From Sky to Sky by Amanda G Stevens

Author:Amanda G Stevens [Stevens, Amanda G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781643525693
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

He opened his eyes to an unknown roof, barely glimpsed through a jagged hole in the ceiling. What on earth …?

The barn.

He had fallen. Becoming a habit. Crap.

“Rachel?” His voice was hoarse, his throat dry. Hay dust had drifted into his mouth while he lay there. He coughed. “Rachel. Are you okay?”

The only sound was the wind passing through the building, under the eaves that didn’t need to be airtight and wouldn’t be by now, in a building this run-down. She might be unconscious. He tried to get up.

The attempt at motion brought sudden awareness of his body. His legs and torso didn’t rise when he told them to, but he wasn’t paralyzed; he felt the muscles gather and execute the commands of his brain, but they weighed too much. He blinked a few times, dust on his eyelashes too, and then cast his gaze down the length of himself.

Buried.

His chest began to squeeze. No, not now. No time for that. He had to push this wreckage off himself and get up. He shoved at the slabs and beams pinning his torso and left arm. His legs were trapped too. Only his head and right arm were free. He strained against the wreckage for long minutes while the behemoth prowled around him, closing in. He yelled wordlessly as if he could scare the beast into leaving him alone. But with the sound of his cry, it pounced and landed squarely on his chest, weighing more than the debris piled on him.

“No. No, no, no.”

He couldn’t walk it off. He couldn’t get outside. He couldn’t find the sky.

His voice continued in his ears, screams he could not stop. He was buried again. He was suffocating in blood and mud and corpses. He was crushed under the barn’s collapsed floor. They were both happening to him at the same time. Words filtered into his mind, words his mouth was making.

“Get me out. Don’t leave me here. Please.”

His throat was raw. He couldn’t speak anymore, but he couldn’t breathe either. His back arched in the tiny space he occupied between hard ground and debris. He tried to buck the weight off him. He tore at the unmovable beams until his right fingers bled.

When he had exhausted himself into stillness, the afternoon had come on. His lungs eased open, adrenaline so far spent the behemoth had to get up and go away.

He tried, for the first time since waking, to think. At first his mind glitched on panic the moment he directed his thoughts to his situation. He lay still and numb, drawing shallow breaths, and in time the pins and needles in his hands and arms withdrew. He tried to find any injuries. Bruises seemed to be everywhere. His left side twinged every time he drew breath, something he should have noticed before. Likely a fractured rib. A surface lick of pain crossed the outside of his left hip, sharp but probably a flesh wound. Nothing mortal as far as he could tell, but it didn’t matter.

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