by Wild, Nikki
“Oh, for fuck’s sakes,” someone shouted from behind me. “Move!”
One of the guys came through with the portable defibrillator. Only a few seconds had went by, the whole station working together swiftly to assess the situation. Tensions were high, but before he could start charging paddles, someone started laughing.
“Guy’s, she’s just passed out,” I heard a familiar voice say from within the crowd of men—my friend, Tom Stoggins. Seeing as I’d damn near started administering CPR, I’d never been so glad he was moonlighting as an EMT in my life. “Gunner here fucked her lights out.”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know she was gonna crash on me?” I grumbled, leaning my elbow on the very same table I’d been pounding Brandy on hours before. “I mean, shit, she can take it…”
Ten minutes later she was back on her feet and going to be fine, but waking up naked and surrounded by firefighters hadn’t exactly gone over well for her. She’d run out embarrassed and angry about the whole thing. I was going to have to screen my booty calls more thoroughly in the future…
“Maybe you just like them limp and lifeless, Gunner,” Stoggins said snidely, smirking at me over his coffee. “Figured that was the only way you’d have gotten laid in the first place.”
“Up yours,” I said, flicking a piece of egg at him from across the table. “You’re the one chowing down on the site of my latest conquest.”
“Yeah, after which I had to wipe your damn jizz off her tits before I could get ready to shock her back to life,” Stoggins laughed. Normally he’d be listening with rapt attention, but he’d never let go of a chance to give me shit—especially one as good as this one. “Never thought someone could actually fall asleep fucking, but somehow you managed to be that dull in bed—or on the table.”
The other men all laughed into their eggs, shaking their heads as they watched me and my friend go back and forward. This wasn’t anything new to them, Stoggins and I had been together since our very first day—he was the closest thing I had to a best friend.
“I mean, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever fucked a girl so bad that the only way she thought to get out of it was to start snoring.”
“You know what Stoggins? How about you kiss my—”
“Gunner Cole!” my Captain bellowed. I visibly flinched at the sound of my full name, like you do when you know your mom or dad are gonna kick your ass.
I tried to act cool, turning around in my chair and giving Captain Simms a wide, shit-eating smile.
“Cap’n!” I said with an over-eager salute. “Good morning, sir!”
“Save your shit, Cole, I wanted you in my office a goddamn hour ago. Get off your ass and move!” I knew he was pissed, more pissed than I’d seen him in months, and all that hot-headed Irish rage was about to come down right on my head.
“Sure, Cap, right after breakfast—”
“Now, you useless chucklefuck. I’m in no fucking mood for any of your shit today,” he said, his voice lowering until it was a growl—which was more frightening than the shouting would ever have been.
Reluctantly I got to my feet, following after the rotund figure of Captain Simms all the way to his cramped little office.
Along the way I saw a few other others poking their heads out to catch a glimpse of my “walk of shame.” I felt like I was being escorted to the principal’s office.
“Sit,” he barked, locking the door behind me and shutting the blinds—like the others would know exactly what was happening.
I did as commanded, knowing that as much as I’d like to, now was not the time for smart-assery.
“Have you got any idea how bad this makes this fuckin’ engine look, Gunner?” he asked, his voice rising once again. He wasn’t just doing this for me—the firehouse walls were so thin that you barely had to strain to listen to every word that was said, especially since Captain Simms couldn’t help but shout whenever he brought one of us into his office.
“You brought some girl into my goddamn firehouse—something that I’ve forbidden more times than I could count, specifically when it comes to you—and then proceed to have her almost die on my fucking dinner table?”
“She passed out,” I started to protest.
“The dinner table! I have to fucking eat on that thing, Gunner! Now all I can think of is your—”
The Captain stopped mid-sentence, cut off by the shrill sounds of the alarm bells that were the only thing on this planet that would get me out of this ass-chewing. A fire. I wasn’t exactly a praying man, but maybe there was a God up there watching out for me, after all…
I’d save the prayers until I was sure nobody was hurt.
I got out of the chair in a flash and made for the door, turning the lock before turning back toward Simms, my grin plastered back onto my face.
“Get out there and do your job, Gunner,” the Captain shouted.
Hero time, I thought to myself.
“Three-alarm fire on 5th and Main,” Stoggins said, bringing me up to speed as we dressed quickly and climbed onto the truck. “We’ve got people stuck on the upper floor, according to the call, and there’s another engine on the way.”
“Sounds like my kind of party,” I said, my leg jumping up and down with anticipation. All the pleasures and bullshit of life faded into the background. They couldn’t hold a candle to the thrill and the adrenaline coursing through me. There was nothing I loved better than fighting a fire.
Chapter 2
Tanya
The moment I first smelled the smoke would stay with me forever.
You see fires and stuff on TV. Not just the news, either. Dramas, movies, stuff like that—an out-of-control fire is the perfect plot device. It’s full of tension. Heroics. Tragedy, too. Sometimes it’s a great metaphor for change or destruction. Passion. Romance. However it’s used, it’s certainly a thrill—a symbol our guts immediately recognize, something even our DNA recalls from the dawn of time.
But it’s not real. And I don’t just mean that in an “it’s on TV” way. What I experienced that day in my apartment isn’t something that will ever be shown on TV or the big screen. No one will ever capture the sheer terror of those hopeless moments the way my memory did. And I’ll never be able to forget.
I was in the kitchen when it started. My apartment was on the sixteenth floor and it was kind of a shithole, so of course while the lower floors were burning, the alarms up by me weren’t going off. I was microwaving one of those Lean Cuisine dinners wearing nothing but some tiny pajama shorts and a tank top when the first curl of acrid stench went up my nose.
Huh, I thought. Maybe I put it in for too long.
Obviously, that wasn’t the case. I’d checked, though. Wasted precious seconds trying to figure out if the microwave was on the fritz. I even texted my landlord to see when he’d be able to get someone up here to take a look at it.
Now, just minutes later, I was thinking something totally different.
I was thinking, I don’t want to die.
Once I realized the smoke was billowing up from under my door, I’d made it out into the hall, but the smoke was way thicker out there. People were running, tripping over each other, trampling others just to get to the stairwell. Kids were crying. A couple of people were shouting just trying to keep everyone else calm. It was chaos. I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes burned. My lungs ached.
In just a few minutes, that narrow hall was packed with people. It was getting violent. I closed the door and ducked back inside. I figured I’d just break my window and removing the outer bars to get to the fire escape. It never occurred to me to think about why nobody else had tried to get out that way.
You were supposed to be able to twist a knob on the inside and then lift the bars up individually to take them out, but the knob was gone and the bars were stuck. In fact, it looked like someone had welded them into the holes. Shit. Fuckin’ Vinnie. My landlord was a paranoid piece of shit who didn’t listen to anyone about anything, much less young women tr
ying to educate him about the city’s fire codes.
“You want burglar to break in?” he’d repeated to me every time I tried to explain why bars on the fire escape windows were bad news. That, or he’d say, “No, no, no. Fire escapes are crime magnets. I’ve seen the Law & Order. Is better this way.”
Fuck Vinnie, and fuck Law & Order, too.
By the time I realized it was a lost cause, the smoke even in my apartment was dense, like fog on the streets in the winter. I tried to get out the door again, but the knob was so hot. It seared the flesh of my palm; the smell made my stomach turn.
“Shit. Shit!”
I stuffed anything I could under the door. Towels, clothes, whatever I had handy. I got on my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1, returning to the window to look outside and watch the fire engines pull up.
They were just getting here. They hadn’t even got the hydrant going yet. My pulse pounded in my ears, deafening everything else except for the roar of the flames.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“Please,” I managed, but devolved into a coughing fit a second later. My mouth was dry. My throat was ragged. Everything ached and burned. The window wasn’t helping filter out the smoke anymore. I ducked low, eyes stinging. “I’m in the Parker building. The one that’s on fire. I’m on the sixteenth floor...”
“Yes, ma’am, we are aware of the fire and have dispatched units to the scene. Is there a way you can exit the building?”
“No,” I choked. “The windows are barred. The fire’s in the hall already.” As I spoke the words, I realized how bad they sounded, how screwed I was. I swallowed a throatful of ash and continued, “Please. Someone has to know I’m up here. You have to tell them...”
I put my face to the floor, covering my eyes with my arm as the emergency operator droned through a script meant to keep me calm. My muscles were starting to spasm. It was getting hotter in my apartment. Too hot. Painfully hot. Yet I felt cold inside, melting and freezing all at the same time.
That was when I heard them. The other people who were trapped on my floor.
They were screaming. Oh, God, I’d never heard sounds like that before. I didn’t know people were capable of making such raw, animal noises. Each one was a blade in my heart, a keening wail that only just rose over the snarl of the flames growing steadily closer, closer.
“Oh, God,” I breathed into my cell phone. “Oh, God, no. No. There’s more of them. More of us. Up here. Please, you have to tell them... Oh, Jesus, I think I hear a kid!”
There was a baby crying. And then, just like that, I was crying too. Crying because she was going to die before she’d even got to live. Because I was going to die, too, before I’d had a chance to do anything right.
“Fire rescue is on the scene. I’ve advised them there are residents trapped on the sixteenth floor...”
There was a sound like something fluttering by overhead, and despite my teary, smarting eyes, I looked up. Fire crawled along the ceiling, liquid and terrible, like lava spilling out on Pompeii. Pieces of ceiling crackled and rained down on me. I crawled feebly under my kitchen table.
“Help...” I whispered. It was all I could say. I couldn’t stop coughing. I was getting dizzy.
So, this is really it, I thought very dimly past the panic and the fear. I’ll never have a husband .Never have kids. Never have someone who actually fuckin’ loves me. I don’t even get to say goodbye...
There was a brilliant flash in my mind’s eye: a projector stuttering, flaring to life, playing the story of my life to a symphony of dying screams.
There was that time I’d baked cookies with Mom, my little, chubby hands making a mess of the flour back when she was still healthy—before the cancer came and sapped the life from her bones.
There was her wake, too, where I’d locked myself in my room and sobbed for three straight hours until my stepfather stopped knocking and everyone downstairs went away.
Jim pushing me in a swing. God, that had to have been way back. I was ten, I think. My stepbrother was sixteen or so. Funny that in these memories, I didn’t think of “steps.” Jim was “Daddy.” My daddy, pushing his little girl higher and higher, touching the clouds...
Boyfriends, long past. First kisses, and better ones. The day my stepbrother left us, years after Jim took to whiskey like every other mean drunk did. God, so stereotypical. Why couldn’t it have been something cool? Absinthe. Now there’s a classy liquor...
The look on both their faces that day was branded into my brain, into my eyelids, into every optic nerve I had. But now the fire was consuming them too, the projector screen fraying at the edges, burning, blackening, curling inward.
Words, blurry and shivering, fading into black: The End.
Oh, God. I couldn’t even hear the screaming anymore.
There was an explosion then, as I was slipping into death’s cool embrace, and then someone had their hands on me, yanking my shoulder, flipping me onto my back, checking me for a pulse.
Through soot-heavy eyes, I saw his face mask, his respiration, the red and yellow of his gear. I wheezed, trying to say something. I’m still not sure what. Maybe it was a laugh. I was too tired to be properly hysterical.
So very, very tired.
He drew his fingers away from under my jaw and picked me up, flinging me like a ragdoll over his shoulder. Blood rushed to my head and the fireman slung his arm beneath my thigh, his other shoulder bearing the weight of my torso. He drew my arm across his throat and held my hand by the wrist, but for a second, just a little one, our fingers touched through his glove. And I remember thinking, very clearly, how thankful I was for that. I wasn’t alone.
Even if I died now, at least it would be with someone beside me. With him.
He turned, steps hard and heavy, to the broken window. “No,” I tried to tell him, but the word wouldn’t form. My lips were numb. My eyelids were leaden. I was passing in and out of consciousness, and the rest of what happened was a blur.
One moment, I was over his shoulders.
Then on the table, sprawled, gasping. Fish out of water.
Then noises like screeching. Banging. Metal on metal.
My gorge rising as the fireman picked me up again so effortlessly, positioning my body across his broad shoulders again, carrying my weight like I was nothing. And yet somehow, everything. At the same time.
He was saving me. Taking me into the light. Was I dying? I was dying. Surely.
So bright. So cool. So heavenly.
And then... air.
I coughed and gagged. Gagged so hard I almost threw up. I choked on my bile, on the oxygen flooding my nose and mouth. Blinding—the light was white-hot, burning like the flames.
Too bright. Too much.
My lungs bloomed with agony. I tried to swat at my face, but whatever was clamped over it wasn’t budging. Something was holding me still. Someone.
I let my eyes flutter just a little more open, even though it hurt. Even though I wanted to scream, though I couldn’t. My throat was too full of needles. Too swollen and raw.
Every breath was a labor. I could hear screaming again. No, not screaming. Screeching. Like sirens. Firetrucks.
The world came into focus around me, which only made the pain worse. I shut my eyes again and writhed and heard a muffled voice say, “Breathe. Just breathe...”
It was so soothing. Those low, dulcet tones made my rigid muscles relax a little and I let go of the hand on top of my face. Awareness seeped in slowly—that hand was clamping an oxygen mask over me, bestowing the gift of sweet, sweet air I’d been denied in my burning apartment building. It was the firefighter. He’d saved me. And now he held me in his arms, bringing me back to life.
“Others,” I whispered and wished I hadn’t. Fuck, Tanya. For once, look after yourself.
“Just breathe,” he replied. Then louder, and not to me, “Will somebody get EMS the fuck over here, please?”
Something about him, even through the haze of pain and possibl
e brain damage, seemed so familiar to me. Maybe I was making bonds where there were none. After all, he’d pulled me out of the fire I should’ve died in, and people got attached to heroes all the time.
But the feeling that I knew him, that we’d met before, just wouldn’t leave me. When I heard him strip off his face gear, I opened my eyes.
He was slow to come into focus. My mind was still a mess, twisting light and shadow and color into some dark dreamscape where nothing made sense. But with each breath I took, my vision became sharper, and soon I knew exactly who I was staring at.
That dark, silky hair. That hard, furrowed brow. Those gleaming green eyes narrowed into slits, yet still reflecting genuine concern. Lips pulled taut beneath a few days’ worth of stubble that made him look more like a man than I remembered him seeming the last time I’d lain eyes on him.
“Fuck,” I wheezed. “Gunner?”
He looked me over. “Do I know you?”
Finally, I laughed. It was weak and I sounded like a frog, but after those four ridiculous words, I could let my hysteria out.
He didn’t wait for my answer. A new face came into view as Gunner pulled away, his mask leaving me just long enough for a smaller one to be strapped in its place. Gunner turned back toward the building and before I could say a word, he was gone.
My long-lost stepbrother had saved my life. And he didn’t even recognize me.
Chapter 3
Gunner
“Paging Doctor Powell. Doctor Powell, please call extension...”
The intercom blared through the linoleum-lined hallway, but I couldn’t have cared less about what it had to say. I hated hospitals. Ever since my stepmother, Nancy, had gone the way she had—withered, gaunt, with tubes sticking out of her nose and her arms—I couldn’t see hospitals as anything other than death houses.
The worst part, I think, is all the damn waiting, sitting outside while doctors and nurses poke and prod, asking the same questions over and over without ever giving any answers. I remembered the way my dad had sat in the waiting room time after time whenever they’d hospitalize Mom for her treatments, the look on his face: hopelessness.