Chapter 48
Wyatt
Jumping out of the truck with my irons—a Halligan bar and flathead axe—I do my best not to sprint towards the main door of the building that leads to the stairwell. The one that will take us straight up a flight of stairs to the massage clinic.
Nate’s shouting from the door, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” so I know I’m not doing a great job, but Bryn is in there.
We’re the first truck on scene, and things looked okay when we first pulled up. No smoke billowing out of windows or the roof, but we all know that looks can be deceiving. My gut tells me they are.
Nearly ripping the door from its hinges, I make entry, Brody hot on my heels. We’re not two steps inside when there’s a cry from above.
“Help! Help!”
Both our heads lift, finding a man coming down the stairs with a limp body in his arms.
My heart lodges somewhere in my throat, stomach sinking. Bryn. Fuck.
But as he rounds the stairway to the second half of the flight, it’s clearly not Bryn, and the breath billows out of me into my mask. Celeste, the receptionist.
The relief is short-lived. Bryn is up there, I’m positive of it. Every instinct screams that she’s there and I need to get to her.
I need to stay focused. It’s what Nate kept repeating in the truck on the way here.
“Can you get her outside?” Brody questions the guy, taking point and ushering him towards the door. “There’s more help out there.”
I’m already on the radio. “Two victims coming out.”
As the guy passes by me, our eyes lock for a fraction of a second, and something in them pulls at a thread of recognition, but Brody hits me in the shoulder before I can tug on it.
Following behind him up the stairs, I let him lead the way with the thermal imaging camera.
So far, visibility is good, but I’m expecting things to get a lot worse.
“Division two, bravo side, fully engulfed. We need water on bravo side, and roof ventilation,” Brody says into his radio at the top of the stairs.
He opens the rescue rope bag at his side, pulling the end out to tie around the stairwell railing.
To anchor us outside of the IDLH, or Immediate Danger to Life and Health, area. “Clip in.”
Acid slices through my veins at the sight, and it takes every ounce of willpower not to storm through the massage clinic doors when I see the way the vacant business to its left is lit up.
The flames are in the ceiling. Bryn’s room is the last one on the left at the back. It shares a wall with next door.
Flames are already in the ceiling, which means they’re already above her room.
“Easy.” Brody glances back to me, then down at my mask. “Slow it down. We’ll find her.”
At his command, I realize how fast my breath is coming, and concentrate to even it out. The faster and harder I breathe, the more oxygen I consume, the less time I have inside.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Pushing into the clinic’s reception area, we’re met with smoke.
It does nothing to help calm my nerves as we do a quick sweep through the room, the smoke not yet thick enough to make it hard to see the floor for any victims. When we reach the doorway that leads to the back hallway, we pause, Brody assessing it with the camera.
Nodding, he says, “Doors good, vent it.”
Grabbing the handle, I open it a crack, my body buzzing with adrenaline like it always does when opening a door.
As much as I want to knock the thing down to get back there and find Bryn, I know I can’t.
The risk of a flashover if we were to straight up push the door open is a chance I’m not willing to take when we don’t know what the conditions are.
Semi-dark smoke rushes out of the hall when it’s finally safe to open the door all the way, so much thicker and darker here than reception. Clenching my jaw, I look to the left, my soul leaving my body.
Thick, gray smoke consumes the end of the hallway, puffing out from the doorframe to Bryn’s room. It’s like a hungry beast, ready to consume and devour, never satiated. It lives to be a monster, and I live to conquer it, but in this moment, I don’t know how to slay it.
“Dalton,” Brody yells at me, grabbing onto the strap of my oxygen pack to shake me.
I blink, and he points to the ground five feet in front of us. Hope soars in my chest at the sight of a body, and I drop the Halligan and axe, lunging into the hall.
“Bryn!” I call.
It only takes me a second to realize this isn’t her. Those aren’t her legs. This isn’t her body.
Not her.
Not fucking her.
The same bittersweet relief washes over me. If this woman isn’t moving, which she isn’t, that means it isn’t Bryn that’s unresponsive. It also means that Bryn is still missing, which means…
No. I refuse to let the thought take shape, killing it before it kills my hope.
I’m going to find her.
Gathering the woman’s legs, I cross one over the other and lift them over my knee so I can crawl her backward.
“Victim found, division two, delta side.” Brody’s voice comes through the radio in my mask as I get to him.
We lock eyes, and I know he sees the pain of truth in mine when he grits his teeth, then he nods, backing out of the doorway so I can follow him out with our victim. We both know what this means, and it’s about to kill me.
There’s one rule Brody and I have to follow. One rule that can’t be broken.
Two in. Two out.
But I can’t. I can’t do it. I have a job to do, but how the fuck am I supposed to leave my heart in that hallway and hope it’s still there when I come back? How do I put this woman’s life ahead of the one I know is still in there? Ahead of the woman I want to spend forever with?
I can’t. It’s impossible.
This woman has a family too. She deserves to go home, deserves to be with them.
But my heart…
“Brody,” I yell, pausing only enough to hoist the woman off my leg and towards him. “Take her.”
“Wyatt.”
The warning is clear. Before I even look at him, I know he knows.
He shakes his head. “Two in, two out. I’m not leaving you.”
“You need to get her out,” I tell him. Even though he’s denying me out loud, he’s taking the woman from me. “I have to find Bryn.”
“We’re coming right back in,” he says.
“There’s no time to argue, and we both know it could be too late by the time we get back here,” I tell him, grabbing both of his shoulders, pleading with him. “Please. Let me get her. I can’t lose her, man. I can’t do it.”
Heartbreak and sorrow, grief and long-buried pain, race to the surface. I watch it all cross his face. The image of his dark eyes clouding over with memories that haunt him every day sears itself into my soul. Something that will now haunt me every day.
I know, at that moment, he sees the same path he’s been walking as a widower being chosen for me. Knows the devastating position I’m putting him in. The possibility of saving his friend and the woman I love. At the risk of losing one friend, or more.
Lifting the strap for the rescue rope over his shoulder, he puts it over my head, grabs onto the side of my mask and stares me straight in the eye. “Do not fucking die on me. Do not let her die. Do you understand me? I will come back for you, brother. I swear it.”
Grabbing onto both his wrists, I tap my helmet against his. “You better.”
There’s no time to waste. He shoves the thermal camera into my hands, and we go our separate ways.
With one look over my shoulder, I watch him hit the doorway of reception with the victim. We lock eyes one final time, nod at each other, and then I turn back to the smoke-filled hallway, determined to walk into the hottest part of the fire to find her.
I can do this. I can save her.