The high pressure blast wave hurled the Leach brother and the coroner and the two GHP officers across the weedy grass like boneless scarecrows, dead before they hit the ground, and then a monstrous orange fireball filled the sky. White flames swallowed the Chevy in a blinding hot flash. Black smoke plumed up, then out, erasing normal daylight.
Kim closed her eyes, covered her ears and ducked her head. Smaller shock waves bounced Roscoe’s Town Car on the grassy shoulder and squeezed Kim’s breath from her chest. Pain seared as if her lungs had collapsed.
Muffled sound far away.
Kim squeezed her eyes tighter and curled as far into the foot-well as the shoulder harness would let her. Her chest hurt. She gulped shallow breaths.
Another explosion, smaller, followed quickly by a third.
Unnatural silence.
Kim waited, struggled to breathe, finally felt her lungs working again. She gulped air, hungry for it.
How much time had passed?
She opened her eyes again. Saw Roscoe still belted in her seat, conscious. OK. Kim struggled upright in her own seat. Took her hands off her ears.
There were fires outside the Town Car. There were muffled noises. There were pieces, chunks, slabs of things scattered everywhere. There were burning vehicles. There was smoke too thick to see through.
The Chevy was still burning.
Kim’s brain was processing data like slow-falling dominoes, one thing leading to the next. Both tow trucks were covered in flames. Tow trucks usually carried extra gasoline. Hence the second and third explosions? Two GHP cruisers also burning. One rested on its roof, the other in the ditch, lying on its side. Thrown there by the initial pressure wave?
Several uniformed personnel were down, injured, but likely alive. Gawkers might be hurt, too, inside vehicles closer to the Chevy than Roscoe’s Town Car.
On site rescue workers mobbed the scene. Firefighters rushed to put out the flames. Helicopter blades fought to disperse the blackness. The noise must have been outrageous, but everything remained muted by the Town Car’s body and the cotton that filled Kim’s head.
Behind the wheel, Roscoe seemed dazed, too, but conscious and not bleeding.
“Gaspar?” Kim asked. But how loud was her voice? She couldn’t tell. And she heard no answer. “ Gaspar?” she called, louder. No response.
She unhooked her seatbelt. She took stock of her body, which seemed to be unhurt and functioning. She turned in her seat but couldn’t see him over the high seatback.
“Gaspar?” she said again. She raised up as far as she could without kneeling, craned her neck and looked down into the deep foot well.
She saw him, face down, prone.
She remembered he’d been lying on the bench seat, not wearing his seatbelt. Had he been thrown to the floor when the car bounced? Was he hurt?
Kim scrambled out of the sedan and pulled open the back door.
“Are you OK?” she screamed, reaching in to him.
He didn’t scream back. Instead, he nodded, lifted himself onto his hands and knees, and crawled backward out of the floor well onto the grassy red ground. He leaned against the door to steady himself upright. Kim thought he looked unharmed. But percussion injuries could manifest hours or days later, hard to detect and potentially devastating. They patted themselves down, checked for broken bones, or blood. Found none.
Kim and Gaspar moved away from the vehicle. Roscoe stared forward, pale, rigid, horrified. Kim understood. The dead, the injured, were Roscoe’s friends and colleagues. She could have been among them. All three of them could have been standing at the Chevy when it exploded, had Roscoe not stopped back there on the county road.
And then the shaking started. Kim felt it, but was powerless to stop it.
Gaspar wrapped his arms around her, holding her close to his body.
“What is it? Are you hurt?” he yelled, patting her down, looking for anything, everything.
Kim shook her head and mouthed without sound, “No, I’m fine.”
Then she thought: Gaspar might have opened the Chevy’s door this morning when he first found the body. And her shaking intensified. Her teeth chattered. She couldn’t stop.
But she had to stop.
She had to help those people. She knew combat first aid. They all did. She was fine. She wasn’t hurt. She had to go help.
She pushed Gaspar away and walked three steps on spaghetti legs toward the carnage. Gaspar grabbed her arm, pulled her around to face him.
“They’ve got enough help,” he said. “There’s more coming. Better that we stay out of the way.”
Kim heard him as if he was at the end of a very long tunnel. She looked ahead at the scene. Medical personnel, first responders, firefighters, sirens, helicopters. She shook Gaspar’s hand away, put one foot in front of the other, determination as wobbly as her steps, but she kept on going. Her next thought was foolish nonsense. She said, “No way to keep the media away now, Roscoe. No way in hell.”
She smiled. How silly was that? She giggled. She covered her mouth with her hand, pressed hard until only stifled silence remained.
Hysteria was the last thing anyone needed.