Chapter 23 #2
Sighing, I pulled onto a darkened back road and tried to find the high beams again. Apparently, they were only easy to find when I was searching for something else. “Okay, okay. I’ll try my hardest,” I said. “I’d really love to have a new car over the summer.”
“I’m sure you would, sweetheart,” Dad added from behind me.
I squinted my eyes as the rain fell harder. My whole body tensed up when cars flew by from the opposite direction, temporarily blinding me. Swallowing, I glanced down to fiddle with the switch for the bright lights. “These buttons are so complicated. Why do they hide everything?”
Mom leaned over to help. “Are you okay? Do you want me to drive?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
A car was coming up the hill, their lights blaring.
The combination of headlights and rain was making me feel dizzy and out of sorts.
I sucked in a shaky breath, trying to hide the fact that my nerves were getting the better of me.
We were cruising at just under fifty-miles per hour down the slick slope, my fingers bleached white around the wheel and my body as stiff as a board.
I leaned over to mess with the wipers again when my father spoke up from the backseat. “You know, when I was your age—”
“Look out!” Mom screamed.
My eyes darted to the windshield as a large animal scurried out in front of the car.
I inhaled sharply, jerking the wheel to avoid a collision, and careened headfirst toward the oncoming vehicle.
Tires squealed and wailed against the wet pavement, spinning in resistance.
My scream fused with my mother’s, and I couldn’t decipher between the two as I lost control and smashed into the vehicle with a sickening crash.
Everything went dark.
Black.
A void.
Nothingness.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when my lids fluttered open, warm liquid dribbling down my forehead and into my eyes.
My head throbbed. My chest pounded.
Everything hurt.
An airbag pinned me against the driver’s seat as an incessant car horn echoed through the night. The high-pitched ringing yanked me back to reality, and I swallowed a giant gulp of air into my lungs. It felt like I’d just inhaled dozens of tiny knives.
I choked, coughed, spluttered.
I clutched my ribs, feeling them splinter inside of me, making me moan.
“Mom…it hurts,” I whispered, my voice strangled and cracked. “Daddy…” I found the strength to tilt my head, fighting through the pain, until my eyes settled on my mother.
No.
No…no!
I went numb as my jaw unhinged, my insides twisted, and my whole world fell apart. I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to look at the horrors beside me.
Mom was still. There was a fragment of glass lodged in her throat, blood coating her beautiful, porcelain face.
There was so much blood.
“Mom!” I shrieked, desperate and terrified. “Daddy…talk to me. Please talk to me.”
I sobbed. Tears mingled with blood as my cries blended with the piercing horn.
Dad was silent.
I twisted in my seat, ignoring the shock of heart-stabbing pain, and glanced back at my father. “No…no…no…” I was crying so hard my body convulsed. I felt torn in half.
They were gone.
My parents were gone.
I’d killed them.
“Noooo!” It was a ghastly sound, almost inhuman. It echoed through the dark of night, through the raindrops that fell like tears. The sky was crying with me, mourning my loss.
Nausea curdled in my gut as I pushed open the driver’s side door and crawled out onto the street, hands first. Shards of glass were scattered across the cement, much like my broken heart, slicing into my palms. I heaved all over the roadway, purging my sorrows and expelling my grief.
The rain poured down in buckets, and I begged for it to wash it all away.
Another cry broke through my grisly haze as I forced my legs to stand upright. My knees wobbled with every small step I took toward another massacre in front of me. Another nightmare.
Someone else’s nightmare.
Headlights brightened a grim scene, lighting up the figures like a spotlight.
There was a man. A broken man.
I recognized his sadness; I felt his agony like I felt my own.
He was sitting slumped in the middle of the street, in the middle of glass, blood, and bone, with a woman in his arms. He cradled her against his chest, rocking back and forth.
Forward and back. I was in a trance as I stared at the scene laid out in front of me.
The broken stranger looked up.
His eyes.
I’d never seen eyes like his before. They were cutting into me like a red-hot dagger, twisting and burning. Tears trickled down my cheeks as our gazes locked.
The man let out a gut-wrenching roar.
It rumbled through me like a violent earthquake. A windstorm.
Like the saddest song I’d ever heard.
“Look at what you’ve done!” he wailed, squeezing the woman in his lap before burying his face in her blood-soaked hair.
That’s when I noticed something else.
A little boy.
A child was lying beside the woman, partially covered by the weight of his mother.
The man was holding on to them both.
Grieving.
And they were both so still.
I whipped around, unable to process the horrible images, my gaze falling on my brother’s mangled Firebird. I thought about Ryan sitting at home on his computer, blissfully unaware of the fact that his life was about to change forever.
My head began to throb.
I pressed my fingertips to my temple, then pulled them back to stare at the warm, red blood. My balance teetered. I swayed from side to side. My legs quivered, and my thoughts turned to fog.
Stars flickered behind my eyes as I collapsed onto the pavement, my skull slamming against the hard surface.
As I faded out, my vision blurred as my eyes landed on the front of Ryan’s wrecked car.
His license plate was the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me up.
LTTLbrD.