Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 71625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
“What are we doing?” he asked, walking like a penguin to try to keep the flippers on.
“Mom?”
I looked up to see Conleigh standing in the doorway of the room she was sharing with Cody for the night.
“Yeah?” I asked, still somewhat upset with her.
I say somewhat because I’d had a lot of time to think over the past several hours, and I was no longer as mad as I was when I’d first found her missing.
“There was a loud crash outside the window…did you hear it?”
I shook my head, then gestured with my hand. “Come in here. We’ll take care of this heathen, then we’ll investigate.”
Conleigh followed, her steps mirroring mine as we waited for Cody to shuffle across the carpet toward Steel’s spare bedroom where he kept all of his extra crap.
He also had a gun safe in there the size of a small Texas town, a spare bed, a freakin’ motorcycle, and a toolbox that was nearly the same size as the gun safe.
To say the room was cluttered was an understatement.
I’d just bent down to help Cody get his flipper off when something akin to glass breaking followed by a whooshing sound caused me to jerk upright.
“What was that?”
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
More glass breaking.
“What the fuck?” I breathed.
I walked to the door and looked down the hallway into the house beyond it.
Steel’s place was a lot like mine. It wasn’t an open floor plan at all, but a bunch of defined rooms. So, it took me a little bit to realize that there was smoke in the air.
“Shit.”
Another glass window broke, and I saw a bottle fly through the room.
It smashed against the wall opposite the window with a crash and that was when I saw the fire engulf the entire wall.
“Oh my God.”
I pulled out my phone and dialed 911 as I moved back into the room, slamming the door and locking it.
“Conleigh! Get that comforter off the bed and shove it against the crack at the bottom of the door.”
Conleigh started to move almost before I’d even finished instructing her.
Just as I was about to tell Cody what to do, the dispatcher picked up.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“My name is Winnie, and I’m at Chief of Police Steel Cross’s house. There are…there are glass bottles with something flammable in them crashing through the windows. And the rags stuffed into the bottles are lit on fire so they ignite whatever’s in the bottle as soon as the glass breaks. A man—I didn’t see him, but he yelled something—was throwing them.”
I couldn’t remember what they were called but I knew that the dispatcher would figure out what it was.
“How many, and where are you?”
“I’m in the room at the end of the hall where his safe is located. Both of my children are with me. There are no windows in here, and the last bottle the man threw hit the wall right at the end of the hallway. There’s not another room besides the bathroom for us to go to, and that window is too small for us to get through.”
My voice sounded calm, but I was anything but.
I was literally shaking like a leaf, and the looks of fear on my babies’ faces was enough to haunt me for the rest of my days.
“Units have been dispatched. Is there something you can shove against the door to keep out the smoke?”
“I’ve already done that,” I answered the dispatcher.
“What about something wet you can wrap around your face?”
I didn’t see a damn thing. Out of all the stuff in this room, none of it appeared to be anything that I could use.
Although, there sure was plenty of stuff that was flammable.
That’s when I saw the first tendril of smoke filter through the vent in the ceiling and realized that this might not work out too well.
I looked at my babies, then took another look around the room, taking everything in. The gun safe. The motorcycle.
Steel’s scuba gear.
Then I saw the portable tanks of oxygen, and I had an idea.
Placing the phone on the bed, I walked to the safe, entered the code—grateful to have a man like Steel who thought ahead and made sure I memorized his codes—and started pulling out guns by the handful.
Chapter 20
My favorite childhood memory is not paying bills.
-Sean to Steel
Steel
“Did they get out?” I breathed.
My house was standing, but it wasn’t going to be fixed easily.
Water dripped from the ceilings and ran down the walls. Most of the windows were broken—either by whomever had thrown the Molotov fucking cocktails through my windows or by the fire department. I wasn’t sure.
I had holes in my roof, and I didn’t fucking care.
“We got Winnie out,” one firefighter, Cook, said. “She was passed out next to the gun safe in your spare bedroom…but we couldn’t find the kids. The Molotov cocktails were thrown in at the front three windows, one of which cut off the hallway from the rest of the house. It went up fast. Her call into dispatch said they were in that room. But she did make mention of a window in the bathroom. Our first thought was that they were able to get out there, but the glass is broken. No signs of anybody making it out of there. Winnie was bussed to the hospital about three minutes before you arrived.”