Jessica Meigs - The Becoming by Brothers in Arms

the pool table, soaking through the towels Jack had kept pressed against the wound. No one had managed to get through on the emergency line in the interim. There hadn’t been much they could do for her. She’d died, and they hadn’t been able to stop it.
    Gray ran both hands back through his hair, ignoring the sticky blood still staining them. He paced to the end of the table and then turned sharply on his heel to go back the other way. He managed to avoid looking at April’s body, lying on the table, cool and pale. He didn’t want to think about what had happened to her. He didn’t want to think about how her hair looked, tangled and disheveled, spread under and around her head like a dark halo. He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of it, so he simply shut it out. His chest still felt tight. He knew he needed to sit down, needed to take it easy and force himself to calm down before he worked himself into an asthma attack. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His nerves wouldn’t let him.
    “Gray, please, sit,” Jack begged from somewhere behind him. “There’s enough going on without you driving me crazy walking all over the place.”
    Gray ignored him, though he abandoned his pacing to move toward the front doors. The shooting had begun outside not long after Gray, Jack, and the bouncer—Brendon was his name, Gray had learned—had brought April inside after they’d managed to disable their two attackers. It seemed like an absolute nightmare had broken out beyond the doors, and in light of the violence outside, Brendon had thought it prudent to barricade the doors, to keep the shooters and any other people who might have wished to do them harm out of the bar. None of them had any idea what was going on out there. Gray had more than once considered calling Theo back to ask him, but considering Theo hadn’t mentioned anything when he did call him, Gray suspected that Theo didn’t know either. It seemed like the entire world had collapsed around them in just a short hour. Gray had no idea how to even begin to cope with it.
    “Gray, please,” Jack said again. He sounded exhausted. Gray paused and turned on his heel to look at the older man. “Just sit, okay? You’re driving me nuts. Besides, we need to figure out what we’re going to do.”
    “Do?” Gray repeated. “We’re going to call the fucking cops, Jack. That’s all we can do.”
    “We need to get out of here,” Jack replied. “It sounds bad out there. Really bad. I don’t think we should stick around in here that much long—”
    “We call the police, ” Gray said again, more emphatically than before, raising his voice as he glared at Jack. “We can’t just leave. There’s a dead body in here! April’s dead! The cops need to—”
    “We can’t call the police, Gray,” Jack interrupted. “We can’t get through!”
    “But we can’t just leave her here!” Gray protested. He sank into a chair, slowly, leaning over to rest his elbows against his thighs. He didn’t look at Jack, directing his next words to the floorboards beneath him. “I can’t leave her here. I can’t just…I don’t know.”
    “The police aren’t going to come,” Brendon spoke up. “There’s a lot going on out there right now. I don’t think they’d have a few minutes to come out and investigate the attack on you guys when they have people running around with guns out there. It’d be total backburner stuff, especially since she’s already dead.”
    “And what the hell is going on out there?” Gray demanded. He stood, taking a few brisk steps toward one of the windows to peer out into the darkness beyond. The parking lot was poorly lit, but he could just make out several people running down the street and could hear the pop of a gun firing. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Never even heard of anything like this. Do you think it’s a riot or something? Maybe some sort of uprising against the government or something like that?”
    “If