“What’s that smile for?” Clint asked, sucking vanilla ice cream from his lower lip—Axel found the gesture both sweetandsexy.
“Nothing.” Axel grinned and dragged his tongue across the mound of melting treat. He felt the cowboy’s eyes tracking his tongue’s path, and his loins warmed.
“What?” Clint insisted.
“You’re just… cute, that’s all.” Axel gazed up at him, smiled big, and went for another lick of ice cream, sucking it off his lips.
Clint grunted. “Cute?” he asked, raising an eyebrow skeptically. “How so?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it might make you self-conscious, then it would be ruined.”
“What would be ruined?” Clint sucked the top of the ice cream mound, then quickly licked the sides as melting drips slid down toward the cone.
The tongue was a merciless creature, Axel thought as more heat pooled in his lower region. His mind exploded with images of him licking ice cream off Clint’s naked body, parts of him lathered in whipped topping—
A squeal of tires sliced through the pleasant afternoon, sharp and jagged. The world snapped hard to the left, and every head on either side of the narrow street turned in unison, as if a gun had gone off—and maybe it had; Axel had heard something that sounded like fireworks in the distance maybe fifteen minutes earlier. A blur of metal—no details, just velocity, malice, and the smear of fading sunlight off a windshield—tore down the street that bisected the small-business section, careening recklessly as if trying to evade the devil himself.
“Kid!” Clint bellowed, dropping his cone and lunging forward, wrenching Axel from his pleasantly warm fantasy.“Watch out!”
The ice cream melted over Axel’s fingers, sticky, cold, and meaningless, as the fear in the cowboy’s voice infected him. He looked around quickly, trying to find the source of Clint’s outburst. The events of the next few seconds unfolded so slowly in Axel’s mind that it was as if time had suddenly stopped.
The kid—a wiry boy with a mop of soft brown hair, maybe fourteen—was just stepping into the street between two parked cars, earbuds in, eyes fixed on his phone. He didn’t see the death machine barreling toward him. No one did until it was too late. Only Clint’s keen eye had clocked the boy… but not soon enough.
The front quarter-panel struck the kid at thigh height as the car swerved recklessly into him, catapulting the boy backward. He spun in the air—a ragdoll in a tornado—then snapped down onto the asphalt, a sound like a sack of wet laundry, pink and redpooling beneath his head. The car never stopped, sideswiping a parked Civic before jerking back into its lane.
Suddenly, time reset and sped up until everything was moving in fast-forward. Someone screamed—a harrowing sound that peeled the flesh from Axel’s soul. A woman ran out of a shop and dropped to the ground beside the broken boy.
Axel spun around, dazed and disoriented. Clint sprinted down the sidewalk as people swarmed into the street. Axel stood in numb paralysis, confused. Where was Clintgoing?Then he realized he had his phone out, held in front of him, recording the car that was briefly stalled by another vehicle before swinging around it and gunning down the street.
His legs moving on their own, Axel dropped the cone and rushed to the nightmare scene. The boy lay in a widening pool of crimson and viscera, each labored breath forcing pink froth between his lips. The white of his T-shirt was already soaked in a tide of red, revealing the jagged end of a rib that had punctured through both fabric and flesh. Blood and cerebrospinal fluid leaked from his ear, mixing with the soft brown hair now plastered to his skull in clumps, some strands torn away to reveal raw scalp. Axel's knees struck the blacktop as he dropped down next to the wailing woman.
Up close, the kid's face was a slaughterhouse display: a shattered cheekbone protruding through flayed skin, one pupil blown wide while the other eye socket filled with blood, lips shredded to reveal teeth that had splintered on impact, fragments embedded in his swollen tongue. A piece of gravel was lodged deep in his left cheek, creating a grotesque dimple. His eyes flickered to Axel, unfocused, rolling in their sockets like marbles.
For a split second, the boy's features blurred and shifted into Luke's, and Axel stared at hisowndying son. Terror and panicclutched his chest, his lungs seizing as his ribcage contracted as if caught in a vise, each heartbeat a thunderclap against bone. The woman—themother—pressed trembling fingers to her child's rapidly hitching chest, where the cotton fabric had turned crimson and sticky. Her hands hovered, then retreated, then reached forward again in a macabre dance, as if touching him might somehow make his injuries real or break him further.
Around them, the hiss of whispers mingled with gasps as multiple phones glowed in outstretched hands, their owners' faces bathed in blue light as they stammered addresses to 911 operators.
Axel was shaking nearly as badly as the screaming woman. He heard himself say, “Hey, hey, Kid… hold on… it’s gonna be okay…” It was not. The words sounded foreign, and his voice seemed to come from far above, crackling through a radio stuck in a tunnel. Tears streamed down his face, and he felt the woman’s panic and horror as if it were actuallyLukelying before him.
The boy convulsed, fighting for air, with wet snorts and gurgles. Blood bubbled from his nostrils, then from his mouth. His eyes rolled back and forth, filling with blood, and finally locked onto the crying woman. He tried to speak, but only fragments came out—“Mmm…o…m”—maybe the last word he would ever say.
“Shh-shh-shh, baby,”the mother sobbed uncontrollably, finally grasping the boy's bloody hand, her fingers slipping against his skin, slick with crimson. “Hang on. You're going to be okay. Help's coming.Sh-sh-sh, don't try to talk... don't...” She broke down, pressing his hand to her trembling lips, his blood smearing her mouth in a grotesque parody of lipstick. A sound—not quite human, more like the keening of a wounded animal—wrenched from deep in her core, splitting the afternoon air likea knife. Axel's stomach lurched as sweat beaded on his forehead, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh; her keening vibrated through his bones, and he felt trapped in a horror movie where someone had cranked the volume and saturation to unbearable levels.
It’s not going to be okay… he’s dying… he’s fucking dying right in front of her!
And she knows it.
Sirens wailed like banshees, rising from a distant howl to an ear-splitting shriek as the ambulance careened around the corner, its red-and-white lights painting everyone's faces in alternating flashes of blood and bone. Axel staggered back on rubbery legs, his jeans sticky with the boy's blood and his shoes squelching in something wet he refused to identify. A paramedic with sweat-darkened hair and eyes that had seen too much gently pried the mother's crimson-slicked fingers from her son's limp hand. Two others—one with a face like carved granite, the other muttering rapid-fire instructions through thin lips—worked in practiced synchrony, stabilizing the boy's shattered neck with a rigid collar before transferring his broken form to a stretcher that gleamed in the setting sun.
The mother climbed in after them, her face a mask of ash-white horror beneath mascara streaks that looked like war paint. The ambulance doors slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid, and it screamed away, leaving only exhaust fumes and silence.
The fading afternoon resumed its charade of normalcy—shoppers stepping carefully around the gory scene, conversations resuming in hushed tones, a dog barking three blocks away. Only the blood remained as evidence of a parent’s worst fears realized—a chilling nightmare spreading across the asphalt, already darkening at the edges and catching the dyingsunlight in oily rainbow patterns. Axel stood transfixed by that stain, the physical manifestation of a mother's universe imploding—right there on the same street where, mere moments earlier, he had felt Clint's calloused palm against his, tasted sweet cream melting on his tongue, and thought howcutehis cowboy looked.
Axel stood at the curb, his jeans soaked in blood, his hands—painted crimson—flexing at his sides. He was shaking, eyes wide, staring at the congealing pool of blood on the pavement. Clint wrapped one arm around him, pulling Axel’s face into his chest and turning him away from the grisly scene. He gripped his phone in his other hand, studying the short video of the fleeing vehicle. Clint hit pause when the car stalled, the license plate number blurred but readable.Gotcha, fucker.
