4. The Rescue
The Rescue
KNOX
Travis had the grill going behind the station.
Wyatt came around the corner, saw it, and stopped. "Whoa. What are you doing?"
"Making lunch." Travis had a plate of raw steaks in one hand and tongs in the other. "These are from your housewarming. They never got cooked, so I brought them in."
"And your plan is to put those on the grill?"
"Yeah?"
Wyatt looked at me. I was at the picnic table with a bottle of water, staying out of it.
"You're just going to sit there?" he said.
"It's not my steak."
Every firehouse has the rule. You don't cook steak on the grill. The tones will drop before it's done. Nobody can say where it started and nobody can prove it, but nobody wants to be the one who tested it and sent the whole crew out before the first flip.
Travis set the first steak on the grate. The sizzle was loud in the quiet afternoon.
Greene appeared in the doorway with his coffee. He looked at the grill, turned around, and went back inside.
Carl came out a minute later and sat down across from me. "Is that steak?"
"From the housewarming," Travis said.
Carl pulled out his phone. Checked it. Put it down. Checked it again.
"Relax," Travis said. He flipped the first steak and pointed the tongs at Wyatt. "See? Nothing."
The tones dropped.
Nobody moved.
Travis looked at the grill, then at Wyatt, then at the speaker above the bay doors.
"That," he said, "is a coincidence."
"Leave it." Wyatt was already heading inside.
"I'm not leaving a perfectly good—"
"Leave it, Travis."
Travis grabbed the water bucket off the side of the grill, dumped it across the grate, and ran for the bay.
The house was fully involved when we pulled up. Flames through every first-floor window, smoke rolling black from the eaves.
A man was on the front lawn barefoot, holding a little girl against his chest. He was shouting before the engine stopped.
"My neighbor! She's still in there! Second floor. She was home, I saw her light on."
Thompson assigned the attack. "Sullivan, Greene, interior search. Brooks, Travis, hose line, Alpha side."
I masked up and went through the front door with Greene behind me.
The first floor was gone. Fire rolling across the ceiling on both sides of the hallway, the walls glowing behind the drywall. We stayed low and moved fast. I found the stairs by the railing and started up.
Second floor. Smoke banked solid from the ceiling to my knees. I couldn't see Greene two feet behind me. I could hear him calling conditions into his radio.
We moved down the hallway together. I swept one room. Empty. Greene took the one across from it. Then the ceiling ahead shifted. A section of drywall dropped, spilling debris across the hall, and the heat pushed back hard.
Greene pulled up. "I can't get through. Knox, we need to regroup."
There was a woman on the other side of that hallway. The neighbor had said second floor. She was home.
I went through.
Greene called after me. Thompson came on the radio. "Sullivan, report your position." I didn't answer, because answering meant stopping.
"Fire department! Call out!"
"Up here!" A voice, raw and distant. "Bedroom, end of the hall!"
I found the door. The room was hazy but better than the hallway.
I crossed the room and lifted her off the floor. She was barefoot, coughing, her arms around my neck before I told her to hold on.
"I've got you. Keep your head down."
I carried her low through the door, back down the hallway, past the debris I'd come through alone. The stairs were hot through my boots. At the bottom I shifted her weight, pushed through the front door, and kept moving until we hit grass.
The daylight hit hard after the smoke.
I knelt and set her down. She was on her back, coughing, pulling at clean air, her face covered in soot. I pulled my mask off, put my hand behind her head, and leaned down to check her breathing.
I saw her face.
For two years, I'd checked every ER corridor, every gas station, every woman in scrubs. I'd been carrying this face since a parking lot in October when I was lying on the pavement and she was the only thing between me and bleeding out in the dark.
Her eyes focused on me. Her hand came up, reaching for something she couldn't quite place, and her fingers found my neck, right where the scar ran from below my ear to my collarbone.
She pressed into the ridge of tissue with the same pressure, the same hands that held me together while we waited for the helicopter.
"I've been trying to find you for the last two years."
She couldn't speak. Her eyes were streaming, her hand still on my neck. The fire roared behind me, the crew working, the medics running across the grass with the gurney. Everything I knew how to do was right there waiting for me, and I couldn't move.
The medics reached us. I stepped back. They put a mask on her, checked her vitals. She watched me over the oxygen mask as they lifted her onto the stretcher. I stood on the grass with my helmet in my hand, watching them load her into the ambulance. I didn't move until the doors closed.
Back at the station, the crew went through the post-fire routine. Air bottles off the packs, masks pulled for cleaning. Travis and Greene reloaded the crosslay. Carl ran the pump to refill the tank.
I was stripping my coat off the rack when Thompson caught my eye from the office doorway.
"Sullivan."
I followed him in. He closed the door.
"We talked about this. Last shift. In this room." He crossed his arms. "Greene called for a regroup. You went through alone. I called you twice on the radio and got nothing."
"There was a woman on the second floor."
"And you got her out. But if that ceiling had come down six inches to the left, we'd be having a different conversation right now." He let that sit. "This is the second time, Knox. I'm not going to be able to keep looking past it."
"Yes, sir."
"The promotional board is going to see a pattern. And I won't be able to explain it for you." He opened the door. "Get cleaned up."
I went to the lockers. Stripped down, showered, stood under the water until the smoke was off my skin.
When I came out, Wyatt was leaning against the row of lockers with his arms crossed.
"So are you going to tell me what happened back there, or?"
I opened my locker. Clean station shirt, clean pants. I got dressed, shut the locker.
"You remember the nursing student? Two years ago, when—" I touched the scar on my neck.
Wyatt straightened. "That was her?"
"I never got her name. But I remember her face. That was her."
"So these past two years of you looking at women in scrubs..." He studied me. "You were looking for her?"
I sat down on the bench and pulled on my socks. "Yeah."
"Oh."
I started lacing my boots. "I never got to thank her."
"Well, you can now."
I pulled the laces tight. "Yeah."
Wyatt clapped me on the shoulder and headed for the bay.
The next morning after shift, I drove straight to CCMC.
The emergency department sat off the main building like a bunker, concrete and glass, ambulances lined up along the bay.
I glanced at the doctors' lot as I drove past to see if a familiar black Mercedes was there.
It wasn't. One less thing to deal with. I pulled into the first open spot and headed for the ER.
Josie was at the nurses' station. She looked up when I came through the doors.
"Sullivan."
"I'm looking for Nora Avery."
Her brow creased. "Are you family?"
"No."
"Then why are we having this conversation?"
"I just want to see her."
Josie studied me for a long moment. "Are you the one who pulled her out of that fire?"
"I am."
She exhaled. "She hasn't woken up yet. They're still monitoring her."
"Is she going to be okay?"
"I can't tell you that. What I can tell you is that if you want to see her, you'll have to wait until she's conscious and she agrees to visitors."
I stood there trying to think of something that would change her mind. Nothing came.
"Fine. I'll check back tomorrow."
I was halfway to the exit when someone caught up to me.
"Knox Sullivan." Liz Halstead fell into step beside me. "It's been a while since your crew dropped anyone off here. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever."
"Halstead."
"Why are you looking for Nora?"
"It's none of your business."
The exit doors shut behind me. I got in my truck and sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel. She was in there somewhere, and I couldn't get to her. But I knew where she was now. I'd come back tomorrow. Hopefully she'd be awake by then.