I put my face to the floor, covering my eyes with my arm as the emergency operator droned through a script meant to keep me calm. My muscles were starting to spasm. It was getting hotter in my apartment. Too hot. Painfully hot. Yet I felt cold inside, melting and freezing all at the same time.
That was when I heard them. The other people who were trapped on my floor.
They were screaming. Oh, God, I’d never heard sounds like that before. I didn’t know people were capable of making such raw, animal noises. Each one was a blade in my heart, a keening wail that only just rose over the snarl of the flames growing steadily closer, closer.
“Oh, God,” I breathed into my cell phone. “Oh, God, no. No. There’s more of them. More of us. Up here. Please, you have to tell them... Oh, Jesus, I think I hear a kid!”
There was a baby crying. And then, just like that, I was crying too. Crying because she was going to die before she’d even got to live. Because I was going to die, too, before I’d had a chance to do anything right.
“Fire rescue is on the scene. I’ve advised them there are residents trapped on the sixteenth floor...”
There was a sound like something fluttering by overhead, and despite my teary, smarting eyes, I looked up. Fire crawled along the ceiling, liquid and terrible, like lava spilling out on Pompeii. Pieces of ceiling crackled and rained down on me. I crawled feebly under my kitchen table.
“Help...” I whispered. It was all I could say. I couldn’t stop coughing. I was getting dizzy.
So, this is really it, I thought very dimly past the panic and the fear. I’ll never have a husband .Never have kids. Never have someone who actually fuckin’ loves me. I don’t even get to say goodbye...
There was a brilliant flash in my mind’s eye: a projector stuttering, flaring to life, playing the story of my life to a symphony of dying screams.
There was that time I’d baked cookies with Mom, my little, chubby hands making a mess of the flour back when she was still healthy—before the cancer came and sapped the life from her bones.
There was her wake, too, where I’d locked myself in my room and sobbed for three straight hours until my stepfather stopped knocking and everyone downstairs went away.
Jim pushing me in a swing. God, that had to have been way back. I was ten, I think. My stepbrother was sixteen or so. Funny that in these memories, I didn’t think of “steps.” Jim was “Daddy.” My daddy, pushing his little girl higher and higher, touching the clouds...
Boyfriends, long past. First kisses, and better ones. The day my stepbrother left us, years after Jim took to whiskey like every other mean drunk did. God, so stereotypical. Why couldn’t it have been something cool? Absinthe. Now there’s a classy liquor...
The look on both their faces that day was branded into my brain, into my eyelids, into every optic nerve I had. But now the fire was consuming them too, the projector screen fraying at the edges, burning, blackening, curling inward.
Words, blurry and shivering, fading into black: The End.
Oh, God. I couldn’t even hear the screaming anymore.
There was an explosion then, as I was slipping into death’s cool embrace, and then someone had their hands on me, yanking my shoulder, flipping me onto my back, checking me for a pulse.
Through soot-heavy eyes, I saw his face mask, his respiration, the red and yellow of his gear. I wheezed, trying to say something. I’m still not sure what. Maybe it was a laugh. I was too tired to be properly hysterical.
So very, very tired.
He drew his fingers away from under my jaw and picked me up, flinging me like a ragdoll over his shoulder. Blood rushed to my head and the fireman slung his arm beneath my thigh, his other shoulder bearing the weight of my torso. He drew my arm across his throat and held my hand by the wrist, but for a second, just a little one, our fingers touched through his glove. And I remember thinking, very clearly, how thankful I was for that. I wasn’t alone.
Even if I died now, at least it would be with someone beside me. With him.
He turned, steps hard and heavy, to the broken window. “No,” I tried to tell him, but the word wouldn’t form. My lips were numb. My eyelids were leaden. I was passing in and out of consciousness, and the rest of what happened was a blur.
One moment, I was over his shoulders.
Then on the table, sprawled, gasping. Fish out of water.
Then noises like screeching. Banging. Metal on metal.
My gorge rising as the fireman picked me up again so effortlessly, positioning my body across his broad shoulders again, carrying my weight like I was nothing. And yet somehow, everything. At the same time.
He was saving me. Taking me into the light. Was I dying? I was dying. Surely.
So bright. So cool. So heavenly.
And then... air.
I coughed and gagged. Gagged so hard I almost threw up. I choked on my bile, on the oxygen flooding my nose and mouth. Blinding—the light was white-hot, burning like the flames.
Too bright. Too much.
My lungs bloomed with agony. I tried to swat at my face, but whatever was clamped over it wasn’t budging. Something was holding me still. Someone.
I let my eyes flutter just a little more open, even though it hurt. Even though I wanted to scream, though I couldn’t. My throat was too full of needles. Too swollen and raw.
Every breath was a labor. I could hear screaming again. No, not screaming. Screeching. Like sirens. Firetrucks.
The world came into focus around me, which only made the pain worse. I shut my eyes again and writhed and heard a muffled voice say, “Breathe. Just breathe...”
It was so soothing. Those low, dulcet tones made my rigid muscles relax a little and I let go of the hand on top of my face. Awareness seeped in slowly—that hand was clamping an oxygen mask over me, bestowing the gift of sweet, sweet air I’d been denied in my burning apartment building. It was the firefighter. He’d saved me. And now he held me in his arms, bringing me back to life.
“Others,” I whispered and wished I hadn’t. Fuck, Tanya. For once, look after yourself.
“Just breathe,” he replied. Then louder, and not to me, “Will somebody get EMS the fuck over here, please?”
Something about him, even through the haze of pain and possibl
e brain damage, seemed so familiar to me. Maybe I was making bonds where there were none. After all, he’d pulled me out of the fire I should’ve died in, and people got attached to heroes all the time.
But the feeling that I knew him, that we’d met before, just wouldn’t leave me. When I heard him strip off his face gear, I opened my eyes.
He was slow to come into focus. My mind was still a mess, twisting light and shadow and color into some dark dreamscape where nothing made sense. But with each breath I took, my vision became sharper, and soon I knew exactly who I was staring at.
That dark, silky hair. That hard, furrowed brow. Those gleaming green eyes narrowed into slits, yet still reflecting genuine concern. Lips pulled taut beneath a few days’ worth of stubble that made him look more like a man than I remembered him seeming the last time I’d lain eyes on him.
“Fuck,” I wheezed. “Gunner?”
He looked me over. “Do I know you?”
Finally, I laughed. It was weak and I sounded like a frog, but after those four ridiculous words, I could let my hysteria out.
He didn’t wait for my answer. A new face came into view as Gunner pulled away, his mask leaving me just long enough for a smaller one to be strapped in its place. Gunner turned back toward the building and before I could say a word, he was gone.
My long-lost stepbrother had saved my life. And he didn’t even recognize me.
Chapter 3
Gunner
“Paging Doctor Powell. Doctor Powell, please call extension...”
The intercom blared through the linoleum-lined hallway, but I couldn’t have cared less about what it had to say. I hated hospitals. Ever since my stepmother, Nancy, had gone the way she had—withered, gaunt, with tubes sticking out of her nose and her arms—I couldn’t see hospitals as anything other than death houses.
The worst part, I think, is all the damn waiting, sitting outside while doctors and nurses poke and prod, asking the same questions over and over without ever giving any answers. I remembered the way my dad had sat in the waiting room time after time whenever they’d hospitalize Mom for her treatments, the look on his face: hopelessness.