Page 98 of Marcus

Was the gurney still moving?

It felt like it.

Strange how nothing more than inhaling smoke could lay somebody out.

Damn.

“What?” Chris asked.

Marcus’s gazed darted to the paramedics wheeling him toward what he suspected was the emergency room of the hospital, and his brother seemed to understand. Chris leaned down, still walking just as fast as they moved.

“Tell me, Marcus.”

“The enforcer,” he croaked out, “at the tribute. He’s the only one who heard us talking about this weekend, Chris. He’s the only one that knew I’d be at the eastern farm.”

“Marcus—”

“Pull him in. Get the fucking info.”

The next thing Marcus saw was the ceiling of the hospital.

The thing about trauma?

It never goes away.

A permanent scar on one’s soul and psyche, it stayed dormant until a trigger came along to make it flare back to life.

Muscle memory, some called it. Like a person’s body and mind just remembered what it felt like in the moment when they experienced their worst trauma, and instinct took over. It became impossible to act rationally or really comprehend what was going on when every single part of someone was screaming to survive.

Just fucking survive.

Cella barely remembered anything after Marcus went back inside the building. Just flashes of moments that led her to sit in the hospital’s emergency waiting room with her sleeping daughter tucked into her lap.

The sirens.

Smoke.

Paramedics checking her.

Someone asking Tiffany’s name.

Other details were foggier like the police that quickly came on the scene after the firefighters arrived to battle what had turned into a very dangerous blaze in only minutes. The paramedics who took her to the hospital, assuring her that she and Tiffany were fine and suffered very little smoke inhalation.

Right.

Yeah, she remembered all those details.

But not how she responded.

Not what her child said.

Just the flashes.

The moments.

So, as she sat in the hard, plastic chair of the emergency waiting room, all Cella could do was become lost in the rushing tidal waves of her past trauma. Memories thick with fear that tasted the exact same as what she felt like right now. Brief, short snapshots of a time that she hadn’t thought about in a long time because that’s also what trauma did to someone.

It made them forget.