn't the only thing the woman had done. She changed something deep and innate in Brock. He could tell.
Just beyond the first wall of trees it happened. A painful ache filled his body. His arms and legs quivered and his stomach twisted. His bones pushed into each other before cracking and pulling away. The shirt on his back ripped and fell to the ground in shreds. It hurt and it felt good at the same time. He was terrified, but whatever was happening to him was necessary.