Nicci nodded absently as she leaned close, groping purposefully across Richard's chest. «Lucky we made it into shelter before the rain,» one of the men said. Richard wanted to hold his breath against the crushing agony radiating from the left side of his chest, but he desperately needed the breath that he couldn't seem to get. Men holding his legs and arms lifted him and then carefully set him down on the crudely hewn plank table. Without the people who had once made it home, given it life, it had the aura of a place waiting for death to settle in. The walls tilted at an odd angle as if the place were having difficulty standing, as if it might collapse at any moment. The shutters banged back as they were flung open to let some of the flat light into the musty room. Small items thunked to the ground and bounced across a dirt floor. Richard heard tin cups clatter as someone swept them aside. Richard was surprised to realize, then, that it was Nicci's voice. The whole mob around him funneled through a narrow doorway and shuffled into the darkness beyond. It felt as if he were being ripped apart. Richard hardly noticed the ashen faces watching him being carried past as he stiffened himself against the dizzying pain of the rough journey. Startled chickens squawked in fright as they scattered out of the way. If only it would hold off.Īs they raced along, the unpainted wooden walls of a small building came into view, followed by a twisting livestock fence weathered to a silver gray. That's how he felt now-alone.Īs they broke from the timber into a thinly wooded, rough field of clumped grass, Richard saw above the leafy limbs a leaden sky threatening to unleash torrents of rain. He remembered hearing it once said that when you died, no matter how many people were there with you, you died all alone. Richard observed the storm of activity swirling around him with an odd sense of detachment. Not far off, a rooster crowed into the still air, as if this were an ordinary morning like any other. They tried to be as gentle as possible, but they never dared to slow. She misunderstood and instead urged the men carrying him to hurry, even though they were already panting with the effort of bearing him over the rocky ground in the deep shade among the towering pines. He clutched the arm of the woman beside him, desperate to get them to stop, to get them to listen.
Richard struggled to put voice to his burning concern, but he couldn't form the words, couldn't get out any more than a gasping moan. It was all he could do to try to draw each crucial breath. The crushing pain in the left side of his chest and his need for air had him at the ragged edge of panic. He knew that he knew them, but right then it just didn't seem to matter. «Most of it, I'm afraid,» a second woman said as they both rushed along beside him.Īs Richard fought to focus his mind on his need to remain conscious, the breathless voices sounded to him as if they were coming from some great dim distance. «How much of this blood is his?» a woman asked.
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