CHAPTER FIVE

“Gray? Where are you at on this one?” asked Doc, poking his head in the door, hearing Brooke cursing East.

“Almost there. Why?”

“I got Daphne crowning, and Dana is right behind her.”

“Not so fast,” said Cruz. “I’ve got Harlow ready, Lyra eight centimeters, and Caroline is trying to push out a toddler right now.”

“Seven?! We have seven babies coming all at the same time? What the hell just happened?” asked Gray. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Eleven babies, all on the same day. Get the others to help. Lena knows what to do. She doesn’t need me. So does Kelsey. One more push, Brooke. That’s it, that’s it, honey! Yes!”

The sound of an infant’s cries filled the room. Ashley and Bree were helping in delivery with so many needed in other rooms.

“Oh my God,” whispered East. “We have a boy.”

It seemed to never end. One woman after another, babies coming out so fast they could barely keep up. When it was done, Gray looked into the waiting room and stared at Irene, knowing that she had something to do with all of this.

“Why you lookin’ at me?” she scoffed. “I didn’t get ‘em pregnant.”

“You’ll never convince me of that,” laughed Gray.

Brix and Daphne gave birth to two beautiful little girls, Pearl June and Amethyst May, or little Amy. They were tiny and perfect and had the best sets of lungs in the room.

The rest gave birth to boys. Nate and Harlow brought beautiful Quinn Nathan into the world of Belle Fleur. Abe and Lyra welcomed Cooper Diego with a head full of thick black hair and the prettiest lips on a boy they’d ever seen. JB and Dana introduced Remington Clark to the family. East and Brooke were happy to have Xander East join their family. And finally, after hours of hard labor, Caroline and Rush showed the world their eleven-pound, six-ounce, twenty-two-inch-long son, Logan Noah .

“Well, Mama, you got eleven new babies to love on this Christmas,” smiled Claudette. “I’m not sure how you got them all to go into labor on the same day, but well done.”

“Oh, that wasn’t the hard part,” she whispered. “The hard part was makin’ sure they were all full-grown and ready to arrive.” Claudette just laughed at her mother, shaking her head.

“You’re something else, Mama.”

“I know,” nodded Irene with a big smile. “Something else.”

By the time Macie awoke, the babies were all resting comfortably at home with their parents, happy for their new surroundings.

“I can’t believe I missed eleven babies being born!” she cried.

“We’ll go see them all tomorrow. I want to make sure that you’re okay. Are you feeling okay?

“I’m good now, thank you. I just suddenly felt it all hit me,” she said, cuddling closer to him.

“I know, honey.” He heard a knock on the cottage door and stood to find Cam, Luke, Hex, and Eric waiting. “This can’t be good.”

“Sorry to bother you both. Is now a good time to chat?” asked Eric.

“Of course. Come in.”

“Hey, honey,” grinned Hex. “You doing okay?”

“I am, thank you. Is everything okay?” asked Macie.

“Hiro heard some chatter, and someone is taking credit for the shootings. They call themselves the Boy Scouts, although we doubt it has anything to do with the organization itself. They’re claiming to take back the American way and stomp out greed, high interest rates, thieving corporations, all of it.”

“That’s a lot to take on for a bunch of boy scouts,” frowned Macie. “Do you think those are really their issues with the world?”

“I doubt it, but it’s what we have right now. Did you see any faces, Macie? Anyone that looked out of place?”

“Luke, I promise, I saw nothing. I was in Saks looking in the men’s department. We suddenly heard people running, then screams. It wasn’t until after that I heard the gunshots. At first, it only sounded like one person.”

“What did you do?” asked Eric.

“I started to run toward the exit. I thought if I could make it out and head across the street to my car, I’d be okay. Then, I heard multiple shots from different weapons. That’s when I scrambled behind the pretzel stand counter and saw the dead guy in the entrance of the storage closet. But it hit me that if he were dead, someone had shot him before I got there, and that meant there were people coming from the direction that I was running toward.”

“You were smart to sit tight, Macie,” said Cam. “If they’d already shot him…”

“Them,” said Garr. “There were two inside the storage closet.”

“Three people,” frowned Cam. “Okay. If they’d already shot three people, but you didn’t hear those shots, someone had a silencer in the beginning.”

“I told Garr and the others I feel as though there were multiple weapons. I know the sounds of a pistol versus a rifle, and it was all of them. One was firing rapidly, like the weapons you guys use on missions. It sounded like an M16A. That, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat,” she said repeatedly. With her own degrees in weapons engineering, Macie wasn’t unfamiliar with weapons, she just hadn’t had the opportunity to hear them up close and personal.

“That means they had silencers, automatic, semi-automatic, and maybe others. The victims were random. They’d shoot one person that was in a group of three or four and move on. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to what they did,” said Eric.

“How can there be?” asked Macie. They stared at her. “How can there be logic to men killing people who were out holiday shopping? Innocent people who were supposed to be home with their families last night having dinner. Today, their families are planning their funerals.”

“We know, sweetie,” said Luke. “None of it makes sense. Random shootings don’t make sense. This will bring out everyone against weapons in the U.S. and everyone for weapons in the U.S. There will be no middle ground. Arguments will occur on both sides, for and against. People will be yelling for stricter laws, background checks, all of it, and in the end, nothing will be resolved.”

“Again, can we blame them?” asked Macie. “I understand the need for weapons in the hands of men like you guys, my father, all of us here. I get that. You’re providing the service of protecting the rest of us. Police, military, security. Understandable. I’m struggling with this, Luke. Why does the average man need a semi-automatic military-grade rifle?”

All of the men were quiet for a moment. They’d been asked that very question on more than one occasion. In fact, they’d pondered it themselves, wondering if there were some happy medium for people to retain the right to protect themselves and their property and the right to bear arms of any type.

“I don’t have an answer for that, Macie,” said Luke. “I know that this is happening way too often, but when we look at the facts for each case, the shooter got their hands on the weapon illegally through their parents or another family member, or they were pushed to their limits by bullies at school, victims themselves.”

“I know, I know,” she said, nodding. “I don’t want to fight you guys about this, but I do feel like we’re going to get caught in the middle of this if we don’t figure out who these men are and how they had so many weapons.”

“Well, it is Louisiana,” said Garr. “Almost every man in the state owns a weapon of some sort. But I know what you’re saying. These weapons weren’t for protection. They were for killing.”

“Maybe their name, the Boy Scouts, isn’t about the scouting organization at all,” said Macie. “Maybe it’s about something else. A mission of some sort.”

“Well,” nodded Hex, “their mission is about to get a helluva lot more complicated.”