Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
L ily held her breath as she raced up the stairs.
She was holding Drew’s hand and had a death grip on Orrin’s wrist to pull him behind her.
Without lights it was dark as pitch, and smoke was a thin fog hanging in the air.
She needed to take a breath. The window was to the right, and she realized they’d have never found it on their own.
Lily took Drew’s hand and guided it to Orrin’s.
When they latched onto each other, she found the window, opened it easily, reached behind her and pulled them to it.
Orrin put one leg over the sill and helped Drew climb out, then he reached back for Lily, but she saw him turning, put her hands on his ass, and shoved him the rest of the way out onto the roof.
Her eyes were burning. She stuck her head out the window, as far to one side as she could, to take a breath. Then she ducked back in, and ran to the top of the stairs, and shouted, “Send more up!”
The open window was creating a draft, drawing the smoke right up the stairs and out the opening, but there was no help for it. If she closed it, the rooms below would fill.
Rosa and her daughters waited below. Lily thought of Manny and his recent heart attack, and knew she should’ve grabbed him first, but she guided Rosa and the girls to the window and got another breath as they climbed out.
Orrin & Drew remained on the roof to help, so Lily went back to the stairs and down them into the deafening roar and impossible heat.
There were vaguely human shapes in the smoke, all crouching low on the dance floor.
Flames were roaring in the original part of the cantina, and heading this way fast, and the main entrance was a curtain of fire. No way out but up.
The biggest shape came her way, those broad shoulders so like Ethan’s that for a second she thought…
Garrett Brand pressed a blessedly soaked towel to her face, then his hand to her shoulders to push her down low. She didn’t know where he’d got the wet towels. Right, she’d put a big water cooler backstage for the band. Garrett took Manny and Chelsea up the stairs.
Lily lowered the towel and shouted over the roar, “Top of the stairs, to the right!”
As Garrett’s form faded into the smoky staircase, Willow grabbed her mother, who grabbed Penny, who grabbed Kirsten, who grabbed Esmeralda.
It was too many at once. Lily got in front of them, broke up the group, motioning them low again, pumping her palm to convey some should wait while others went up. Then she sent the rest.
She’d given away her towel and she needed it again.
Somebody handed her one. She lost track of how many passed, of who was left behind.
Garrett was up and down the stairs many times no longer letting her guide people up.
It was so hot! Her skin felt sunburned. She couldn’t hear anything but the fire’s roar and furious crackling, like bones being crushed in the teeth of a giant.
“Lily, come on.”
It was Garrett again. He was pressing another wet towel to her face. “The others?” She asked. “Is anyone?—”
“Everyone’s up.”
“My dad? The kitchen crew?”
“I don’t know, Lil.” He put an arm around her and they turned toward the staircase. Then there was a whoosh as flames blasted up the stairway like a blowtorch, following the draft.
Lily screamed as she and the man who’d become like a second father to her over the past year, backed up into the darkest darkness they could find. They sank to the floor in a corner near the stage.
“He never even got to see it,” Lily said. Her chest kept spasming and she didn’t know if it was from the smoke or the grief. Garrett’s chest must be doing the same, because he was clutching it…Oh no. Oh no. “Garrett!”
But the big guy dropped like a sack of feed, flat onto his back on the floor.
“Garrett!” she shrieked.
But he didn’t move. Hell! She knelt and pressed her fingertips to his neck, then laid her head on his chest to be sure. No pulse.
The defibrillator was behind the bar, beyond a pool of fire.
She couldn’t get to it. So she placed her hands over his chest, and started pumping, and counting.
She gave him two breaths in between, because something told her to do it that way, rather than the newer method of all compressions, no breaths.
But she felt it, he needed the air. So she gave him her own.
She started to cough. Her wet towel was beside Garrett’s head, but she had to keep pumping.
Then all at once, he dragged in a loud long breath, only to start coughing.
She rolled him onto his side and pressed the wet towel to his face and said, “Just slide yourself this way, Garrett. Can you do it?”
He nodded from behind the towel, and she got behind him, grabbed him under his arms, and he pushed along with his feet. They made it to the very front of the stage, the furthest spot from the fire.
Garrett lifted the wet towel to her face. He said, “You should’ve left me, girl. We ain’t gettin’ outta this.”
“Sure we are. You gotta have a little faith.”
He coughed lightly then rubbed his chest. “Tell me somethin’, Lily. Did I have a heart attack just now?”
“I mean, it stopped beating. It was probably the smoke.”
“Or maybe the sausage.” He offered the end of his wet towel to her. She lay down on the floor beside him so it would reach and held it over her face. “So my heart stopped altogether, did it? I was…dead?”
“What’s the movie line? You were…” She coughed hard and her eyes stung and watering and her chest burned. “You were only mostly dead.”
“Then it was real.”
“What was?”
He met her eyes, shook his head slow. She could hear his breaths because they whistled in and out of his lungs. His voice a rasp, he said, “You’re a helluva nurse, Lil. Should you ever want to go back to it, remember that.”
As they neared the exit to Mad Bull’s Bend, an ominous orange glow hung low in the sky. Ethan didn’t slow down when he got off the highway. His heart was already frozen with dread before he saw Two Lilies engulfed in fire, and barreled over the grass, across the patio.
“The roof!” Jeremiah shouted, pointing. “Back up, turn on the fog lights.”
Ethan did both, then dove out of the truck and ran toward the building before he even realized what he was seeing.
People were on the roof, family, filing toward the farthest end, then inching lower along the peak, dangling from their hands, and dropping to the ground.
He ran to them, Jeremiah right on his heels.
Manny’s family, all five of them, were huddled off to the right, and he spotted Hyram still in his white apron. Cat was with him, but not Lily.
Nearly everyone was off the roof by then, and many were talking and shouting at once. He ran back a few paces to see if Lily was up there, but he didn’t see her.
A small hand grabbed the front of his shirt. Chelsea.
“Garrett and Lily are still in there!” she screamed. “They didn’t make it out!”
“Get everyone out of the way,” he said, and ran back to the truck. He got behind the wheel and slammed the door. The other door slammed too, and he realized Jeremiah had returned to his spot in the passenger seat.
They locked eyes. Something connected. His brother nodded, pulled his seatbelt on and said, “Hit it.”
So Ethan hit it.
Lily was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Even down flat on the floor, there was no good air. But she was conscious enough to hear the thunderous crash and see the blazing lights that suddenly pierced the darkness. She held her hand before her eyes and looked into the light.
Ethan’s truck, like a fiery red steed with blazing eyes. It backed up slightly, leaving a gaping hole behind. And then Ethan was coming toward her, a tall, broad, Stetson-wearing shadow framed in light. He crouched low and scooped her up into his arms. “I got you, Lil. I got you.”
“Your father,” she croaked, and managed to point limply.
He turned, dropped back to one knee, still holding Lily. “Dad.”
Garrett pushed himself up. “I’m alive.”
“I got him, Brother.” A bearded man pulled Garrett’s arm around his shoulder, gripped him around the waist, and helped him get up onto his feet. The flames roared closer, drawn by the fresh oxygen coming in through the gaping hole.
“Gringo Sombrero?” Lily asked.
“Ma’am.”
She let her head fall against Ethan’s chest, and rocked with his steps as he carried her out through the hole his truck had made in their beautiful honky-tonk. “Did my father get out?” she croaked, surprised her voice sounded so deep and hoarse.
“I saw him. He looked okay. Cat too.”
There were flashing lights and firefighters on the outside. There were hoses attacking the flames, and there were Brands everywhere. A medic came running and pressed an oxygen mask over her face. “Over here, bring her over here.”
A few more steps and Ethan was lowering Lily onto some EMT’s gurney and taking his arms away. She sat up and pushed off the mask, reaching for him. “Ethan!”
And then his arms were around her again. “It’s okay, I’m right here.”
“Ethan.” It was a whisper this time. Her cheek was pressed to his, and she felt a teardrop that was not her own. Startled, she drew back to look at his face. Flashing red-and-white lights painted it in the darkness, and made the tears on his cheeks flash like diamonds. “Ethan?”
He put the oxygen mask back over her nose and mouth and then smoothed her hair out from under the elastic band.
He looked around, and she followed his gaze as best she could.
The fog in her mind was fading, though, as the oxygen did its job.
She saw Garrett in Chelsea’s arms, ignoring the medics who tried to get at him.
She saw Elliot Brand, Trevor’s dad, sitting on the tailgate of a firetruck, breathing oxygen through a mask like she was.
He’d been among the final group to escape out the window.