Chapter Twenty-Seven: Fall Hard, Fight Forever-7

The entire car shook at the contact, jolting me with such startling force that I couldn't breathe in that few seconds of chaos. My head whipped back. My chest fought the constraints of my seatbelt. All of my muscles quivered as the impact rippled through me in what seemed like eternity. As consciousness settled back in, I coughed hard, forcing some air back into my lungs and scrambling at the seat belt to get it off. The air was thick with the smell of asphalt and hot metal and fumes, burning my eyes and throat but I didn't care. As soon as I was free, I took several more deep breaths, moving what I could of my limbs to see if I was still in one piece. I felt like shit but yes, thankfully, all in one piece. Have to get out of here. A moan beside me snapped me back to heart of this hell. Lola was curled against the mangled side of the car in an awkward angle, blood oozing from a gash on her head. Even though the front and side airbags didn't deploy, I still couldn't see much from the internal wreckage but I didn't waste a second more inside. Blasts of emergency sirens hit me when I crawled out of the car and stumbled to the ground. I jumped back when a car whooshed past on the left lane, reminding me of where I was. An ambulance had pulled over just a couple car lengths behind us, paramedics filing out of it and hurrying toward me. I was hobbling to meet them, half-crying, half-mumbling incoherent words when another gunshot rented the air, freezing us in the spot. I glanced over my shoulder and saw police officers hurrying from the car that had pulled over in front of the wrecked Mercedes. They cautiously approached the heap of metal, their guns poised. Ice started to coat my bones as fragments of possibilities came together in my head. When no sound or movement came from the wreckage, one officer looked in for a few seconds before turning to his partner who had taken out a notepad. "Visual confirmation of the suspect-caucasian female, late-twenties, dark-blond hair. Gunshot wound through the right temple..." The rest of his description faded away as I staggered to my knees, my vision swimming in front of me. Lola. Dead. I lost track of the paramedics who rushed toward my aid, of the sheer terror and shock I'd just lived through, of the cold that gripped me from the inside like the hand of the dead. I only saw the rough gray surface of the road, the fine drops of blood that dripped down on it like little polka dots, and my own white-knuckled fists trembling against the weight of everything that had just happened. Then I saw nothing. *** I welcomed the numbness because it held me together on the way to the hospital. It contained the riot of emotions fighting for top spot in the crevice that had opened inside of me as aftershocks continued to rock what was already my precarious grasp on sanity. No matter how tired I was, or how my body ached at the abuse it had taken, I couldn't close my eyes. I kept seeing the innocent bystander on the ground, the ghastly pale beauty of Lola's face as she lay crumpled in the mangled corner of that car, seconds away from ending her own torment once and for all. I was only grateful that I hadn't been there to see her take the very thing she'd fought for-her life-no matter how wrong and cruel and tragic her ways had been. What a sad life. An inescapable hell that continues to exist because you do. I went through the motions of being loaded on a gurney, being poked and prodded by the medical staff and being interviewed by the police officers who'd escorted us. They even told me that the construction worker who had been shot on the shoulder was out of danger. I muttered some flat, automatic response of relief but I no longer felt it. I finally felt nothing.