Chapter 21 Galen
Galen
Smells like trouble.
The snow.
It’s three in the morning. I’m in the station yard, coiling hose, hands moving with little conscious direction from me as I fumble through the job, fatigue weighing me down, fresh flakes falling at my feet, and though my mind is full of Sab, the air around me thick with damp and diesel, it’s a thought that never quits at this time of year.
They looked sick.
Him and Esme. Another thought I can’t shake, but this one’s not so old. It’s been with me a couple of days, and now I’m counting down the hours to the end of my shift so I can maybe do something with the number I scrawled on my arm as I stalked Sab’s van out of the local ASDA two nights ago.
It’s not on my arm anymore. It washed off after a garage fire late last night. But even if I didn’t have every digit inscribed on my soul, it’s on a scrap of paper in the pump cab where I’ve left my phone too.
Least, I hope it is, or I might fecking die.
As it is, I’m still the same irritable melt I’ve been all week, blanking my siblings and Logan, cutting my ma short when she called to see if I liked the itchy as all feck jumper she sent.
I feel like my skin doesn’t fit me. Like it’s inside out.
Every sight and sound pisses me off, and my crew are getting the brunt of it.
Sonny wanders over to where I’m finishing up with the hose. Watches me drop it over the rim of his tea mug. “The boys are asking me if you got dumped.”
A reasonable question. But it irks me enough to feel like throwing hands. “Don’t you ever shut the fuck up?”
Sonny blinks, caught off guard by the growl in my voice. Then he shrugs. “Fair enough, mate.”
He walks away, and guilt rushes in, barbed and sour. This kid, he’s a good one. And they put him with me because I’m a competent mentor and I’m nice. Jesus, I’ve messed that up too, but unlike the mess I’ve made with Sab, this one is easily fixed.
Apologise.
Make him another cuppa.
Spend some time showing him more than the worst of me—
The bells go off. And you know, that sound, I’ll hear it in my sleep till the day I snuff it, but sometimes it hits different. Sometimes it thrums through your ribs, straight to your marrow, and you know, even before the Tannoy crackles.
“RTC—coach versus barrier. Multiple persons. Coach in the water.”
Like every firefighter in the yard, I still for a beat, that engrained urgency taking a second to land.
Then it’s chaos, and we run, grabbing kit, boots thudding the concrete, piling onto the pump as if we’re rolling into Christmas Eve while some poor bastards drown in a freezing river.
Because that’s what’s happening—this isn’t a fecking drill, and I shove my gloves where I need them with my mind whirring a hundred miles an hour.
An RTC into water.
In December.
Not the first I’ve faced, but it’s been a while, and I already feel the cold seeping into me. The dread as we wade into something that wants to kill us as much as anyone who’s lived through the impact.
Take a chance, Nash told me.
Not sure he had this on his bingo card of wisdom, feck my life.
I propel myself to the engine, Sonny a heartbeat behind me, and clamber into the cab.
We find our seats as the doors slam. Blue lights flare. The engine roars to life, and through the open windows, I scent the same danger in the air as when the snow started in earnest a few hours ago.
I’m not looking forward to being cold and wet.
To contemplating it could be the last thing I ever feel.
I need more—I need Sab. And that selfish need, despite the haunting memory of him walking away from me in the supermarket, has me reaching for the phone I left on the rig.
Scrabbling for the crumpled slip of paper some big-arsed twat has already sat on.
I grab them both before I can talk myself out of it and shake off the gloves I’ve only managed to get halfway on. My heart hammers worse than any call anticipation I’ve ever had and I catch my reflection in the phone screen.
Wild-eyed.
Unshaven to the limit of regulations.
Literal fear lines my face, as if I suddenly can’t bear the thought of not saying all the fecking shit I should’ve said weeks ago. Of Sab never knowing he was more than a hookup to me. That he always will be, even if he never speaks to me again.
I’m running out of time.
I type, quick and raw, words spilling from my fingers unchecked. The undeniable fecking truth pouring from my heart to fill the screen in black and white.
Reeling, I hit send as the engine lurches through a savage pothole. There’s no time to read what I wrote. No time to think—to breathe, as my heart finds that eerie calm unique to the most horrible fecking things, and the pump lurches to a stop.
Brakes screeching.
Sirens the soundtrack to hell.
I drop my phone, switching modes so fast I lose track of my precious scrap of paper. I’m out of my seat as the doors fly open. As blue lights flood the scene and the world spins into pandemonium.
The broken bridge.
The coach, roof-deep in coal-dark water, mist rising from the ice.
Screaming.
So much screaming.
It consumes me like the raging river water and I hit the ground running, anchoring Sonny to me, knowing by the strangled sound he makes this is the worst thing he’s ever seen.
It’s not great for me either, but in the split second before the scene swallows me whole, one thought tethers me.
He knows.
Whatever happens to me tonight.
Sab.
He knows, probably with more clarity than I do, that I think I might love him.
The scene is carnage. Blue lights shatter the dark, the mangled coach on its side in the black water, three-quarters submerged and still sinking.
There’s no time to do anything but run, years of drills and past disasters powering my body through muscle memory so potent I almost turn to Sonny and shout Logan’s name.
I catch myself. Just. But I don’t stop to shake my head. Or heed the reminder I still need to apologise to the lad for ripping his head off in the yard.
Instead, I bark orders. Deploy lines and thermal kit. Tune out the shrill and panicked screams of the trapped souls on the coach.
Right now, they’re numbers.
They have to be.
Kitted up, I lead Sonny to the water line.
He’s sharp-eyed and ready, but apprehension darkens his young eyes, and I don’t blame him.
Freezing water on this scale, rushing at this sheer speed, it’s a goddam horror, and Christ knows I needed someone older and uglier than me to guide me through it the first time I faced it.
I seize his lapels with both hands. “It’s going to be cold,” I warn him. “Worse than anything you’ve done in training, and it’ll hit you like a hammer until you ride it out. Thirty seconds, okay? That’s all it takes to get control back and push on.”
Thirty seconds the coach passengers don’t have, but I don’t tell Sonny that.
He knows.
Nodding, I release him from my grip and turn back to the water, steeling myself for the frigid shock I’ve never got used to.
Harness clipped, line secure, I steer Sonny in front of me where I can keep an eye on him, and enter the water, cursing up a storm as freezing water surrounds me, the razor cold an absolute bastard, even through the kit.
I don’t take my thirty seconds.
Sonny doesn’t either.
We push on—we push through—and wade out into the icy drink to where the coach lists at a treacherous angle. Glass blown, body warped from impact, diesel staining the drink a meaner shade of black, screams still carrying over the water and into the night.
They’re still alive.
We reach the coach and fight for access, smashing glass and hauling people out. Grabbing and wrenching, over and over, losing track of how many, just that there’s more, and we won’t stop until we have them all.
But the coach…it’s unstable. Metal groans under us, listing harder with every sweep of current in the raging river. We’re on borrowed luck and somehow, in the mayhem, I’ve lost track of Sonny.
A slender human slips through my gloved fingers.
I grab for them again and drag them out through a shattered window. “Sonny! Talk to me. Where are you?”
No answer.
I shout again, passing the body over my shoulder to the crew behind me.
No response. And then I spot him, his line snagged on debris, head low, grip slipping as he flails against the side of the coach, cold shock overwhelming his faculties.
“Sonny!” I lunge for him, catching his harness before the current and his snagged line pull him under. His eyes are wide and white, panic already there. He thrashes, sluicing water over us both, and I realise he’s fighting me as much as the cold.
Shouting isn’t working.
I wrench him close, pinning him against me, forcing him to conserve the energy he’ll need to walk out of this water. I growl in his fecking ear. “Stop. Breathe. Focus.”
And I keep growling until the fight in him fades and I can coax a rhythm back into his lungs.
It costs us valuable time. Vital seconds, lives still depending on us. But Sonny’s with me. He’s whole. Now we just need to dig deep for a Christmas miracle, clear this goddamn coach, and get the feck out of here.
Easy, right?
Not even close.
I set Sonny straight, but the coach moves with me, lurching again, grinding metal against rock in the racing current.
Cursing, I lose my footing, the world shifts, and Sonny’s weight drags me under—
Fuck.
Fuck.
It’s my turn to fight. I break the surface and shove Sonny as hard as I can toward the crews behind us, hollering at them to haul him in.
He resists, trying to stay with me, but I holler at him too until he listens, and battles his way to safety.
Then I turn back to the wreck, instinct telling me there are more souls trapped inside.
That I’m not done here.
Not yet.
I plant a boot on a surface that feels solid, but it’s twisted wreckage. It gives way, taking me under again, and pressure closes in on my lungs before I can figure which way is up.
Holy Christ. I’m as annoyed as I am scared, and I fight the line tangling round my legs, kicking at it like it owes me money. Like it owes me life, my lungs already screaming, black water and diesel flooding my senses, panic a distant drumbeat I’ll reflect on later.
Strength leaches from my limbs, murky light blinking and blurring. Screams become all too real as my window for survival closes in on me, and my annoyance fades.
So does the fear.
I can’t see shit anymore. And yet somehow, something white catches my eye as it drifts from me in the water.
It looks like a butterfly, and it should fecking worry me how long it takes me to conclude it’s no cabbage white. Then I realise what it is and I stop thinking entirely, my brain wiped clean of everything except the name I scrawled on that scrap of paper.
Sab.
It’s his phone number. The same number I plumbed into my phone before I walked into this river. So it doesn’t matter if it floats away. And yet I reach for it anyway, my hand lazy in the manic river, even as I stretch and my fingers find nothing but angry water.
The paper slips beyond my grasp, twirling in the current, eerie and calm, like I’m starting to feel—like I do feel as the water presses closer and the cold settles into the kind of silence I’ve made my peace with before.
Dangerous silence, my brain whispers. And I know it, I fecking swear. But this kind of quiet, it’s nice. It’s consuming. And just for a second, I let it take me with one last thought of Sab dancing through my mind.
He knows.