Chapter 73

THE SOUNDS OF SCREAMS and moans from the wounded are entirely familiar to me. So is the smell of blasted granite, acrid smoke, and detonated C-4 explosive. What’s not so familiar is knowing that my fiancée could very well have perished in the ground zero of the blast. As I run to her, I feel caught up in a nightmare where the stone is quickly turning to mud and my legs are sinking into it, slowing me, drowning me.

Sirens blare from every direction. They echo off the stone walls and inside my head. Police and innocent bystanders shouting. Screaming. As I approach the building and the site of the explosion, I see the first of the dead lying on the narrow canal bank. I see several bodies lying in the water. One of the bodies is unmistakable. It’s Alessandra. She is floating face down on the canal, her long black hair spread over the water’s surface like a child’s doll that’s floating face-down in a filled bathtub. A policeman who is treading water, is attempting to fish her out.

“Grace!” I scream. “Grace!”

I’m running, but I no longer feel like I’m running. The scene before me of smoking rubble, shattered glass, a sinking boat and still-life bodies isn’t real. It’s a made- up dream that is manufactured inside my head. I don’t feel like a participant. I feel like a helpless observer looking in. I make it to within a few feet of the building when I find that I can move no further. I can’t move at all as I drop to my knees and that all too familiar pressure builds and grows behind my eyeballs.

Once more I want to scream, “Grace!”

I want to throw myself into the blast zone.

I want to grab hold of her hand and pull her away from the destruction, but I can’t move anymore.

The pressure behind my eyes grows so intense, I feel like my eyeballs are about to pop out of their sockets. The vision before me begins to go gray and then black. Like my eyelids are made of steel. The steel curtains have come down and bolted shut. I fall forward and feel the cool, damp of the cobble-covered bank, and the sharp shards of shattered glass and splintered brick that pierces the skin on my cheek.

Knowing that all is lost, I fall into a deep, dark unconsciousness.