The Entanglement Clause ✓

Chapter 20, part 1

"Come on, Emmie... please..." Finally, there it was. A pulse, weak but present. In the dim light, he searched her for signs of injury. It was impossible to tell for sure what damage she had sustained. And the baby... shit. What would this trauma do to it, and how would a negative turn in the baby's health potentially endanger Emmie's life?

He brushed hair back from her face and continued to stroke her forehead. "Hang on, just hang on. Help is coming. You'll be okay." Leaning his head inside the window, Ryker kissed her cheek. "I'm here. I'll stay with you." He repeated this over and over again until the sound of sirens echoed from the road above.

#

Ryker once read that when something tragic or harrowing occurred, time around that triggering event moved in a blur because the brain could only process so much. But things did not move this way for him.

He remembered everything with the clarity of an emotionally-enhanced robot. The EMT workers trickled down the cliffside like ants on their way to a picnic, gently moving him aside so they could assess the situation. He told them she still had a pulse.

"What about the driver?" The technician, a tall, middle aged man with a goatee motioned to Sam. Already another responder was breaking the glass on Sam's door to get to him.

Ryker hadn't bothered to check on him. He shrugged his shoulders. Like he gave a fuck whether Sam lived or died.

No that wasn't true. He cared. Anger burned inside of him. If Sam wasn't already dead, he would kill him himself. For Emmie's sake, he suppressed this rage. The half hour it took to extract her from the vehicle was the longest of his life. He spent it watching the tide slowly creep back in, praying they'd be able to pull her out before they had to contend with the ocean's wrath in addition to the hunk of metal she was wrapped within.

The firefighters worked efficiently and quickly, even though it felt like they were moving slower than ketchup from a glass bottle. First, they had to stabilize the vehicle so that it didn't shift while they worked on it. Next, they secured the seatbelts with vice grips, and then the Jaws of Life were hauled down over the cliff. Once they set to work, first prying open the jammed back door and eventually taking it and the front door off in one piece, the process took less than five minutes.

The sight of her exposed, still dangling unconscious, nearly brought him to his knees. He fought back tears as she was laid out on a stretcher, which they hauled up on a pully to the road above.

Ryker followed the stretcher up using ropes the responders had secured to the cliffside, but he wasn't nearly as fast as the pulley system. By the time he'd scrambled up to the top, she was already being loaded into an ambulance. A firefighter stopped him on the way to his car, handing Ryker a familiar opal pendant.

Shocked, Ryker looked at the firefighter questioningly.

"We found it when we were removing her from the vehicle. She was clutching it in her hand." He patted Ryker on his shoulder. "I know who you are, you know. My wife showed me the picture of the two of you together just the other day. Thought you'd want to have this so you can give it back to her."

Whether he said this because he believed Emmie would live or because he wanted to give Ryker a glimmer of hope, he didn't know. Either way, Ryker could have kissed the man.

"Thank you."

The firefighter nodded. "Of course. The police will want to question you at the hospital. They'll want to know if you knew the deceased..."