Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
But the little crying whimper sounded again for a second time, and I gasped.
The woman’s hoodie wasn’t a hoodie at all, but one of those wrap things.
And the woman had the baby strapped to her chest.
The baby was most definitely alive, however, and I slowly untied it from the woman, almost terrified of what I’d find.
“Oh, aren’t you precious,” I breathed when I saw the little one.
He couldn’t be more than ten days old, max.
He was tiny.
Tiny, tiny.
No wonder the woman had him strapped to her.
I cursed anything and everything as I took the baby out and placed her on his dead mother’s chest for a short moment as I unwrapped the wrap from her body.
My hands hit something hard when I did, and I gasped when I saw the bottle tucked in the wrap where the baby had once been.
A full bottle.
Thank god.
I carefully removed the wrap from the dead woman, then did the unthinkable, and I checked her pockets.
I didn’t find a phone, but I did find a small iPad that had somehow stayed with her despite the devastation around her.
After wrapping up the baby in the wrap, stuffing the bottle and the iPad in with him, I looked over at Finnian on the other side and said, “You’re going to have to do all the work. This baby is too small to get wet, or he’ll get really cold really fast.”
He nodded. “I won’t let you go.”
And he didn’t.
With the baby held up high over my head, he pulled me back to him.
I did no work at all, and Finnian looked like he could do this all day, every day.
When my feet reached the shore, he moved to take the child from my arms and said, “Holy fuck. He’s fresh.”
“Very,” I said. “There’s a single bottle, and an iPad.”
His eyes lit up. “An iPad?”
“An iPad,” I confirmed. “You want to wrap that around you so you can carry the baby?”
“You…” He paused. “You’re too wet. Are you cold?”
I was freezing.
Absolutely freezing.
Yet, I didn’t tell him that.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “But you’re nice and dryish. So looks like you’re up.”
He looked at the baby, then grimaced.
I wondered about that for a short second, but then he was handing the baby over to me and wrapping the wrap around his body.
Expertly, might I add.
He didn’t hesitate even a little bit on getting the wrap into place.
He’d done this before.
I wouldn’t have had a clue how to get that wrap on if I hadn’t literally just unattached it from the baby’s mother.
“You have kids?” I asked curiously.
He looked up, and I saw the devastation in his eyes.
“Not anymore.”
Fuck.
That was an awful thing to hear.
I wanted to ask a thousand questions, yet I forced myself to ask none of them.
“I’m sorry,” I replied softly.
I chose to allow him to have his privacy and shut my mouth.
He reached for the baby when he was done and got him situated, the baby’s black onesie with, ironically, blue airplanes standing out starkly against Finnian’s mostly white shirt.
“How’s your leg?” I asked to distract him from the utter devastation of the baby strapped to his chest.
Because he looked worse now while holding that baby than he did when I’d ripped that sliver of wood out of his leg.
“It’s fine,” he said. “A minor nuisance, nothing more.”
I forced my gaze away from him and said, “I keep thinking that the sky will start to look a little better, but it’s just getting worse.”
It was a putrid green now with black interspersed in between. The clouds looked angry and intense, and if I’d had to guess what an imminent tornado sky looked like, it would definitely be what I was seeing now.
“What now?” I asked as we once again started walking.
“We hurry,” he murmured.
I agreed.
The walk back the way we came took a lot less time.
We passed the shed and kept going.
“This shed would normally indicate that there’s a house nearby.”
He grunted and looked to his left, jerking his chin. “All that exposed plumbing?”
I was scared to look, but I forced myself to. “Yeah?”
“That probably used to be a house.”
Now that he mentioned it, there was a lot of space with no trees everywhere. It looked fairly manicured, too.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Yeah.”
He took my hand, and that was when I felt the rope still attached to him. “I should take this off.”
He looked at me then and shook his head. “Leave it. Just in case. We’ll tie ourselves together if we need to.”
I hated that he made sense.
I hated even more that we would even need to consider being tied together.
We walked for a long few minutes, and just when I was just about to give up hope that we’d ever see anything, I pointed ahead. “Look.”
The wind picked up even more, and a tree branch fell into the river with a loud crash a few feet behind us.