October 12
Just after midnight County Memorial Hospital—A makeshift ICU room
Pain materialized one inch at a time into his mind until it filled every pore, every cell of his body. He couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he was even breathing on his own. There was nothing but fire seeping into his skin where it continued to smolder, burning all the way to his bones.
The weight of the sheet pressed agonizingly against him, while a tube choked past his swollen vocal cords, holding back a scream. Fighting with a strength borrowed from the deep recesses where life struggles to survive without consciousness, he pulled at tubes clawing their way into his arms. But his fingers had been individually wrapped with fine gauze and cupped, as if to hold a can, around a soft mass. The gentle splint rendered his efforts to touch anything useless.
Figures moved around him. Shouting. Ordering. Begging him to stop resisting.
He stilled, more from a need to conserve his last bit of strength than from cooperation. He tried to open his eyes but couldn’t tell if they were bandaged or swollen closed.
“Please don’t move, Shelby,” a soft voice cried close to his ear. “You’ll only hurt yourself more. Skin is coming off each time you move. Please be still.”
He couldn’t make sense of the madness.
“They’re giving you morphine for the pain,” the woman whispered between sobs. “It won’t hurt so bad in a few minutes. Hang on, darling.”
The fight to stay conscious was lost before he could tell her no one had ever called him darling. He drifted on an ocean of turmoil so constant it became commonplace, a part of him.
“Shelby?” the soft voice came again. “Shelby, can you hear me? They’re changing the bags of saline on each arm. I know you hurt, but hang on, darling. Hang on.”
He tried to open his mouth to tell her she was wrong. Somehow there had been a mistake. He didn’t want to hear, or think, or feel. A dark void finally lulled him into numbness. Her words pulled him back to the surface where the horror stayed vivid. He wanted his suffering to end.
Let me die! he tried to beg. But he could not make words form. Let me die! Please, God, let me die!
Pulling at his bindings, he fought to take flight. If he could run fast enough and hard enough, he could outdistance the pain. He was surrounded once more by shouting and movement and machines. As he fought, he realized he couldn’t feel his legs.
Let me die! his mind screamed. What did it matter? He was already in hell.
The woman was there in the chaos, begging him to live. She didn’t understand. If she knew his torment she would not keep asking.
The sound of her crying finally eased him back into the blackness where his mind could rest even if his body still throbbed.
When he awoke the third time, the pain was too familiar to be shocking. Drugs had taken the edge off of hell, nothing more. This time he heard the drone of machines forcing him to breathe. He cursed the technology that kept him alive.
He drifted, trying to make his lungs reject each breath. Trying to force his heart to stop pounding. People moved around him, whispering like gnats in the night air. Nobody heard him beg for death.
Someone must have understood a fraction of his suffering. He heard her near, crying once more. He no longer resided alone in fiery hell. She stayed at his side. Unwanted. Unbeckoned. Unneeded.
Time lost all meaning. He would wake and force himself to take the blast of agony before his captured screams drove him mad. Then he’d hear the voices, and the woman sobbing softly at his side.
Sometimes, she would talk to him, low and Southern. For a second, he’d remember life before the pain. Moments, frozen like photographs, but real with smells and sounds. A ball game played on fresh-mowed grass. Drinking cold beer on a hot day. He felt the chill slide all the way to his gut. Sleeping on the porch in summer, with music from the house competing with crickets outside.
He forgot about his pain and tried to move. Volts of fire sliced through him. All thoughts vanished when the drugs dulled his mind once more.
Time passed, others came and went. The light grew softer, then brighter with an electric glare. Once, in the moment between blackness and agony he was aware. He made no effort to open his eyes, but listened to the sound of rain on the windows and a conversation hovering near.
“Look at the bastard,” a man mumbled. “He can’t live much longer. That special nurse said it was a miracle he’s hung on this long. She said there’s a rule, age plus percentage burned equals chance of death. The old man’s fifty-eight with a sixty percent burn. That equals no chance in my book.”
The male voice laughed. “The staff wants to move him to a burn unit in Dallas, but Crystal’s following Daddy’s orders and keeping him here. He’d already be there if they could have gotten the helicopter from Parkland Hospital through the storm the first few hours after the explosion, before they knew who he was.”
The man’s low voice grew closer. “Now he has next of kin. It’s Crystal’s choice, and she’s not likely to forget his ravings every time he got drunk and talked about never being taken out of the county to die. He used to swear the big city hospital killed Mom. Too bad they couldn’t do the same for him.”
“Stop talking about him, Trent. He might hear you,” a woman’s sharp tones answered. “The hospital is doing what they can. They’ve turned this room into an ICU, and equipment from the city is coming in by the hour. He’s got as much chance here as anywhere. Stop talking about Daddy as though he’s already left us.”
“He can’t hear. Hell, he wouldn’t even be breathing if it wasn’t for this machine. All I’d have to do is reach up and…”
“Stop it, Trent! You don’t have the guts to kill him.”
“Or the need. What the rig explosion didn’t do, the old man’s stubbornness about being transferred to a real hospital will. He may have blamed the Dallas hospital for killing Mom, but I’ll be able to thank this little place for not having the ability to keep him alive. In a few hours, I’ll be running Howard Drilling. Even if he lives, he’ll be a vegetable, and I’ll take over.”
The woman’s tone was cruel. “And our dear little tramp of a stepmother will be back to waiting tables where she belongs. I’d feel sorry for her if I thought Daddy ever loved her. But she was just his toy. I’ll always believe he married her just to irritate you.”
“He did a good job of that.”
The woman laughed. “Wait till you see what I brought her as a change of clothing. I find it hard to believe she had the guts to even ask me to do such a thing. She hugged me as if she could comfort me and asked if I’d do her a great favor. She even said it didn’t matter what I brought, she just needed a change because she wasn’t leaving the hospital until Daddy did.”
“All she’ll have left is guts as soon as the old man dies.” Trent laughed.
A door opened. The conversation ended. He drifted with the pain for a while before he heard someone crying again.
“Don’t die, darling,” the soft Southern voice whispered over and over. “Please don’t die.”
Her fingers pressed lightly over the bandages on his hand. She willed him to live with a determination stronger than his need to die. Whoever she was, she wasn’t giving up. She wasn’t letting go.
Through the pain he realized he didn’t want her to give up on him. She was the only hope he felt he had ever known.
Sleepy little farming towns flooded overnight with thousands of oil field workers, teamsters and speculators. Gambling houses, saloons and shacks called parlors offered entertainment for a price. Small-town sheriffs from Borger to Port Arthur called in the Texas Rangers to help maintain