Reckless (27 page)

The group moved forward toward the center of the row home, but their boots had no sooner hit the bottom porch board than one of the guys on squad shouldered his way out of the unit directly to their left, yanking his mask from his face.

“Search is clear in here, and neighbors are reporting they haven't seen the guy who lives in that one since he left for work this morning,” he barked over the rush of flames and the steady roll of heat. “From what Oz can see from up top, he said the Charlie side of the third floor is pretty heavily involved, and if these units are all alike, you've got your fucking work cut out for you with that line. The stairs over here were a bitch and a half.”

Anything else he might've added was cut off by the radio request for an immediate search in the end unit, and Cole jerked his chin at the unit in front of them with nobody home.

“Go. We've got this.” He nodded as the guy fell out with the rest of squad to search the end unit. He paused at the front door just long enough to force the wood from the hinges with his Halligan bar, angling past the threshold with steely purpose. Smoke clung to the air in a curtainlike haze, and Alex reached up to pull his mask over his face, motioning for Jones to do the same before they elbowed their way after Cole.

“I'm going up to floor three. We've got to keep this fire from walking,” Cole hollered from just inside the entryway, motioning toward the set of thinly carpeted stairs in front of them. “I'll knock this thing down before it spreads any further and work my way down to you.”

They maneuvered their way up the first set of steps single file, waves of soot and ash clogging the visibility in the windowless space and hampering any quick progress Alex had hoped to make. The second-floor landing was little more than a series of boxy angles and tight turns leading up or down, all with potential roadblocks and range of motion that amounted to Alex's new best friend, Jack Shit.

“God damn it.” Cole surveyed the situation, his frown evident even behind his mask. “There have to be seventy different recipes for disaster with a layout like this.”

But Alex motioned his best friend upward with a brisk back-and-forth of one hand, while giving Jones the signal to hold steady where he stood with the other. “Go,” he said to Cole. “Jones and I will keep this from becoming a cluster fuck.” His kept his
maybe
to himself as Everett hauled ass toward the third floor; at least they could radio if things got hairy.

Alex swiveled a calculating gaze in a quick three-sixty, turning on one booted heel to scan as much of the second floor as he could. Strains of daylight did their damnedest to poke in from the trio of open-doored bedrooms just off the stretch of the hallway leading toward the rear of the house, and Alex measured three—no four sites of active fire in his line of sight alone.

“Okay, Jones. Stay right there between floors one and two. Make sure you—”

Out of the corner of his eye, Alex caught the barely there outline of a figure hunched in the doorway of the far bedroom.

“Jesus!” His pulse went ballistic, and he cursed fluently as he whipped his hand up toward the radio on his shoulder. “Donovan to command. We need a search on the second floor, like
now
.”

“That's a negative, Donovan.” Westin's voice crackled over the two-way. “Everett is reporting that the third floor is a goddamn train wreck. I need those lines clear.”

“Yeah, well I've got . . .” Alex squinted back down the hallway, sweat dripping into his eyes and fogging his mask.

No one was there.

“Did you see that?” he asked, swinging toward Jones. “I swear I saw someone in that back room.”

Jones gave his head one tight shake. “I was concentrating on the line.”

Shit.
Of course he was. It's what Alex had told him to do.

“Not the time to stop being chatty, Donovan,” Westin grated through the radio, and Alex arrowed his stare back to the bedroom, nearly engulfed by smoke and shadows.

“I saw . . . something in the rear bedroom, east side. I swear.” His legs itched to bolt down the hall, but he settled for a lung-burning shout. “Fire department! Call out!”

The only answer was the incessant rush of flames and Alex's breath sawing in and out of his own ears.

“Neighbors say there's nobody home,” Westin radioed, yanking Alex's attention back to the landing. “I can't green light a search on a maybe. Not with a fire like this.”

Alex assessed the line, a sharp curl of relief spiraling through his gut as he saw it advancing, albeit slowly. “We're straight down here on the landing. I'm telling you, Cap.” He turned again, taking a few steps toward the mouth of the long, tightrope-thin corridor. “I had eyes on somebody.”

“Is that an affirmative?”

Alex paused. “Not entirely, but—”

“Can't do it, Donovan.” Westin's growl was all bite, and for a minute, Alex froze. He hadn't run a fire call in over five weeks, and his screaming muscles and overeager adrenaline were living proof. While they were able to advance the water line right this second, Alex knew shit could go south on a dime—hell, he'd seen worse consequences from more stable situations. His brain cautioned him to stay put, to stand down on the search and work with Jones to back up Everett so they could all put this fire out as fast as possible.

But then the figure reappeared, and Alex lunged down the hallway.

“Fire department!” he bellowed, sweat streaming between his shoulder blades as his heart pumped his blood on a lightning-fast circuit through his veins. Blocking out the shouts from behind him—presumably Jones's—as well as the abundant stream of curse words coming in from the radio that were definitely Westin's, Alex barreled toward the bedroom.

A man, thin and frail and wrapped in a bathrobe, stood bent over by the bed, his face pale white and panic-stricken as his chest heaved with weak coughs, and holy hell, he looked barely a step away from keeling over.

“Tried . . . to call out, but . . . I came home sick, and . . . I think I passed out. . . .”

“Don't worry,” Alex said with a shake of his head. “I'm going to get you out of here.”

He crossed the threshold to grab the guy and haul ass out of there, but he only got three steps inside the bedroom before his gut plummeted all the way to his feet. More than half of the Charlie side wall was on fire. Bright streamers of flame hovered over the doorway, reaching up to the ceiling in a malicious orange arc, and hell. No wonder the man hadn't come running out to the safety of the hallway beyond.

Alex reached for his radio with one hand while guiding the man away from the door with the other. “Donovan to command, I've got a man trapped on the second floor, Charlie side. Needs medical attention. Our exit is compromised.” Big. Fucking. Understatement. More than half the damn door frame had gone up in flames in the fifteen seconds Alex had been inside the room. “I need a ladder to this window, and I need it now.”

“This fire's burning like a sonofabitch. We're trying to get to you, but it's going to take a couple of minutes.”

The man swayed in place, his coughs rattling all the way through him as he gasped for air, and Alex turned to yank the window as far as it would go against the sash. Ah hell, there wasn't even so much as a tree or a porch roof within range of the twenty-five-foot drop, and a straight jump would be upper-level dangerous. “I don't have a couple of minutes,” he said. “
Hurry.
”

Alex stabbed his boots into the floor, looking around the room for something—anything—he could use to get them either out the window or past the deteriorating door frame. But there was nothing usable in the tiny room, and the odds of surmounting either obstacle were growing more shitastic by the second.

The man collapsed into a heap on the floor.

“Whoa!” All of Alex's air abandoned his lungs on the shout. He hit his knees, the jolt running up his legs even through his heavily padded turnout gear. But the man was unresponsive, his breathing thready and irregular as Alex checked his vitals. He craned his neck to look at the window over his shoulder, and cold fingers of dread slithered up his spine at the realization that no matter how fast squad appeared with that ladder, he didn't even have ten seconds to wait.

“Okay, buddy.” Alex choked back the harsh tang of fear before scooping him from the carpet. “Let's get you out of here.”

The man's frail body was an easy lift, even for Alex's wailing muscles. The left side of the door frame was completely swallowed up by flames, so he swung the man's body over his right shoulder. Locking his molars together with a determined
clack
, he aimed himself at the burning exit, not even giving himself a chance to second-guess as he burst past the falling ash and flames.

And slammed right into Cole and Jones on the other side.

“Christ, Teflon!” Everett shouted, and Jones reached out, sliding the unconscious man from Alex's shoulder in a quick grab.

“He's barely breathing. Get him to Rachel. Go,” Alex barked. Relief blasted through the unchecked adrenaline, making his vision shaky and his mouth tilt upward into a holy-shit-that-was-close smile. He jerked his chin at Cole, signaling for his best friend to follow Jones down the hall so they could get the hell out of Dodge.

But before Alex could take a single step, the door frame he'd just charged past came crashing down over the left side of his body, and then everything went black.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Zoe stood in the eerily silent hallway at Station Eight for what could've been a minute or an hour. Hell, it might've been a day, except that no firefighters or paramedics had come back through the door.

Not that there was any sort of guarantee that they would.

Something twisted in her chest, dangerously close to her heart. Between the blow of not getting the Collingsworth Grant and the showdown with her father, this night had already destroyed both her confidence and her faith. The numb shock of losing the grant had quickly worn away after the phone call with the director, leaving raw streaks of pain in its wake. Hope House was so in need, its residents so deserving of the money to make their temporary home a better, safer place, with warm food and a chance for more. Zoe had worked for months on end to make it happen, throwing not only her heart and soul into the effort, but asking everyone around her for a piece of theirs as well.

She'd believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that she would get that money so she could finally make a real difference at Hope House. To the point that she'd risked everything.

And
lost
.

With her nerves feeling like they'd been scorched over high heat and left to stick to the bottom of a frying pan, Zoe blinked herself back to the firehouse, where fresh waves of dread stuck into her like needles. Her breath trembled in her lungs, her chest rising and falling in shaky bursts. The black-framed photos marching down the wall in front of her slid back into focus, and tears re-formed in her eyes as she looked at them again. Oz and Andersen, their faces creased in concentration as they hung from harnesses off the side of the practice tower, a dizzying four stories above the ground. O'Keefe at the back of the ambulance, arms outstretched as he helped a woman huddled helplessly on the gurney in front of him. Alex and her father, arms slung over each other's shoulders with smiles they might not ever wear around each other again. And Brennan and Mason Watts, hamming it up for the camera in the engine bay, both of them blissfully unaware of the tragic consequences that would wreck the career of one and take the life of the other.

Alex had promised her he'd be okay, that
everything
would be okay. But clearly, risks failed. Hell, she hadn't even made it to the final selection round for the Collingsworth Grant before her leap of faith had fallen spectacularly flat. How the hell could he make a promise so enormous and expect to keep it when every single time he went to work, his life was literally on the line?

Like right now.

Choking back the sob squeezing the back of her throat, Zoe forced herself down the hallway. She needed to focus, to breathe, to take the panic rising in her chest and get rid of it.

She headed for the kitchen.

The grocery bags she'd handed off when she'd arrived stood in a precise row on the stainless steel counter next to the refrigerator, and she emptied them one by one. Jones had put the trays of mac and cheese in the fridge, but pulling them out to get them in the oven seemed kind of pointless since she didn't know when everyone would be back.

“Stop it,” she chided, and fabulous, now she was talking to herself. She turned toward the pantry—there had to be something in there she could chop, mix, or bake—when the flash of the muted TV caught her eye from across the common room.

Everyone had hauled out to respond to that fire call so fast, they must've forgotten to turn the thing off. Zoe crossed over to the pair of couches arranged in an L shape in front of the television, where a quick pat-through of the cushions yielded the remote.

But the image on the screen turned her blood to ice water, and instead of hitting the power button to turn the television off, she jammed her finger over the volume, cranking it loud enough to vibrate in her ears.

“. . .
Breaking news at the scene of a fire in the one hundred block of Windsor Avenue, where firefighters have made dramatic attempts to put out the massive blaze now taking over four units of a row home. Moments ago, our very own KTV crew witnessed a breathtaking rescue that left at least one person critically injured. . . .
”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Zoe gasped, fear slamming through her with enough force to knock the air from her rib cage with a cry.

In the background, over the reporter's shoulder, O'Keefe and Rachel scrambled to take care of the lifeless figure strapped to the gurney, their faces as ash white and serious as she'd ever seen them. The man stretched out between them, prone and unmoving, was fully decked out in turnout gear, with one exception.

His helmet was missing, and Zoe would know that sun-kissed blond head anywhere on the planet.

The remote had barely hit the floor before she tore out of the fire station with her keys in her hand and her heart shattering into a million pieces in her chest.

 

 

By the time Zoe had made the ten-minute drive to Fair-view Hospital, her panic had grown six rows of razor-wire teeth and sunk them all the way into her bones. Barging past the hiss of the automatic double doors, she flung herself over the linoleum toward the information desk. Her breath hitched at an unnatural pace, tumbling her words together in a rushed mess.

“The man . . . the firefighter hurt at the fire on Windsor. Please. I need . . . I need . . .” Absolute terror clotted the rest of her request, and the woman behind the desk leaned forward with obvious concern.

“Are you a family member?” she asked, and Zoe froze.

“I, uh . . . I . . .”

“She's with us,” came a familiar voice from her left. Her heart vaulted into her windpipe as she swung around to see Cole walking toward the desk, his face streaked with sweat and soot and seriousness as he came to a stop beside her.

“Oh my God, Cole.” Zoe threw her arms around him, choking on the pervasive stench of smoke clinging to his turnout gear. “What's going on? I saw the fire on the news and they said—”

“Come on. Let me take you to the waiting room down the hall, okay?”

A wave of nausea roiled in the pit of her belly. “Please just tell me,” she whispered, wiping away the tears wobbling on her lashes.

Cole motioned her toward a quiet corner of the hospital's lobby. “We just got here five minutes ago. Alex was injured during a rescue. They're assessing him in one of the trauma rooms right now.”

Zoe locked her knees to keep herself upright. “Injured,” she repeated, and God, if she didn't get a straight answer, she was going to lose her ever-loving mind. “How bad? Come on, Cole, talk to me here. I need to know.”

The firefighter hesitated, only for a second, but with Cole, it might as well have been a screaming admission of things gone wrong. “Part of a ceiling beam collapsed across his back and shoulder. He lost consciousness, and Jones and I dragged him to the ambo. Rachel said he woke up just briefly on the way here, but . . .”

“But?” Zoe rasped.

“The docs have to check him out, Zoe,” Cole said, his voice canting lower with concern and the sharp undercurrent of fear. “He's hurt pretty bad, but I don't know any more than that.”

Every ounce of despair that she'd stuffed into her chest in the last few hours came surging up in a hot rush, the absolute irony of Alex's voice echoing through her head.

Except the promise had been a lie. Just like all the other ones that had come crashing down on her today.

Zoe exhaled, and her fingertips and toes tingled with numbness that started working its way inward. “Is everyone else in the waiting room?”

Cole nodded, just one lift of his cleft chin. “Everyone except for your father. He said he needed some space. Last I saw he was by the ambulance bay.” He paused. “Do you want to try to talk to him?”

“No,” Zoe said, her arms heavy with the prickle of non-feeling. “I'd like to sit in the waiting room with you guys, if that's all right.”

“Of course,” Cole said, ushering her toward the double doors marked EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT.

By the time she'd reached the tiny room filled with stony-faced firefighters, her heart had gone as numb as the rest of her.

 

 

Alex swallowed past the steady stream of fire ants in his throat, and God
damn
, whoever was playing the samba in his skull needed to lay off the fucking percussion.

“Mr. Donovan. Nice to see you made it back.” The voice was just as unfamiliar as Alex's surroundings, and wait . . . where the hell was he?

“Thanks,” he croaked, shocked to hear that his own voice vaguely resembled forty-grit sandpaper. “Where . . . ?”

“Take it easy.” The voice was joined by the face of a gray-haired man in a white coat. “My name is Dr. Ward, and I'm the attending physician here in the Emergency Department at Fairview Hospital. Do you remember being brought in?”

Alex squinted, which proved to be a stupid move because now there were two guys in front of him, and he was pretty sure the doc didn't have a twin. Clips of memory swirled in his mind's eye, surging and then slipping away. Narrow stairs, a smoke-filled hallway, backing up Everett on the nozzle . . .

“There was a man in that bedroom.” Alex froze in realization for only a second before bolting upright against the mattress where he lay. The move sent a shock wave of pain on a nasty route from his left shoulder to his fingers and back, and what was with the sling on his arm?

“Take it easy, Mr. Donovan.” Dr. Ward's voice tacked on an unspoken
or I'll restrain you
, but Alex didn't really give a shit. “You've sustained a few injuries. You need to be still so you don't make them worse.”

Yeah, yeah. Alex shook his head even though the move made throwing up a distinct probability. “I pulled a man out of that fire. Where is he?”

“He's here at the hospital, too.” Dr. Ward's expression stayed completely neutral, but he moved forward to look Alex in the eye. “Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Are you feeling any pain right now?”

Even though he wanted to barrel past the Q & A, it was clear from the look of things that getting chippy wouldn't take Alex very far. “The back of my shoulder hurts a little.” Okay, so by
a little
, he really meant
a butt ton
. But still. “And my head feels kind of weird, but otherwise, I'm fine.”

“I see.” Dr. Ward took a hard look at the monitor by Alex's bedside, following up with the whole stethoscope-flashlight thing. “Well, you were brought in by ambulance with injuries to your head, your upper back, and your shoulder.”

“Really?” Shock prickled a path up his spine. How did he not remember being in the ambo?

“You sustained a moderate concussion. It's not unusual for people to have memory gaps immediately following a traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Ward assured him, as if he'd sensed Alex's concern. “Fortunately your gear kept you from sustaining any burn damage, and your colleagues got you here very quickly, but you did lose consciousness at the scene, and you've been in and out during your assessment.”

“Good to know,” Alex said, the joke falling flat. Holy shit, how much time had he lost?

The doc continued. “We've cleared you of any immediate spinal injuries, although you sustained some blunt force trauma to the back of your shoulder and neck, apparently from a falling ceiling beam. X-rays don't show any significant damage to the bone in your upper arm or shoulder.”

“So I'm fine,” Alex said. His arm throbbed in protest, so he tacked on, “Mostly.”

“What you are is lucky. And I imagine, what you will be in the coming days is very sore.”

Alex matched Dr. Ward's raised brow, shifting against the overstarched sheet on the gurney beneath him. “That's not a no.”

The corners of the doc's mouth tipped upward in a touché-like smile. “We'll have to monitor you overnight per concussion protocol, and I'd like to run a CT scan and a few more tests just to hedge our bets. But yes. Your prognosis is for a full recovery eventually, provided that you follow your standards of care.”

“What about the man from the fire?” Concern peppered Alex's gut. The guy had barely been breathing, and God, he'd been so limp when Alex had picked him up to get him out of that room.

Dr. Ward shifted his weight, his internal debate raging clearly on his face. “Hospital policy dictates that I can't share patient information with nonfamily members. However, I can tell you that every patient brought to Fairview Hospital's ED gets the very best care we can offer.”

God
damn
it, why had Alex hesitated when he'd first seen the guy in that doorway? “So he's in pretty bad shape.”

“He's being extremely well attended,” Dr. Ward said, the subtext of his nonanswer screaming through loud and freaking clear. “At any rate, you've got a room full of firefighters outside who are champing at the bit to see you. I'll need to restrict visits to one at a time, and only for a few minutes each, but I can apprise them of your condition if you'd like.”

Oh hell. The last time any of them had been hauled off in an ambo, their captain had been critically burned, and the time before that, they'd lost a man. Knowing everyone at Eight, they were probably flipping out. “Please. Make sure you tell them the prognosis part first.”

He sat back against the gurney, his head and neck duking it out for the title of I Hate You More. Everett had needed backup on the nozzle—there was no denying those stairs had been ridiculous, and not in the good way. But Jones had been there, too, and just because he was a rookie didn't mean he was an idiot. If Alex had gone down that hallway earlier, even by a minute or two, he might've gotten the guy to safety.