Their Child?. Karen Rose Smith

spun like a plate, and flew out the hole where the ballroom doors had been.

      Lori screamed.

      He urged her onward. “Go, move, we can make it.”

      She surged valiantly forward, her dress plastered hard to her legs, slowing her progress—until she grabbed it and hiked it up around her waist. The dress flapped back, wrapping around him, holding on tight like a clutching, desperate living thing.

      From overhead, above the ceiling, on the second floor, there was an earsplitting ripping sound. One part of Tucker’s mind placed the noise: the roof must have blown off.

      Tucker kept his focus, kept pushing Lori from behind, every inch toward that cellar door a triumph, a victory over the monster that roared and clattered and beat at them and threatened to tear them apart.

      They made it to the door and she was just about to duck into the stairwell, when the walls started going. Within the roaring rose a groaning and a horrible, screaming, creaking sound.

      Tucker staggered on the shifting floor.

      Lori cried his name, “Tucker!” and turned, reaching back to grab for him. Before he could tell her to go on, to go forward, to get down the damn stairs, a white stoneware mixing bowl materialized out of the spinning chaos, flying straight at her. It struck her at the temple, breaking neatly in half, the pieces pausing in midair and then blowing off in opposite directions. Blood bloomed at her forehead, welled, spattered everywhere.

      The walls were falling in on them. Platters and frying pans whizzed by them—and Lori wore the strangest, most tender, sad look.

      “Sorry…” She formed the word, without sound, as the blood ran into her mouth, sprayed her pink dress and the front of his suit. “So sorry. Ruined everything…” Her eyes drooped shut beneath the curtain of blood. She fell toward him and he caught her.

      Her limp body anchored him.

      He was able to take that one more step, to gather her to him, lift her high against his chest, and surge for the stairs. He went down as the ceiling gave way and came crashing to the floor.

       Chapter Eight

      In the shadowed candle and lantern-lit recesses beneath the clubhouse, a deep hush descended.

      From above, there was silence. Terrible. Total.

      The monster had moved on.

      Tucker sat on the bench that a few kind souls had vacated for him when he came down the stairs with Lori limp in his arms.

      She lay stretched out beside him, too pale and very still. Her bright head, matted with blood, rested in his lap. Someone had handed him a clean white bar towel. He pressed it to the wound on her temple, watching it slowly soak crimson, the dark stain spreading, absorbing the white.

      He told himself the flow was slowing. But he really wasn’t sure that was true.

      Brody stood beside the bench holding Lori’s limp hand. His young face was set, his mouth a bleak line. Lori’s mother and father and Lena, Dirk at her side, hovered a few feet away, all of them silent as the quiet from above.

      Someone nearby spoke into the hush. “It’s over…”

      And then, from aboveground, came a slow, painful creaking sound. Something fell with a shuddering crash.

      “Oh, sweet Lord,” a woman cried.

      “What was that?” a man demanded.

      No one answered him. Who the hell could say?

      Tate pulled a cell phone from his inside jacket pocket. He flipped it open and gave it a try. “No go,” he said. “That big boy must have knocked out a tower or two.” Tate turned to the club manager. “You got a land line down here?”

      Near the wall, where water had begun to trickle down from broken pipes above, one of the bridesmaids spoke up. “There’s one right here.” She took the receiver off the hook and put it to her ear. Then she shook her head. “Dead.”

      All around them, people were trying their cells—and getting nothing.

      Tate said, “Okay. Let’s check out our chances of digging out of here.”

      He chose a couple of able-bodied men to go with him up the stairs. The club’s manager and two of the wait staff went the opposite direction, headed for the outside entrance, an in-ground steel door, mounted in concrete, reached by an underground corridor that ran out about ten yards from the clubhouse.

      Tucker left them to it. Right then, all he cared about was the unmoving, blood-spattered woman in his arms. No way would he leave her side. He stared down at her still face and a word burst like a bright light into his stunned mind: doctor.

      Damn. What was wrong with him? A doctor should have been the first thing he asked for once they made it down those stairs. He glanced up. “Doc Flannigan. Where’s Doc Flannigan?”

      Lori’s dad, shell-shocked as the rest of them, visibly shook himself. “The doc. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” Heck raised his voice to his best booming roar. “Doc! We need Doc Flannigan over here, now!”

      The word went out through the cellar’s warren of rooms.

      “Doc Flannigan.”

      “Anybody seen Dr. Flannigan?”

      “Doc Flannigan. They need him up front.”

      A couple of minutes later, the tall, white-haired gent eased his way through the crowd. When he reached the bench, his silver brows drew together. “Oh, my.” He handed his jacket to Brody. “I wonder, could you hold on to this for me, young man—and move back over there just a little?”

      With obvious reluctance, Brody laid his mother’s hand gently on her stomach, took the jacket and stepped back. Tucker watched him, thinking what a terrific kid he was. Ten years old and holding it together with a building collapsed on top of them and his mother out cold and covered in blood.

      “Thank you.” The doctor sent the boy an encouraging smile as he rolled up his sleeves. He turned to Tucker. “Is she breathing normally?”

      “Yeah, as far as I can see.”

      The doc said, patiently, “Son, with her head in your lap like that, there is some restriction of the airways…”

      Calling himself ten kinds of thoughtless idiot, Tucker carefully eased out from under her, guiding her head to the bench with a cautious hand, keeping steady, gentle pressure on the wound the whole time.

      The doctor moved closer. “Any other injuries—beyond this nasty head wound?”

      Tucker said, “I don’t think so. But stuff was flying all over up there. She might have a bruise or a cut or two.”

      “Nothing major, though—other than that gash on her head?”

      Tucker frowned. “It was wild up there. I can’t say for sure…”

      “Let’s have a look, why don’t we?” The doctor glanced over his shoulder. “Bring that lantern close. Someone get me some clean towels, please. And something to cover her.”

      The man with the lantern stepped up and held it high. Two women moved off—presumably in search of the towels and a blanket.

      Dr. Flannigan examined the angry, swelling gash. Yes, Tucker thought with a grim surge of triumph, the flow of blood really had slowed. Flannigan gently poked and prodded. He checked Lori’s pulse and lifted her eyelids, one and then the other.

      About then, Tate and the men returned from the stairs.

      “That exit’s blocked solid,” Tate said, scowling. “We’ll have a hell of a time digging out that way…”

      Molly, who’d been hanging back near