Chapter 29

Asher had seen a lot of horror in his life. He had always thanked God that the day Travis died he had been knocked unconscious because watching someone you care about getting hurt or killed is entirely different than watching it happen to a stranger.

He was running towards Axel when the car hit him. He heard himself scream as he saw his boy’s body fly up and slam back down onto the windshield. He bounced off that and flew about ten feet into the street. The impact of his body shattered the windshield and the driver, who hadn’t stopped was trying to drive away across the front lawns of Asher’s neighbours. He ran first to Axel and he was knelt down on the asphalt next to him when he heard a heart-wrenching scream.

“Axel! Oh my God! Asher! What happened to him?” Mia was at his side on her knees. Asher was in shock as he looked at Mia’s face. Axel was bleeding from the back of his head. A pool was forming under him. One of his arms was twisted at an unnatural angle. Asher was aware enough to know that Mia was about to cradle him.

“No!” He didn’t mean to say it so sharply. He lowered his voice and said, “Don’t touch him, baby. Don’t let anyone touch him until the ambulance gets here.” Frank was standing next to them with his phone to his ear. Asher could hear him talking to the 911 operator. He was shaking so hard he could barely keep the phone to his ear. About twenty feet behind Frank, Asher saw it. The car that hit Axel had crashed into a tree a few houses up the street. He got up and left Mia with their son. He had to make his way through a sea of people that had descended out of nowhere. They all seemed to be on their phones. Once he was outside the circle of people, Asher broke out in a dead run towards the car. He grabbed the handle on the driver’s side and pulled. James Proctor practically fell out at his feet. Asher had never felt the kind of fury racing through his veins. He was barely conscious of what he was doing. He grabbed hold of James by his shirt and threw him onto the ground. The other man tried to scramble away but with a kick to his ribs, Asher knocked him back down to the ground and within a fraction of a second he was on top of him.

Asher unleashed the fury inside him onto James. Each time he slammed his fist into the man’s face it would bounce off the pavement and Asher would hit him again, and again. People were watching him now but Asher didn’t see or hear anything going on around him. He was in the zone. All he could see was his son smiling at him just before he watched the car plow into him. And then he would think of the terror in Mia’s face when she looked at this man, and the horror in her eyes when she saw their son in the street, and he had hit him again and again.

“Asher! Asher, stop! You’re killing him.” Frank grabbed him by the shoulder hard and it brought him back. He finally looked down at the man underneath him. James was unconscious and his face was a bloody mess. “You have to stop son,” Frank told him, gently. Asher was shaking all over and his knuckles were bleeding as he struggled to stand up.

“Axel…”

Like a man in a trance, he pushed his way through the crowd that had just watched him beat James into a bloody pulp. He could see Mia in the street with tears streaming down her face as she sat next to their son. Axel was still not moving. He dropped down to his knees next to Mia and his son. The blood pool underneath his head was larger now and although he was still breathing, his breaths were slow and shallow. “Where the fuck is the ambulance?” he screamed out to no one in particular.

“It’s coming, son. I can hear it.” Frank was at his side once more. Asher looked up at him and then down the street. It was suddenly like his head was in a vacuum. He couldn't hear the ambulance coming but he could make out the blurred shape of it through his puffy, blood-shot eyes. He looked back at Axel’s pale face. It was like he was watching the life drain out of him onto the asphalt. The ambulance stopped behind them and Asher had to physically move Mia out of the way. She felt as strong as an ox as she tried to break out of his grasp and get to her baby. They stood helplessly by as Axel was strapped onto a body board and loaded onto a stretcher. The light from the ambulance was blinding as they watched him be channelled to it.

Mia shrugged Asher’s hand off of her arm and ran to the ambulance.

“I’m going with him,” she said. She didn’t leave room for argument as she climbed inside.

“We’ll be right behind you,” Frank told her as the doors closed. Asher couldn’t take his eyes from his son. He stood there and watched as the ambulance rushed off down the street. When it disappeared Frank said, “Come on, let’s follow them.” Asher followed Frank to his car and that was when he saw the other ambulance and the police cars. They were loading James into an ambulance and one of the witnesses was pointing Asher out to the policeman. Asher waited while the cop made his way towards him. When he got close he said,

“Are you Asher Fury?”

“Yes.”

“The boy that was hit was your son?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“If you follow me to the hospital. I have to get there and make sure my son is okay.”

Asher’s hand was on the passenger side door as the cop said, “I need to get your statement first, sir.”

Frank visibly tensed as Asher stepped up into the cop’s face. “This is my statement, James Proctor ran my son down like an animal in the street. All the damage you see on his face now is not going to even come close to what I’m going to do to him if Axel is not okay. Now, I’m going to the hospital to be with my family. If you need any more than that from me, you can meet me there.” He got in the passenger side of the car and Frank scrambled quickly to the driver’s side. Neither of them said a word on the way to the hospital.

**

Frank had barely stopped the car before Asher stepped out and ran in through the sliding Emergency room doors. He walked up to the desk and the girl sitting there was on the phone. He could tell she was talking to a friend or boyfriend by the way she was twisting her hair and giggling. He gave her about two seconds to hang up and notice him. When she didn’t, he slammed his hand down on the counter in front of her. She lowered the phone and with a mixture of fear and attitude she said, “Can I help you?”

“My son was just brought in by ambulance. His name is Axel Halloway. I want to see him.”

“Have a seat and…”

“No. I’m not having a fucking seat.” He felt Frank touch him again. This time he shrugged him off. “Get on that computer and find out where my son is.”

“Asher, they’ll kick you out of here if you don’t calm down.”

“They can try,” he said. The girl was looking at the computer. A second later she said, “He’s in 3B.” Asher was already headed for the door. “You can’t go back there right now. The nurse has to buzz you in!” As Asher and Frank made it to the door, a doctor was coming out. Asher grabbed it to keep it from closing and went through. Frank followed him. Asher looked at the signs on the doors and when he got to 3B he found Mia sitting in a chair sobbing. She was alone. He felt like his heart stopped.

“Where is he? What happened?”

Mia looked up at them. Her face was swollen and her eyes barely opened. “They took him to surgery,” she said.

“For what? What’s wrong with him?”

“They said he was bleeding in his brain. They had to relieve the pressure. He had a seizure in the ambulance.”

“Fuck!” Asher ran his hands through his hair as paced the floor. Frank stood in the corner with wide eyes and Mia sobbed softly. After several minutes, a male nurse came into the room and said, “I’m Brad, the head nurse here. I’d like to take you folks up to the surgery waiting room. Axel won’t come back here. He’ll be in surgery for a while and then in recovery before they get him into a room.”

“Do you know anything? What’s wrong with him?” Asher heard his voice crack and that pissed him off.

“No sir, I haven’t heard anything new since the ER doctor spoke to Miss Halloway.”

Asher nodded and reached his hand down to Mia. She took it and he pulled her up against him. She clutched onto him as they followed the nurse to the surgical waiting room. It was a clean, comfortable room with about twenty anxious and depressed looking people sitting and standing and pacing and crying. It made Asher’s anxiety worse. The rage had finally lifted and made way for the anxiety and sadness. He held Mia and occasionally whispered reassuring words to her that he didn’t believe himself. Frank sat like a stone and stared at the television with no volume playing on the wall. Asher tried concentrating on the television or Mia or anything that would stop the vision of Axel being hit by that car and flying up into the air from replaying over and over in his head. They sat like that for hours and the morning light was already slipping in through the blinds when a doctor stepped into the room and said, “For Axel Halloway.”

They all got to their feet at once. Asher was happy to see the doctor had silver hair. He knew it didn’t make sense but he felt better knowing that his boy was being taken care of by a mature man and not a kid. He was clean-cut and his movements seemed deliberate and precise. He had a deep voice and when he started talking to them he used non-medical friendly terms, but he didn’t dumb it down so much that he made them feel like idiots.

“I’m Dr. Roberts. I’m the surgeon attending to Axel. You are?”

“I’m his mother, Mia.” Mia’s voice was a raspy whisper. Asher squeezed the shoulder he was holding onto and said, “I’m Asher Fury, his father and this is Frank Halloway, his grandfather. How is my son?”

“He took a really hard blow to the back of his head. There was an open area near his neck and that’s where all of the bleeding was coming from. But on the MRI we saw a spot deeper in the brain that was bleeding inside. The pressure was building inside his skull and that’s what caused the seizure on the way in. We repaired the bleed and put in a shunt to drain the fluid. That’s what took the longest. He also has a fractured arm and three broken ribs. One of the ribs punctured his lung. We repaired that as well. He will have to be attached to a chest tube for several days to drain the fluid.”

Mia was shaking so hard that her body leaning against Asher’s was making him shake, or maybe he was shaking on his own. He wasn’t sure. “Is he going to be okay?”

“The best answer to that is we did all we could for him and now we wait. Until he wakes up, we really won’t know. He’s in a medical induced coma right now, so I don’t want anyone to panic when you see that he still has a tube in his throat and a machine breathing for him. It will give his brain time to recover and be able to take the regulation of his vital signs back over more slowly.”

“Can I see him?” Mia sounded on the verge of tears again.

“He’ll be in recovery for an hour or so before they take him up to ICU. You can see him there.”

Frank thanked the doctor. Mia and Asher were still standing there like they were made of stone long after he left. Mia was sobbing silently again and Asher was thinking that this was his curse; one more person he loved had been struck down and it was his fault once again. When would this ever end?