Chapter 28 - The Blood on the Concrete
The blast wave ripped the world apart in a blinding flash of white heat and thunderous concussive force.
The reinforced concrete housing disintegrated into flying boulders. Claire felt the air violently sucked from her lungs as the shockwave slammed Ethan’s heavy body down onto hers. The heat singed her hair; the deafening roar ruptured her eardrums, leaving a high-pitched, metallic ringing in its wake.
For several seconds, everything moved in agonizing slow motion.
Choking black smoke rolled over the roof, smelling of sulfur and pulverized stone. Claire coughed violently, pushing through the debris and dust.
"Ethan..." she gasped, wiping blood from her eyes.
Ethan lay sprawled across her, unmoving.
"Ethan!"
She shoved the heavy concrete fragments off his back and rolled him over. Her heart plummeted into a freezing abyss. A massive piece of jagged shrapnel had penetrated the seam of his tactical vest, piercing deep into his right side beneath his ribs. Dark, arterial blood was already pooling rapidly across his combat uniform, steaming in the freezing rain.
"Claire..." Ethan whispered, his face turning an alarming shade of gray, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips. "System... critical..."
"Shut up, don't talk! Marcus, I need an immediate medevac on the roof! Ethan is hit! I repeat, Ethan is hit!" Claire screamed into her comms, frantically ripping open her medical pouch, tearing into a pack of combat gauze and hemostatic dressing.
She shoved the gauze directly into the wound, applying maximum pressure with both palms. Ethan groaned, his teeth grinding together so hard they cracked, his hands weakly gripping Claire’s forearms.
Margaret, miraculously untouched by the blast because Ethan’s body had absorbed the brunt of the shrapnel, sat up from the rubble. She looked at her dying son. For the first time, the icy, sociopathic mask of the corporate titan cracked completely. Her hands began to shake not with fear for herself, but with the sudden, crushing horror of what she had wrought.
"Ethan..." Margaret whispered, crawling forward on her knees. "No... no, no, no... Ethan, look at me..."
"Don't you dare touch him!" Claire snarled, her voice a terrifying animalistic roar that made Margaret recoil in pure dread. "You did this to him! You put him in this dirt!"
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Above them, the hostile Little Bird gunship banked sharply, turning back for a second strafing run to finish the job. Its miniguns began to spool up with an ominous, rising whine.
Claire looked up at the descending reaper. Her rifle was empty. Ethan was bleeding to death under her hands. There was nowhere to run.
