Flashback by Justine Davis (classic reads .txt) 📕

She heard a sound. A groan?

She blinked, rubbed at her eyes, blinked again, and at last was able to see something. A shape, dark, still. It took everything left in her to hang on to some semblance of discipline and keep acting dispassionately.

She flattened herself on the ground and began to scramble under the smoking bus, propelling herself forward with knees and elbows. She was vaguely aware of jabs and stings as she made her way over debris. Didn’t care.

And then she was there, touching him.

He groaned.

Adrenaline spurted through her. She moved swiftly then, running her hands over him, searching for injuries. She found no blood, no obvious broken bones. Ordinarily she would have waited for medical help, but the smoke was getting worse and she had to get him out of there before the fire hit the huge fuel tank.

She wasn’t sure how she did it. She only knew it was Justin and it had to be done, so she did it. There was no room to maneuver, but she did it. There was no way to get leverage, but she did it. And the moment when, out in the sunlight again, he opened those turquoise eyes and looked up at her was like a full, deep breath of cool, clean air.

“Ouch,” he said.

Alex couldn’t help herself; she laughed. She knew she sounded giddy. She probably was, she admitted to herself. Giddy with relief that he was alive. Smokey, a bit grimy, maybe hurt, but alive.

He moved as if to get up. She gently pushed him back. “Take it easy.” As she said it she realized she was hearing the sirens. “Medics are on the way.”

“I’m okay. Just a little woozy and a bit singed.”

“We’ll let them decide if you’re okay,” she said.

“In command mode, are we?” he said, but he smiled when he said it and stayed put.

She put out a hand to touch a bloody spot on his head, but drew her hand back when she realized how grimy it was.

“Anyone killed?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Hurt?”

“Some,” she said. “I don’t know how many or how bad. But it could have been worse, if the bomb had been in a different place, closer to the fuel tank.”

“It wasn’t a bomb.”

Alex blinked. “What?”

She heard the shouting and scrambling as the fire department arrived and went into action, but she didn’t look. She focused on what Justin was saying.

“It wasn’t a bomb. If it had been, I’d likely be dead. It was something fired.”

Alex’s eyes widened. “Fired? You mean like a rocket or something?”

“Yeah. An RPG, maybe. I heard the whistle right before it hit. I can’t be sure where it came from. Sound was kind of muffled from under there.”

Alex instinctively looked around, searching for any sign that a sniper might still be around. When she saw no suspicious movement, she began to look for anywhere a sniper with that kind of equipment might have hidden. The area around the scene was fairly open and lacking in cover except for the buildings of the club and the four-story office across the street.

And then the paramedics were there, hustling her out of the way as the firefighters tackled the bus and they began a triage of the injured. She went, knowing Justin was in better hands than hers for medical assessment.

She went to the other side of the still-smoking bus, knowing that the barrage of water and foam would quickly obliterate any evidence. Immediately she saw that Justin had been right. The gaping wound in the side of the bus was marked with an inward, not outward curve of bent, twisted and blackened metal.

Had they been wrong about this? she wondered. Were they dealing with the disgruntled general, or some other military type? Had someone there truly been so violently opposed to Athena back in the beginning that they would take out one of their most loyal supporters?

No time now, she reminded herself, and continued to study the damage.

The hole not only went inward instead of out, it was also, she noted, near the front. Thankfully the farthest it could have been from the fuel tank and still hit the vehicle. She also saw that her quick assessment had been accurate; if the driver hadn’t gotten out to look at the tire damage, there was no doubt he would be dead, incinerated in the blast that had apparently been somewhat confined by the cockpit design of the driver’s compartment.

It occurred to her then that this bore the same hallmark as the previous attacks: all the tools but lousy execution.

She hadn’t really had time to think until now, hadn’t had time to think about the possibilities—and probabilities—of this particular incident.

At first it had seemed like a simple vehicle breakdown. It had quickly become clear it was tampering, even sabotage, with the tire damage. She had no doubt now, when she looked at the object lying in the roadway in the bus’s path, that it had been put there exactly for the purpose of stopping the vehicle.

The explosion had instantly taken it to another level altogether, she realized. And a second later she told herself not to assume that everything that happened everywhere around her was related to what she was working on.

And then she’d been too busy, too consumed with the rescue effort and worry about Justin to think about anything besides what she had to do.

She supposed there were other possibilities: foreign terrorism for one, in the forefront of everyone’s mind and being discussed among the shocked survivors.

Or some kind of domestic terrorism, in resentful protest against the country club for the kind of success it stood for.

But she knew it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t any of those other possibilities. Deep in her gut she knew that grenade had had one purpose: to stop this investigation. She guessed it was just bad luck for the hunter that while the first vehicle to run over their carefully planted spike strip had indeed converted