Meredith opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. She would have slid to the floor, but Sheriff Farrington's arm encircled her and held her up. He seemed a cold man and his hug felt cold now, as though he were only doing his duty, nothing more.
'Kevin,' Meredith cried. 'I want Kevin. We've been together since we were sixteen. How can he be gone?'
'If it's any comfort, Meredith, he didn't suffer. We think the blast killed him, not the fire that followed.' The doctor swallowed hard. 'I signed his birth certificate so I asked if I could sign the death certificate.'
The sheriff held Meredith steady. She turned her face into his shoulder and sobbed.
Dr. Hamilton looked at Helena. 'I'm sorry, Helena. J.D. fought for life all the way into town but died before we could get him stabilized. He was a soldier to the end.'
Helena nodded but did not move. She sat like a statue at the end of the table. Not a hair out of place. Not a wrinkle to be seen on her clothing, but her heart crumbled inside.
'The other three men were almost the same height and build. All B positive. They were burned so…' The doctor stopped, not wanting to tell more.
He stared at the center of the table.
'The one still alive only has a slim chance and, if he makes it, it will take months, maybe even years, of care and therapy. He wore a plain wedding band. We had to cut it off.'
A single tear rolled down Anna's face. 'D-Davis wore no wedding band,' she whispered in a blending of English and Italian. She took Helena's hand as she joined the growing ranks of widows.
The doctor raised his fist and slowly opened his palm. 'This will tell us who's alive, I guess.'
All the women stared at the ring. A plain gold band, badly beaten and twisted, tarnished to black. It belonged to one of the Howard men, either Shelby, Crystal's husband, or his nephew, Jimmy.
Tears streamed, for the first time, down Randi's face. She choked in one deep breath. No one moved.
Anna raised her gaze to meet Randi's terrified stare, then she thought she saw Helena nod slightly to Crystal. The movement was so small no one else but Crystal seemed to notice. In the length of a heartbeat Crystal nodded back, first at Helena, then at Randi.
Meredith's wide-eyed look was unreadable as she stopped her sobbing and watched.
Crystal glanced around at each of the women, then straightened slowly. Her stare locked with Randi's, not on the ring in the doctor's hand. Understanding and sympathy passed between the two women.
Not a woman in the room breathed as Crystal slowly raised her hand and took the ring. She buried it into a white knuckled fist and closed her eyes. 'Shelby's alive,' she whispered. 'Shelby's alive.'
Randi pulled her hands off the table, covering her left hand with her right. She huddled into herself as though the room had grown suddenly cold.
Among the riggers in the early days of the Clifton Creek oil boom the question wasn't if you'd be hurt, but when. It was often said, after an accident, that fire climbed the rigs with lightning speed and no one within a hundred feet would be left untouched.
October 12
Pain materialized one inch at a time into his mind until it filled every pore, every cell of his body. He couldn't move. lie wasn't sure he was even breathing on his own. There was nothing but fire seeping into his skin where it continued to smolder, burning all the way to his bones.
The weight of the sheet pressed agonizingly against him, while a tube choked past his swollen vocal cords, holding back a scream. Fighting with a strength borrowed from the deep recesses where life struggles to survive without consciousness, he pulled at tubes clawing their way into his arms. But his fingers had been individually wrapped with fine gauze and cupped, as if to hold a can, around a soft mass. The gentle splint rendered his efforts to touch anything useless.
Figures moved around him. Shouting. Ordering. Begging him to stop resisting.
He stilled, more from a need to conserve his last bit of strength than from cooperation. He tried to open his eyes but couldn't tell if they were bandaged or swollen closed.
'Please don't move, Shelby,' a soft voice cried close to his ear. 'You'll only hurt yourself more. Skin is coming off each time you move. Please be still.'
He couldn't make sense of the madness.
'They're giving you morphine for the pain,' the woman whispered between sobs. 'It won't hurt so bad in a few minutes. Hang on, darling.'
The fight to stay conscious was lost before he could tell her no one had ever called him darling. He drifted on an ocean of turmoil so constant it became commonplace, a part of him.
'Shelby?' the soft voice came again. 'Shelby, can you hear me? They're changing the bags of saline on each arm. I know you hurt, but hang on, darling. Hang on.'
He tried to open his mouth to tell her she was wrong. Somehow there had been a mistake. He didn't want to hear, or think, or feel. A dark void finally lulled him into numbness. Her words pulled him back to the surface where the horror stayed vivid. He wanted his suffering to end.
Let me die! he tried to beg. But he could not make words form. Let me die! Please, God, let me die!
Pulling at his bindings, he fought to take flight. If he could run fast enough and hard enough, he could outdistance the pain. He was surrounded once more by shouting and movement and machines. As he fought, he realized he couldn't feel his legs.
Let me die! his mind screamed. What did it matter? He was already in hell.
The woman was there in the chaos, begging him to live. She didn't understand. If she knew his torment she would not keep asking.
The sound of her crying finally eased him back into the blackness where his mind could rest even if his body still throbbed.
When he awoke the third time, the pain was too familial to be shocking. Drugs had taken the edge off of hell, nothing snore. This time he heard the drone of machines forcing him to breathe. He cursed the technology that kept him alive.
He drifted, trying to make his lungs reject each breath. Trying to force his heart to stop pounding. People moved around him, whispering like gnats in the night air. Nobody heard him beg for death.
Someone must have understood a fraction of his suffering. He heard her near, crying once more. He no longer resided alone in fiery hell. She stayed at his side. Unwanted. Unbeckoned. Unneeded.
Time lost all meaning. He would wake and force himself to take the blast of agony before his captured screams drove him mad. Then he'd hear the voices, and the woman sobbing softly at his side.
Sometimes, she would talk to him, low and Southern. For a second, he'd remember life before the pain. Moments, frozen like photographs, but real with smells and sounds. A ball game played on fresh-mowed grass. Drinking cold beer on a hot day. He felt the chill slide all the way to his gut. Sleeping on the porch in summer, with music from the house competing with crickets outside.
He forgot about his pain and tried to move. Volts of fire sliced through him. All thoughts vanished when the drugs dulled his mind once more.
Time passed, others came and went. The light grew softer, then brighter with an electric glare. Once, in the moment between blackness and agony he was aware. He made no effort to open his eyes, but listened to the sound of rain on the windows and a conversation hovering near.
'Look at the bastard,' a man mumbled. 'He can't live much longer. That special nurse said it was a miracle he's hung on this long. She said there's a rule, age plus percentage burned equals chance of death. The old man's fifty-eight with a sixty percent burn. That equals no chance in my book.'
The male voice laughed. 'The staff wants to move him to a bum unit in Dallas, but Crystal's following Daddy's orders and keeping him here. He'd already be there if they could have gotten the helicopter from Parkland Hospital
