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STUNNED BY THE blast, Leine stared at the carnage around her. Bodies and parts of bodies lay strewn across the square, blood and debris and dust marking the fallout from the powerful explosives. Survivors staggered to their feet, moaning and coughing. Rubble blocked the entrance to the cathedral, but the surrounding statuary was still relatively intact.
The bright pink sleeve that had once been part of Chessa’s jacket lay a few feet from where she and her mother had been, the young woman’s arm still inside. Blood stained the material a dark, angry red. The rest of her body was unrecognizable. Her mother’s severed head lay a short distance from her torso, pieces of shrapnel embedded in her face.
“Holy shit!” The man Leine had tackled shakily climbed to his feet and offered her his hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Leine said, her ears ringing. She accepted his hand and got to her feet. An engine coughed to life. She looked up as a black delivery van sped past.
“I should probably thank you for saving my life,” he said. “I thought you were just some crazy—”
Ignoring him, Leine tracked the van as it sped away, memorizing the phone number of the flower store stenciled on the side. It seemed odd that anyone driving a delivery van would leave the scene of a bombing, knowing that it would likely be commandeered to deliver the wounded and dying to the local hospital.
“Are you all right?” she asked him, the realization of what just happened sinking in, hitting her hard.
“Yes, I think so. I’m just happy to be alive. You’re sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He checked his phone, and apparently finding that it wasn’t damaged, ran toward the destruction to film the aftermath of the bomb.
A woman nearby struggled to rise, but her leg collapsed under her and she fell back onto the ground with a stifled cry. Leine scanned the square, searching for Manuel as she made her way to the woman to see what she could do. She spotted him, still alive, sitting on the ground with a dazed look on his face, not far from the cathedral entrance. Sirens filled the air, echoing off the buildings as first responders grew near and skidded to a stop at the landmark cathedral.
“Don’t try to get up,” she urged the woman. “Looks like your leg is broken. They’ll come and get you as soon as they can, all right?”
The woman nodded, her eyes wide. “Is it over?”
“Yes,” Leine assured her, already headed across the square to help Manuel. “It’s over.”
His leg was bleeding heavily from a piece of shrapnel embedded in his thigh. She had her jacket off by the time she reached him, and quickly bent to cinch it around his leg.
“Looks like it nicked an artery,” she said, unsheathing her knife to use as leverage to tighten the handmade tourniquet. She secured the hilt so it wouldn’t unwind and flagged down a medic. “You’re going to be fine, Manuel,” she assured him.
Once she was certain that he would be well taken care of, she made her way to another victim, and then another, busying herself with helping however she could, ignoring the drumbeat of her conscience telling her she’d made a horrible mistake.