by A. R. Shaw
Dane watched the puddle forming on the ground in front of him.
Time stood still.
He turned finally. His hands attempting to stem the crimson tide.
Dane made sure their eyes met before she turned and walked away. Not even caring enough to see him die. In a few steps, she heard what sounded like his body fall to the ground.
Someone screamed, and she quickened her pace and realized a block later she was still clenching the string wire in left hand. His blood on her hands for the final time.
27
Matthew
There was a ripple in the force. He felt it. Matthew shifted in his seat as he drove the truck down the long dusty road. She…flashed in his mind. The time when she was on top and he’d flipped her suddenly beneath him, his hand tangled in the nap of her neck as he drove in. She didn’t seem to mind though he saw her wide eyes in a moment of rare vulnerability. He couldn’t explain it. This didn’t happen with anyone else, ever. But suddenly he knew something wasn’t right with Dane at that very moment. That tether between them vibrated. Something was wrong. Dammit, Dane.
That’s when his phone vibrated against his chest and Matthew swerved out of the lane and over to the side of the road.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Owen asked.
“I’ve got a call.”
“Nobody’s looking. You don’t need to pull over…” Owen said.
Matthew did though. He pulled to a stop quicker than intended and then when he looked at the screen, he realized it wasn’t Dane, after all. Instead, it was the department. The number was the big one. The one that called when you knew your next few minutes would be spent in a fury of action and you were never prepared enough. One deep suck of breath in and, “Brogen here,” he said.
All he really recalled from the relatively calm voice beginning the conversation were the words, Arson, Firestorm, Seattle. And yet he wondered why they were being called in…then, “It’s Chicago all over again, Matt.” Then he understood why they needed the Type 1’s. He ended the call turned the steering wheel and floored the accelerator as Owen called to the others in a voice devoid of emotion like a contagion of the original call.
“The conditions aren’t right, Matt. How can a blaze get that bad with all the rain on the west side this time of year?”
But Matthew barely heard his question. Instead, he was thinking, Dane couldn’t be responsible for this? Could she?
“I suppose anything’ll burn, if it’s hot enough,” Owen said attempting to answer his own question.
Matthew glanced at him briefly. “It’s Chicago again, my friend.”
28
Dane
This wasn’t like killing that prick back in Chicago. This was different, and Dane’s hands trembled under the cold water of the public faucet as she rubbed off the blood. It had dried to sludge in spots. She’d made it five blocks before entering the otherwise empty public bathroom. Her plan was to exit before anyone came in but then suddenly the door opened. Dane stopped and looked at the woman. She wasn’t wearing an official uniform, that was all she cared about. The water still ran pink in the sink though, that and the fact that there were only one entrance and exit to the bathroom, concerned her. A perfect trap. But she had no choice. She was headed back toward the ferry. Someone would notice the blood on her hands as she walked through the congested city.
The woman didn’t seem to notice the pinkish water. Instead, she averted her eyes from Dane altogether, a common trait of Seattleites, and went into the nearest empty stall, and closed the door as if Dane wasn’t even there.
Dane stopped the water, skipped the air-dry fan and pushed open the door with her forearm. The fewer people that saw her and recognized her the better which wasn’t going to be easy to do with the current state of Seattle. She got about ten feet away when suddenly an explosion rocked the ground. For a split second, she thought she’d been hit from behind perhaps, but it wasn’t her. There was no one chasing her down for the murder she just committed. The actual ground she stood on reverberated. She stood again, her hands out, with cation and then turned just as the woman in the restroom darted out the door and ran away the other way.
That’s when Dane looked up behind the restroom building and saw the explosion cloud billowing up behind the peaked rooftop. “Shit.” She ran in the opposite direction. The direction that would lead her to the ferry dock. The one that would bring her back to Bainbridge Island and the hell out of there. But it was too late. It happened again. And then right after that, it happened again…
29
Matthew
In the haste of getting his crew and equipment aboard a plane that would take them there, Matthew heard an exchange that concerned him, but he wasn’t sure why…until later.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Lee asked.
Dustin replied, “I thought I was supposed to go with you guys.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Lee said.
Then a scuffling sound and then Owen said, “Oh yes. That’s right. You are coming with us. I’m not leaving you here on your own. God knows what we’d come back to.”
“Matt…I have a problem with this. He’ll get one of us killed,” Lee said.
Matthew’s back was turned against the exchange as he read the latest reports coming in. Phrases like, multiple explosions, mass casualties, terrorists, like Chicago, flashed before him. “He comes with us,” Matthew said, “Owen, take care of him.”
“I intend to,” Owen said and a few hurried moments later, they were already in the sky and on their way to the glow in the sky only a state away.
The trip would take a little more than an hour but the ride there was tense. Those that were there in Chicago with them hadn’t forgotten yet about Tuck’s death, nor Cal’s for that matter. And even through the darkness, their eyes occasionally met, and Matthew knew they were remembering, just as he remembered pulling Dane away from that inferno’s edge.
Dane, Matthew thought. She’s there again in the center of it all as if she were a magnet and trouble followed her wherever she went. Yet he knew, it wasn’t that really. The whole world was a mess and somehow messes just seemed as if they were your special friend. The kind you wanted to draw up a restraining order for. The damn things just wouldn’t go away.
The light on his phone drove away the darkness suddenly. When Matthew looked down the words the three words, he longed to hear from her finally came. The screen read, I need you, highlighted in a little green box. Dane’s plea meant a lot. Those three words she’d never say, were there for a reason.
He texted back, “I’m on my way.”
Afterword
This continuation of Remember the Ruin is something between a novella and a novel. Though there will be a third addition to the Remember the Ruin series, I feel I’ve left my fans wanting a little more.
For that reason, I’m inviting you to download a free book. The first book in the Dawn of Deception series, Unbound. Just click on the link below.
Acknowledgments
No work of fiction is completed entirely on its own. Of course it seems silly to thank the internet for the many golden nuggets of information I’ve used to expound on Dane’s journey but there are also many people that I’ve contacted to ask random questions. Michael Havelka is one of those people. He’s a chemist professionaly and when he picks up the phone and I say, “I need an explosion that will ignite even a waterlogged forest in the middle of a monsoon.”
“Napalm,” he says.
There’s never a hello, how are you or any other introduction. He’s just one of those people that expects random questions from me. Or, “I need a weapon in a police state.”
“String wire,” he says without a pause.
The guys a genius.
