Coming Home

Tobias smelt burning rubber, his head throbbing from where it had hit the ground. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what the hell just happened. All he knew was that people were hurt, and this wasn’t an accident.

Earlier that day:

“No matter what the results are-“

“Not that line, please,” Derrick muttered into his phone as he arranged his tie as he left his bathroom. He heard her laugh across the phone, her sound muffled as the wind blew harshly against her.

“I’m sorry I can’t be there. I’ll be watching the news with the others at the office,” Cassadee said and he could hear her smiling across the phone. It seemed like the whole world was confident that the NDP would win again, but Derrick wasn’t so sure. He had been working too hard, and had been worked up over every single minute detail to be fully confident.

“Relax,” she said.

“I’ll call you back soon, or maybe not. I gotta go, Caleb’s calling me now.”

“Got it, love you.”

“Same here.”

He heard her click her phone, and the line went dead as Caleb’s face filled his phone screen and Derrick picked up his call before locking his house up and entering into the car that was waiting for him outside his house.

“Good luck,” Caleb said as Derrick gave a silent nod to the driver. The car started moving as Derrick thanked Caleb for his well-wishes.

“Yeah, I’m meeting Tobias there.”

“Okay cool, I’ll be watching the live telecast.”

“Are you kidding? That thing’s going to run for hours.”

“You’re right. I’ll probably just tune in at 9pm.”

“Good on you.”

Derrick smiled into the phone, grateful that he had managed to fix his relationship with Caleb. He felt the car turn right, and looking out the window he saw people walking out of voting stations holding pamphlets and brochures.

There was serendipity filling him as Derrick knew he had tried his best, and he had shown the public what he had wanted most. Even if it didn’t align with what his father wanted, Derrick was happy that he had managed to make most of the situation.

As the car manoeuvred into the polling stations, the empty streets suddenly transitioned into police cars and throngs of eager people, stationary in their excitement. Derrick felt the driver speed up a little, just to make it across the green light just as it started flashing orange.

“Slow down, I don’t want to-“

Derrick saw a car coming into his side, and he thought, for one second that it would break. That he would stop right in front of the polling station, unharmed and everything would go smoothly, for once in his life.

Then it happened.

The impact sent Derrick flying into his side, palms cutting into the ruined metal as heat blasted onto his face.

It all happened so fast. The car was spinning, there was smoke. Derrick heard screaming, and his heart sank.

Aside from the burning pain which crept up his legs, Derrick was aware of numerous nerves fraying. He felt himself literally come apart as the car careened into a path of destruction.

When he felt the ceiling of his car come downwards, crushing his chest even further, Derrick knew he was done. He was so sorry, he didn’t want this to happen to her again. If only he could have gotten to the door.

But Derrick could smell the gasoline, leaking everywhere. And he knew that if he could smell, he wasn’t dead yet. Everything was so loud and so painful, as it was dark and obsolete. His mind churned painfully against his body’s crying need for relief, he needed an escape from the wreckage.

Somewhere in his mind, he wondered if the NDP had won.

Somewhere in his mind, he wondered if Tobias, who was supposed to be waiting, had seen what happened.

He wondered if Casadee was watching, and his heart, beating weakly, managed to falter ever so slightly.

As he reached for the jammed door handle, feeling glass, leather and liquid- Derrick wondered if this was planned. He hoped there would be witnesses, and he hoped the driver was alright.

There was stabbing pain, echoing his name as darts of pain ricocheted through his body as he tried to wiggle his fingers against the sunlight that he thought he was looking at. It was like the pain that had haunted him, had accumulated and hit him in full force.

Derrick hated that he was such a coward to think this way. But he hoped that if death awaited him, it would just take him into its obviating darkness and leave his body a broken vessel for pain to corrupt.

He wondered if everyone was a coward as they died.

*

Tobias pressed his bloody knuckles against his teeth. It was the only way he could control the hammering of his heart, and the silence of his mind.

He thought he would have lived through life to not see a dead body. And he had seen 3.

They told the public that there wasn’t any confirmed deaths, but to Tobias, they certainly looked pretty dead. None of them were breathing, and there was so much blood. He regretted ever taking up this job. It would have never ended well.

“Sir, are you alright?”

“Sir, I need you to get up from the ground.”

He did as he was told, aware of the still burning cars, and the blood on the ground. Smoke was smouldering from the wreckage, and Tobias looked at the blackened soot filtering through the air and felt sick.

“Sir, who are you?”

He vaguely heard someone utter his name to the paramedic. A sigh, an assured voice telling him that everyone would live.

No way. He had seen a face so battered and cut up that he wasn’t even sure if they would fix him up if they were going to bury his dead body. Make-up could only fix that much, but it would never fix a broken face- almost ripped in half.

The images came quick and fast.

“Sir, please, speak.”

Tobias looked at the paramedic in front of him, before noticing the other 2 driving away. He opened his mouth, and desperately clung onto Jared’s name in his mind.

“Are you okay? Do you feel alright? We understand you might be in some trauma seeing Mr Fieldings-“

Tobias stopped the paramedic right there when he did decide to open his mouth.

At first nothing came out, then Tobias threw up all over the ground.

*

“Cass, sweetheart, you have to get out of there,” muttered a voice.

Cassadee pressed her cheek against the toilet floor, the coldness seeping into her. She never left the office, she was still in there when she had seen the car smashing into another car on television.

“Lee, it’s been 20 minutes.”

She heard a gentle knock on her door, and saw working shoes peeping out from below the hole.

“Cassadee?”

She whimpered, and felt the tiny sound shake her insides. She didn’t want to think. Something bad had happened. Her phone lay silent and turned off next to her face.

“Look, it looks bad-“

She heard her boss speak to her, his Asian accent making every word sound warm and comforting. She knew she couldn’t stay in there forever. But the sterility of the toilet was the only thing tethering her to her sanity. It couldn’t have happened, not again. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel to her, twice. She had given in to it once with Clarissa, and she didn’t want to know why it had done it again.

A small part of her felt incredibly selfish. To make such a national scandal about herself, and she wanted more than anything to chase the fear in her. She couldn’t be the one who needed saving anymore. This wasn’t about her, to the very least.

Picking up her phone, pushing herself slowly off the ground, Cassadee took a deep breath that seemed to set fire on her insides. She turned on her phone slowly, before opening the door. Lee’s worried face looked at her, with what seemed like almost all of the weekend staff loitering behind him. She let sympathetic and comforting hands guide her out before looking at her phone. The public would be her pillars of support, being alone with her phone would crush her.

She let a brief memory flit past her. Derrick forwarding Sampson’s number to her grudgingly after she had pestered him to give it to her since they were in the same team. He said she didn’t need his help since Sampson was refusing to help her. But she had told him that another contact in her phone wouldn’t necessarily mean she had to be friends with him. Derrick had made her put the words “FOR EMERGENCY ONLY” behind Sampson’s name, she had laughed and deleted it because it was childish.

Looking at the screen, Cassadee almost let a scream erupt from her body.

“8 missed calls from Sampson”