One Thousand Years to Forever Read Free

looked like the
city had been annihilated.
    Colum gently let Katherine go. She
looked up at him, her face a mess but beautiful to him. She looked
the same as she had each of the lifetimes she had been with him,
and taken from him. This time he had won. He had loved her, for a
thousand years and more, and he was determined not to lose her this
time.
    Katherine didn’t know what to
think, what to say. She stood with destruction surrounding her
beyond anything she had ever thought she would see in her lifetime.
She looked up at the man, the giant who had carried her out of the
North Tower like she was nothing. He now stood looking at her,
covered in dust, all a greyish white. All that was visible were his
eyes and mouth.
    “ Why?”
    Colum looked down at Katherine. He
knew what she was getting at but he wanted to hear her voice
because he knew it would be a while before he would become part of
her life again.
    “ I beg your pardon?”
    “ Why did you save me? I wanted to
be with my husband, I could have helped him... ”
    Colum wanted to pick her up and
shake her. She was as stubborn as she had always been, she just
didn’t know this was her make-up down through the ages.
    Colum watched as her father and
father-in-law turned and touched her on the shoulder. They spoke in
unison, “Had you stayed with him, your children would have ended up
being without both parents.” Both had tears spilling down their
cheeks, making paths through the grayish white dust that covered
all of them. Chief MacNamara leaned into the shoulder of
Katherine’s father. Katherine’s father wrapped an arm around his
daughter.
    Colum watched as the range of
emotions hit her. Others in the group just stood, trying to take in
what had just happened. Some were trying to contact family members
to tell them they were safe.
    Colum saw Katherine go from mad to
all of a sudden knowing what her family had said was true. She let
out a wail and collapsed, beating the ground. Both her father and
her father-in-law dropped to their knees, covering her with their
sobbing bodies.
    Chief MacNamara looked up at the
man who had carried his daughter in law down those thirty-four
flights like it had been nothing and saw anguish. “I want to thank
you for saving her. I don’t know what’s in store for us, whether we
will find my son, but at least their children still have a
mother.”
    Colum looked down at Katherine who
was fighting off her own father as she rose to her feet and started
to run to the rubble. “John!” She screamed. “John!”
    She was met by police officers who
tried to pull her back but Colum and the men of her family were
behind her and soon all were among the searchers, listening as the
PASS Devises from the fallen firefighters air packs announced with
the shrill scream the location of those closer to the top. Others
could be heard but deeper beneath the depths of the rubble. They
were soon digging through the rubble with bare hands, and anything
they could lay their hands on, finding survivors and
victims.
    Hours later, someone found a part
of some stairs and their beams, and then they found a cluster of
bodies... all like they were just sleeping, all curled up.
Katherine was on top of the searchers before anyone could pull her
off. Colum heard her wail. He ran to her and caught her as she fell
on top of the body of her husband. She looked up to the sky that
was black with the night, but lit up with the brightness of the
searchlights. She screamed to the heavens over and over, clutching
on her husband’s body, and then on Colum’s as he held her tighter.
Holding her as she cried and screamed in turn. If it had been
possible he would have brought her husband back to life. He had no
joy in the fact that he had saved her and that her husband had to
die so that he could have her. He could have taken her husband up
in his arms also, saved him too. He was more than capable of doing
so much, but he had gone with the sole purpose of saving her.
Saving