Emotion roiled in her, terror and anger and even embarrassment that she was falling apart like this. But she couldn’t help herself; she clung to his hands for support, looked up at him for even more reassurance. “Mr. Creed, I—”
“Call me Josh,” he said. “1 think everyone here is on a first-name basis, don’t you?’
“Josh,” she said, vaguely ashamed because she had kept him, too, at a distance. “I—you—” She stopped because she was stammering and had no clear idea of what she wanted to say. Go get him? Bring him hark safe and sound? Yes, that was what she wanted. She wanted Cal to walk in that door.
“Listen.” He squeezed her hands, then patted them. “He’s doing what he does best, which is finding out what’s going on.”
“It’s been hours—”
“People are still coming in, aren’t they? He sent them, so you know he’s okay. Roy Edward,” he called, raising his voice. The elderly Starkeys were the most recent to arrive. “When did you last see Cal?”
Roy Edward looked away from Milly Earl, who had been cleaning his face. He and Judith, his wife, were bruised and scraped from falling. They weren’t nimble on their feet; both had taken some bad tumbles, but, by some small miracle, hadn’t broken any bones. “No more’n an hour,” he replied. The old man was exhausted, his voice thready. “We were the last ones, he said. He was going to gather some things before he came back here.”
The last ones. Stunned out of her own misery, Cate looked around at those who were here, and those who weren’t. Everyone in the basement was doing the same thing, because no more neighbors would be arriving to cries of relief and welcome. Mario Contreras. Norman Box. Maery Last. Andy Chapman. Jim Beasley.
Lanora Corbett. Mouse Williams. They’d lost seven people—seven!
Silently Creed made his halting way up the stairs. Tears streaked Neenah’s face as she went with him, lending him support so he wouldn’t damage his leg more.
“We can’t let ‘em just lay there,” Roy Edward declared, something fierce entering his cracked old voice. “They’re our people. We have to do right by them.”
Again there was silence as, one by one, they realized the enormous responsibility that lay before them. Retrieving the bodies would be a daunting task, and even then, without electricity, there was no way to present” them. Still, they had to do something. The weather was warm today, which meant the need for action was extremely pressing.
“I have that generator,” Walter finally said. “We all have freezers. People, we’ll manage something.”
But Walter’s generator was on the side of the community closest to the shooters—and moving chest-type freezers around was a two-man job that would require them to be in the open.
Gena couldn’t bear up any longer, not even for Angelina’s sake. She buried her face in her hands, sobbing in great, raw sounds, her entire body heaving. Cate remembered when she, too, had cried that way, and she crossed to Gena, sat down, and put her arms around her. There were no words that would make the pain less, so she didn’t say anything. Angelina’s face crumpled and her big dark eyes began swimming with tears. “Mommy, don’t cry!” She patted Gena’s leg, both giving and searching for comfort. “Mommy!”
Cate gathered Angelina close, too. Her babies had been too young to know anything when Derek died, too young to miss him and cry for him, but Angelina wasn’t. When she understood that her daddy was gone and was never coming back, nothing in die world except time would give her solace.
“Mow do you do it?” Ciena sobbed, the words so thick with tears and choked out through sobs that Cate barely understood her. “How do you manage?”
How do you function when your entire body has been overtaken by searing emotional pain? How do you function day to day when a huge hole has been ripped in your life? How do you ever smile again, laugh again, feel joy again?
“You just do it,” Cate answered quietly. “Because you have no choice. I had my babies. You have Angelina. That’s why you have to do it.”
The door opened and Cal came in.
He’d changed clothes. He was wearing what she thought of as deer-hunting clothes: a pair of woodland-pattern camouflage cargo pants, an olive-drab T-shirt, and an unbuttoned shirt in the same woodland pattern as his pants. He also had on flexible Gore-Tex boots, a hunting knife in a scabbard on his belt, the shotgun with its sling hooked over his left shoulder, and a rifle with a big scope mounted on it in his right hand. 11 he’d been going deer hunting, though, he’d have been wearing either a cap or a hunting vest in bright orange.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. What he was wearing told her louder than words that he intended to go after the men who were shooting at them. She released Gena and stood up, galvanized by the sheer, icy terror that seized her. She wanted to scream; she wanted to tackle him and tie him up so he couldn’t go. She refused to let him do this; she couldn’t watch him walk away knowing there was a strong possibility he wouldn’t come back—
His gaze snagged hers. She saw him take in her white, strained expression. Carefully he stood both weapons in a safe place where they couldn’t be knocked over and then threaded his way across the crowded, cluttered room to her side. People spoke to him, patted him on the shoulder, and he nodded and spoke and traded greetings, but he never paused, never wavered from his course.
When he reached her, he touched her hand and said, “Are you okay?”
She felt as if she would choke if she tried to utter a word. She gave a fierce, single shake of her head.
He looked around, saw there was no privacy to be had for even a moment. “Follow me.”
Numbly she did, scarcely aware of anything around her as she trailed in his wake, seeing nothing but his back. He led her outside, into the warm sunshine, but stopped while they were still protected by the downward curve of the land. Turning to study her with his pale, steady gaze, he said. “What’s wrong?”
What was wrong? “Your clothes,” she blurted, unable to formulate a more coherent reason.
Bewildered, he looked down at himself. “My clothes?”
“You’re going after them, aren’t you?”
Understanding dawned. “We can’t just sit here,” he said quietly. “Someone has to do something.”
“But not you! Why does it have to be you?”
“I don’t know who else it would be. Look around you. Mario was the youngest man, and he’s dead. Josh could have done it, but he’s got a cracked bone in his leg. Everyone else is older and out of shape. I’m the logical choice.”
“Screw logic!” she said fiercely, grabbing his shirt with both hands. “I know I don’t have the right to say anything because we aren’t—we haven’t—” She shook her head, fighting a sudden rush of tears. “I can’t lose… not again—”
He stopped her incoherent babble by dipping his head and putting his mouth on hers.
His lips were soft, so soft. The kiss was gentle, questing. His lips moved against hers, learning and asking, and she tilted her head up to answer.
“You have the right,” he murmured, and framed her face with his hands, his fingers sliding into her hair as he took her with a series of tender, hungry kisses, as if he were eating her mouth. She gripped his forearms, digging her fingers into the hard muscles and tendons, holding on for dear life as she sagged against him.
His tongue made leisurely forays, touched and stroked and enticed as though he had all the time in the world and couldn’t think of a better way to spend it.