Isolated

Chapter 40

Chapter 40

The world stood still. No voices, no movements, just the shock that was heavily slammed onto our brains.  My eyes were dazed and dead like the body I stared at yards away.  It broke my heart in a whole new way.

The innocent and now deceased man was splayed on his back.  Even yards away, the sun demanded we see the damage.  Blood flowed from his still chest and slowly expanded over his uniform to the cement.  His limbs carelessly laid around his lifeless body. The body of a man who had feelings, family, memories, and a lot of life left. Life that was taken away from him for absolutely no reason.

Absolutely no fucking reason.

"What the fuck was that?!" Luke shouted through his uneven and panicked voice.  The heartbroken tone he forced through his mouth grew thick.  "WHAT THE FUCK?!" he screamed.

It finally snapped my eyes back to life.  His face was a broken mess of sadness, panic, and rage.  Teeth bared and clenched, Luke stormed up to Carter a few feet in front of me. Gripping his shirt, he whipped Carter's body towards him and slapped the gun out of his hand.  Distress lined Carter's dipped eyebrows and blue eyes. It disappeared the second Luke punched him across the face.

The blow wanted to send him stumbling back towards the car, but Luke's shaking grip on his shirt didn't allow it.  "What was that? Why? Why?!" he yelled and begged.  Luke used his weight and winding fist to nail him in the face harder.  "You son of a bitch! Why?!" he shakily shouted.

"I-I needed to! I fucking had to!" Carter shoulder back with as much panic and anger.

"You had to?!" my scratchy voice released.  I was shaking, hating what this piece of shit did.  "You did not! You did not need to do that!"  The gun that skidded a few feet away from me started to look nice in Carter's near future.  I mean Jesus Christ, why did this need to happen? I didn't!

Luke spit in Carter's face before roughly pushing him away.  Stepping backwards towards the middle of the road, Luke shut his eyes tightly, shaking his head.  "God, no," he whispered. His head and opening eyes tilted towards the officer.  I could hear Luke's hard breathing.

My heart taunted the back of my throat. I wanted to sink down into the cement and take the dead man's place.  I'm sure I did worse things in my life than that officer did.  Why couldn't it have been me?

"Did you not hear who he was looking for?" Carter shouted around at us after composing himself.  Rubbing the side of what would soon be a bruised cheek, his eyes were sharp and full of fire.  "This needed to happen!  What other option was there?"

The sadness and guilt in my mind already worked out the other options that wouldn't have resulted in this.  Marching up to him, I hissed into his swelling face.  "We could have held up the gun to him.  We could have floored it away. We could have even taken him.  Anything but kill him!"

"Imagine what the consequences would be if we left him alive!" he shouted.

"What consequences?! What would be the worst thing if he lived?" I demanded.

"We need to go," Jackson said, drawing my eyes to the man I forgot existed. Jaw clenching with tension caressing his body, he met our eyes.  "We need to go, right now before any other cars pass by," he said, swiftly moving to the driver's door. 

I could only stare as Jackson seated himself in the driver's seat and slammed the door closed.  Carter followed and moved to the front passenger seat, shaking his head with panic all over his face. As for Luke and I... how could we? How could we just get in the car and go?

Glancing over to Luke, his strained eyes moved between the dead officer, me, and the car.  "We can't just leave," he said, eyes pausing on Jackson through the open driver's window.