Fries Before Guys (SWAT Generation 2.0 2)

She shrugged. “Somewhat. Me and Earl share.”

I nodded. “Okay. Do you mind taking me to, errr, Earl?”

She scrunched up her nose. “I just lit this up. I’ll be in when I’m done. In the meantime, he’s in the back bedroom.”

I scratched my head and shrugged.

I did, indeed, find him in the back bedroom.

I also found him in a puddle of his own urine.

Nice.

After feeling for a pulse, I called in the medics.

“This is 3443,” I said into the handheld radio I carried around with me on calls. “I have a forty-eight-year-old male who is unconscious. He’s gonna need an ambulance. His pulse is sluggish and I’m getting…”

I continued to spout off what I knew and was just about to take my blood pressure cuff off when Dax Tremaine walked into the room.

“Dax!” I said, smiling.

Except I didn’t think he heard me. Mostly because the man at my side blinked his eyes open.

And went freakin’ wild.

I’m talking, bat shit crazy, ‘I’m going to kill everyone that’s in the room’ wild.

The next few minutes happened fast. And honestly, by the end of it, I had a pounding headache from getting thrown against a wall. Twice. And Dax was slowly getting up to his feet for round eight or nine with this guy.

The man’s wife sat in the corner of the room, watching the festivities, with a goddamn beer in her hand.

Just as she was about to reply, none other than Derek Roberts walked through the door and joined the fray.

***

An hour later, I was growling in frustration.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m fine. I just want to go home. I have to be at school tomorrow. It’s already eleven.”

“You got thrown against a wall, Avery,” Derek said.

I glared at him even harder.

“I’ll take you home,” Dax said. “And Derek can follow with your car. But you really should consider getting checked out at the hospital.”

For the fourth time, I shook my head.

“Why not?” Derek threw his hands up in defeat.

I turned to him and glared.

“Because I don’t have insurance, Derek,” I snapped. “Those things end when your parents die.”

There was silence at my outburst.

Pure and utter silence.

Because Derek and Dax weren’t the only men at the scene. There were other officers, too.

I immediately regretted my outburst.

“I’ll take the ride home, though. Thank you,” I said to Dax. “As long as my car does eventually make it back.”

“I’ll bring it right behind you,” Derek supplied.

I didn’t bother looking at him.

I was embarrassed.

Both for what I’d done months ago, and what I’d just said.

I couldn’t afford health insurance.

I couldn’t afford car insurance, either.

Though, I kept that one even though it about killed me every month to pay it.

My high school was just too far away from where I lived to not drive.

The ride to my place was silent.

Dax didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know what I could say to make him not ask more questions. Questions that I could see floating around in his head.

He’d look over at me every once in a while, his mouth open, only to close it when he got a good look at my face.

“I hear your sister got married,” I said.

That’d happened a long time ago. Way before my dad had died.

But I was at a loss for what to say to get him to stop wanting to ask about my family or my situation.

“Yeah,” he said. “May eighteenth.”

That freakin’ day.

I hated the memories that surged to the forefront of my mind.

Hated even more that I couldn’t hold them at bay.

They hit me like a flash motion picture, every single detail hitting me all at once.

***

“She’s clinically braindead, Mr. Flynn,” the doctor, someone that had introduced herself but I couldn’t recall her name, said. “As of right now, these machines are keeping her alive. Doing the things for her that her brain would normally tell her body to do on its own.”

My dad looked blankly at my mother, as if he wasn’t seeing her, but looking right through her.

“What does that mean?” I found myself asking.

Movement from behind my mother’s bedside had me glancing up to find a couple of officers standing there. I wasn’t sure who they were, or what department they were with, but they were there.

The entire hospital was lined with officers at this point.

One of their own had been hurt.

So they were here.

“It means that she wouldn’t be able to stay alive without help. She’s dead, and will not come back from this,” the doctor explained patiently.

The nurse across the room was wearing a pin on her shirt. It was a pink heart with ‘yes’ printed in the middle of it.

I’d seen quite a few of the nurses in the hospital wearing it today.

I wondered why.

I couldn’t stop myself. I had to find out why.

That was the weird thing about me.

I was always so fucking curious.