I'll Take a Chance (12 page)

“No
fucking way, if this is our guy, if our girls are in there we need to do this now. Who knows what he is doing to them. We can’t just sit here and let God knows what happen to them,” I say angrily.

“No
, I said we do this my way,” Slick shouts.

“Look I think you are outnumbered here Slick. We can
’t just sit here and do nothing,” Asher says.

Slick sighs deeply
and looks at the three of us.

“
Man you guys are a pain in my fucking ass. Alright, but you need to sit tight for a little bit. I’ll do a sweep of the parameter and see what we are dealing with. You stay here. If you guys mess this up it could end badly not only for the girls, but for us too.”

We all agree and sit in the truck. Waiting for him to come back seems to take forever. Just thinking that Amelia and pos
sibly Chloe are in that house is killing me. Finally, Slick gets back in the truck and closes the door softly.

“Alright,
there is one man inside and he’s armed with a hand gun. I didn’t see any trip wires or alarms around the parameter. I think our best bet is to go in there full force. I think the best outcome is for me to get him at gun point. You three start looking around for signs of the girls,” Slick informs us.

With Slick in the lead with his gun drawn
, we quietly make our way to the front of the house. Asher and I are on one side of the door while Aiden and Slick are on the other side of the door. Slick counts down from three then moves in front of the door and with his boot, he kicks in the door and all hell breaks loose. Slick barks orders at the man to get on the floor and put his hands behind his head. He aims the gun just inches from his face.

The three of us spread out and search the main floor first then the upstairs.
Every room I search that comes up empty tears a little piece of my heart right out of my chest. This can’t be a dead end. It just can’t be. I was devastated to lose my sister, I felt like someone took half of my heart away. Having Amelia taken too feels like someone has taken half of my soul. No one can live with only half of a heart and half of a soul.

We come back down
, not having found anything. Slick has his boot in the man’s back. I don’t know what comes over me. I have never felt such utter untamed anger before. I grab the man off the floor and pin him up against the wall with a loud thud and place my forearm at his throat. I press so hard he gasps for air.

“Where are they, you sick son of a bi
tch?” I shout, as spit flies out of my mouth and in his face. Then it hits me. I finally get a look at his face. This is the man who lost his wife and child. I could never forget this man’s face. I back away slowly letting the man drop to the floor. He coughs and sucks in much needed air. Slick steps on his chest and points his gun in his face again.

“It is
you,” I say numbly.

“
Is this the man you told us about?” Asher asks.

“It’s been you this whole time? Where are they?” I shout at him. I grab him back off the floor and punch him in the face. Blood sprays from his mouth and nose
, across my face. My knuckles split open, but I barely feel it. Asher and Aiden grab me, pulling me away from him. In the scuffle somehow the man gets Slicks gun and he makes a mad dash for the door off the kitchen. He quickly turns the locks on the door, and slams the door behind him.

We all run to the door and pull it open. Slick goes down the stairs first followed by Asher then Aiden then myself. When I make it all the way down the stairs
, I see the man, and he has Amelia held around the throat in front of him. He has a gun to her temple and my heart drops in my chest. I hear a woman shouting and it’s then that I see Chloe on her knees on a bed behind them.

“Chloe,
” I whisper. It’s really her. She’s really here. Two years of worry and stress melt away at the sight of my sister. I place my hand over my chest, not from pain, but overwhelmed joy. There are a million thoughts running through my mind all at once. I wished for this day to come so many times and now she’s here, she’s so close I can almost grab her. Then I hear Amelia crying.

My attention is drawn back to
the man and he still has Amelia at gun point. Slick takes a few steps forward and tries to reason with the man.

“Look man, there’s no need for all this. We just want the girls. J
ust hand them over and we’ll leave you alone.” He takes another step toward them and the man moves the gun from Amelia to Chloe.

“No!” I shout.
Never in my life have I felt so helpless. My instinct is to jump the man, but he has the gun and at anytime he could kill one or both in a heartbeat.

“Take one more
step and I’ll kill them both,” he shouts.

Everything next happened so fast. Slick lunges toward the man at the same time Chloe jumps
off the bed and jumps on the man’s back. The man steps back and rams Chloe into the wall. Her head bounces off the wall with a loud thud and she falls lifelessly to the floor.

Slick grabs for the gun that the man has turned
back toward Amelia. Aiden and Asher move toward the man as I just stand there rooted to the ground. I don’t know where to go first. Chloe is on the ground unconscious behind Amelia, as she screams hysterically, struggling in the man’s arms.

Then
the three guys make a mad lunge for the man. Then it happens. The gun that was aimed toward Amelia is fired and the five of them all fall to the floor. My world starts to crash all around me. There’s a ringing in my ears and my whole body goes numb.

Then another shot is fired
, pulling me out of my frozen trance. I look up from the pile of bodies and see Chloe standing over everyone with the gun in her hand. She has blood running down the side of her head and down her arm.

Did she just fire the gun? My eyes go from Chloe to the pile of bodies on the floor. A stream of blood is
pooling around the lifeless pile. I hear my voice screaming, no, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t said anything.

Asher, Aiden and Slick start to move and they stand up. When everyone is standing the only bodies still on th
e floor are the man and Amelia.

On my God, Amelia.

Her shirt is covered in blood, and the pool of blood seeping from her chest is quickly growing. Slick places his hand on the gun Chloe still has raised and lowers her hands then takes the gun from her. He wraps her in his big body and she starts to shake uncontrollably as she goes into shock. Asher moves toward Amelia, and he sinks to his knees beside her.

“Somebody call 911!” Asher shouts.

“Kyle you need to do something!” I hear someone shouting at me, but I’m frozen.

Asher stands and run
s over to me and shakes me violently, “Kyle you need to fucking help her, you’re a fucking doctor, get a grip, man.  You need to help Amelia,” he shouts and points to Amelia on the floor.

Aiden is on the phone with the police
, and he tells us an ambulance, and the police are on their way. I finally get myself together and I go to Amelia.

I kneel on the floor on the other side o
f her. She is unconscious, I feel for a pulse. She’s alive. Thank God. I pull my shirt over my head and hold it to the wound on the left side of her chest, applying pressure. Aiden runs upstairs, yelling he will flag down the paramedics.

There is just so much blood
. My t-shirt is quickly soaked with her blood. I apply stronger pressure and I can hear the ambulance in the distance now.

There are thudding feet coming down the steps
. The room is quickly filled with medics and at least a dozen police officers, who take control of the scene. A paramedic grabs my shoulders.

“Move asi
de sir, I can take it from here,” he says.

“N
o, I’m a doctor. I can help her,” I insist.

“You need to step away, s
ir. You’re in shock and in no way capable of handling the scene. Step back. We can take it from here. You’ve done everything you can, we need to get her loaded and in the ambulance,” he says.

I stand and the paramedics quickly get to work. A second team has Chloe on a gurney with oxygen
. I lock eyes with Chloe and she stops shaking. I’m so torn between going to my sister and staying close to Amelia.

Chloe holds out her arms to me and I rush to her. I wrap her in my arms
, and start to sob with two years of pent up emotion. I can’t believe she’s really here. I’ve missed her so much. Another team of medics check the man who held them captive. They shake their head and cover his whole body with a sheet.

“
Shh, it’s OK. I’m OK,” Chloe says.

I pull away and look at her with such relief. The paramedics wrap her head and take her vitals. Other than her head she appears to be alright. I pull her into a hug again as I hear a
medic say, “She’s in Vfib.”

I turn around and see the medics working on Amelia. If I thought my world stopped earlier, it doesn’t even compare to what I feel now. The room is silent. I see Asher next to her, he i
s being held back by Slick. He’s screaming, but I hear nothing. I can see the medics mouth move as he says, clear, but I hear nothing.  They shock her heart with a defibrillator. They take her vitals and again they shock her heart. Each time is like a physical shock to my own.

I sink to the floor on my knees. To come this far
and finally find Chloe only to turn around and lose Amelia would be unbearable. I have never felt such pain in my heart. It feels like an electric shock. There is a shooting pain going from my heart all the way down to my fingertips. I never put much thought into the words, heartache, until this very moment. It is an actual physical feeling. My heart is breaking right inside my chest.

All the schooling and training I have been through to become a doctor
, and I kneel here numb. I’m trained to be an OB/GYN not an ER doctor, but I shouldn’t be feeling this kind of helplessness. Aiden shakes me and I tear my gaze away from Amelia to look at him. His lips are moving, but I still hear nothing.

“Kyle, you need to go with them
,” Aiden says. He shakes me and repeats it again. I feel like someone just punched me straight in my heart as my senses start to come back. She’s alive, I can hear the monitor beeping telling me she has a stable heartbeat again, and she’s being loaded on a gurney.

“Kyle, she’s stabilized
now, you need to go with them,” he says urgently.

They carry Chloe up on a stretcher first followed my Amelia. Chloe is loaded into a separate ambulance and I am told she has a concussion and that she will need stitches in her head
, but that she will be fine. The police said we could go, but that we needed to all make official statements at the hospital. Slick gets in the ambulance with Chloe and gives me a nod.

They load Amelia in another ambulance and the medic says only one of us can go with her. Both Asher and Aiden
insist I go with her and they will meet us there.

The ride to
the hospital seems like it’s taking forever. All the noises around me are jumbled together, the wailing of the sirens from the ambulance, the beeping of her heart monitor and the thudding of my own heart in my ears. The pen that the medic uses to write down her vitals sounds like a jet plane racing across the sky. The dripping of her IV makes loud splashing noises like a cannon ball falling into the ocean. And my heart sounds like its being torn into a million pieces.

Amelia is still unconscious and
she is as white as a ghost. I reach for her hand, and it’s then that I see all the blood on my own hands. She’s lost a lot of blood. I try to concentrate on the beeping of her heart monitor and will the next beep to sound, no I command it to. She can’t die. She just can’t, as long as that machine is beeping I know she has a chance.

We get to the hospital and they immediately rush her into surgery. Minutes
later Asher and Aiden rush in.

“They took her into surgery. They said they will
update us as soon as they can,” I tell them both. I’m a doctor and I know the things we’re supposed to tell waiting family. It’s not easy being on the receiving end of that ‘we’ll update you when we can’ bullshit.

A doctor comes out and tells us Chloe is stitched up and is resting comfortably.
The police want to interview her before anyone can see her. They want to keep her overnight for observation, and I can see her once she is put into a room.

A nurse comes up
to me and hands me a scrub top.

“It will be a little while before we know anything
Dr. Peters. You should go get cleaned up, I promise to tell you as soon as we know anything,” she tells me with a sympathetic smile.

“I called Willow on the way here. She made me promise to come get her as
soon as I checked in here. I’ll be back as soon as I get her from Amelia’s apartment and drop Abbey off at home with the nanny. My parents are meeting me at the house and we’ll all be back as soon as we can,” he tells us and runs back out the door.

“I’ll stay right here, you go get cleaned up. If they tell me anything before you get back
, I’ll come get you,” Aiden insists.