Reckless

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “Squad Eight, Engine Eight, Ambulance Eight. Structure fire, reported entrapment. One-nine-seven Windsor Avenue. Requesting immediate response.”

  “We’re not done here, Donovan. This changes nothing,” Westin said, leveling him with one last frown before sprinting down the hallway.

  But Alex had a feeling that was as far from the truth as any man could get.

  “Look sharp, boys, because this shit is not a drill.” Crews’s voice cut through the crush of engine noise, blaring sirens, and controlled chaos flying around in the back step of Engine Eight, signaling a neon-colored shut up and listen through the headphones each of them wore. “Dispatch has multiple nine-one-one callers reporting active fire in a block of row homes on Windsor.”

  Cole took Alex’s inward groan and gave it a voice. “Those row homes are three stories up and six units across. Not to mention they’re goddamn ancient.”

  Translation: fire fucking loved them. Firefighters? Not so much.

  “Affirmative on both. There’s reported entrapment in at least one unit, but no details on location or how many people, which means we’re going to have to keep our eyes wide the hell open. Looks like we’ll be first on scene, so be ready to run some lines and get this place wet while squad hits the roof for a vent. Cap’s behind us, and he’s going to call the ball. Copy?”

  “Copy,” came the string of responses, but Alex barely heard them as he tugged his headphones off and hung them on the hook above his seat.

  “You good?” Cole asked, turning sideways to get geared up. The move let him not only peg Alex with a critical stare, but it effectively blocked Jones from hearing any strains of the conversation from his spot on the other end of the step. “And don’t even think about fracturing the truth just because we’re on the way to a fire and you want me to keep my head straight.”

  Well, shit. So much for that. Might as well come out with it, because once they got back to the house after this call, everybody and their mother was going to hear the sonic boom coming from the captain’s office. “Westin caught me kissing Zoe.”

  Cole’s expression triple-timed into son of a bitch territory. “When?”

  “About twelve minutes ago.”

  “You’re freaking kidding me,” Cole said, and Alex plastered his expression with as much I wish as he could work up. Cole pulled on his hood, then his gloves, waiting for Alex to do the same before asking the inevitable. “Did he lose his shit?”

  “Scale of one to ten?” Alex’s stomach twisted, his unease multiplying at the scent of bitter-black smoke filtering in through the window. Cole nodded, and Alex let himself linger on the acidic aftertaste of the confrontation for one last second before mashing his dread all the way down to the bottom of his rib cage.

  “It was about a forty.”

  Engine Eight jolted to a stop with an overloud groan of the brakes, and Alex forced himself to switch gears and focus. Popping the door handle at his hip, he jumped down to the pavement, scanning from left to right, then back again as he methodically took in the scene from the middle of the narrow street.

  Stretches of white clapboard-covered row homes lined the asphalt on either side, most of them six units long with barely a ten-foot break in between buildings. Steady rolls of smoke funneled from the windows of the three attached units in front of them, although between the quickly growing haze and the limited visibility from the tight confines of the street, pinpointing actual flames was essentially a million to one. But with the walls and attics these homes always shared, it was a solid bet that if the flames had reached the roofline of one of them, they’d all be on fire in a matter of minutes, not hours. If they weren’t all burning already.

  Talk about getting tossed out of the frying pan. But after five solid weeks of not fighting fires, Alex was so ready to shake the rust off, it was damn near painful. The radio on his shoulder crackled to life, and he stood between Cole and Jones, his adrenaline taking a potshot at his pulse as he waited for the directive to put his pent-up energy to good use.

  “Osborne, you and Andersen get up on that roof for a vent and get the rest of squad inside for search and rescue. Two residents made their way out of the far right unit on their own, but let’s not waste any time in case any others are occupied.” Westin clipped out orders from his spot on the street between the engine and the ambo, dividing up the remaining members of the rescue squad for search and rescue before turning his attention to Engine. “Everett, you’re on the nozzle. Donovan, put Jones on your hip and back him up. I want water in this building starting yesterday. Go.”

  Alex sucked in a breath, turning toward Jones as everyone fell into action with precise yet urgent movements. “You catch any fires like this while I was gone?” he asked, and the recruit shook his head.

  “Not in a row home, no.”

  Alex’s shoulders burned with exertion as they readied the heavy lengths of hose from the engine, and damn, he needed to keep himself on the level. “It’s the same deal you learned in the tower at the academy,” he said to Jones, slowing the tempo of his inhale-exhale so his freaking pulse might get the memo. “Nozzle man goes up with the officer to start running water. But these places have tight, pain in the ass stairwells, kind of like a high-rise. Because of that, the nozzle man usually has a hell of a time advancing the line, so someone always backs him up to keep it from getting tangled or caught on corners. Today that someone is me and you. You got it?”

  Jones nodded, his brows bent in concentration beneath the brim of his helmet. “I think so.”

  “Don’t think so, rookie. Know so, because there’s no dress rehearsal and we’re up.”

  Cole cut a path across the swath of grass serving as the row home’s collective front yard, and Alex fell into step behind him with Jones at his six. He had to give the kid credit—he’d been a quick study in finding the right distance at which to follow along, and Alex wasn’t about to sneeze at the extra assistance with the hose, since his muscles were already halfway to Jell-O and the damn thing felt like it weighed a metric ton. But someone could still be trapped inside one of these houses, so Alex didn’t give a shit if the line weighed six metric tons and he had to haul it solo. He had a job to do, and after a month of not going on a single fire call, he was damn well going to get to doing it.

  The group moved forward toward the center of the row home, but their boots had no sooner hit the bottom porch board than one of the guys on squad shouldered his way out of the unit directly to their left, yanking his mask from his face.

  “Search is clear in here, and neighbors are reporting they haven’t seen the guy who lives in that one since he left for work this morning,” he barked over the rush of flames and the steady roll of heat. “From what Oz can see from up top, he said the Charlie side of the third floor is pretty heavily involved, and if these units are all alike, you’ve got your fucking work cut out for you with that line. The stairs over here were a bitch and a half.”

  Anything else he might’ve added was cut off by the radio request for an immediate search in the end unit, and Cole jerked his chin at the unit in front of them with nobody home.

  “Go. We’ve got this.” He nodded as the guy fell out with the rest of squad to search the end unit. He paused at the front door just long enough to force the wood from the hinges with his Halligan bar, angling past the threshold with steely purpose. Smoke clung to the air in a curtainlike haze, and Alex reached up to pull his mask over his face, motioning for Jones to do the same before they elbowed their way after Cole.

  “I’m going up to floor three. We’ve got to keep this fire from walking,” Cole hollered from just inside the entryway, motioning toward the set of thinly carpeted stairs in front of them. “I’ll knock this thing down before it spreads any further and work my way down to you.”

  They maneuvered their way up the first set of steps single file, waves of soot and ash clogging the visibility in the windowless space and hampering any quick progress Alex had hoped to make. The second-floor landi
ng was little more than a series of boxy angles and tight turns leading up or down, all with potential roadblocks and range of motion that amounted to Alex’s new best friend, Jack Shit.

  “God damn it.” Cole surveyed the situation, his frown evident even behind his mask. “There have to be seventy different recipes for disaster with a layout like this.”

  But Alex motioned his best friend upward with a brisk back-and-forth of one hand, while giving Jones the signal to hold steady where he stood with the other. “Go,” he said to Cole. “Jones and I will keep this from becoming a cluster fuck.” His kept his maybe to himself as Everett hauled ass toward the third floor; at least they could radio if things got hairy.

  Alex swiveled a calculating gaze in a quick three-sixty, turning on one booted heel to scan as much of the second floor as he could. Strains of daylight did their damnedest to poke in from the trio of open-doored bedrooms just off the stretch of the hallway leading toward the rear of the house, and Alex measured three—no four sites of active fire in his line of sight alone.

  “Okay, Jones. Stay right there between floors one and two. Make sure you—”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Alex caught the barely there outline of a figure hunched in the doorway of the far bedroom.

  “Jesus!” His pulse went ballistic, and he cursed fluently as he whipped his hand up toward the radio on his shoulder. “Donovan to command. We need a search on the second floor, like now.”

  “That’s a negative, Donovan.” Westin’s voice crackled over the two-way. “Everett is reporting that the third floor is a goddamn train wreck. I need those lines clear.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve got . . .” Alex squinted back down the hallway, sweat dripping into his eyes and fogging his mask.

  No one was there.

  “Did you see that?” he asked, swinging toward Jones. “I swear I saw someone in that back room.”

  Jones gave his head one tight shake. “I was concentrating on the line.”

  Shit. Of course he was. It’s what Alex had told him to do.

  “Not the time to stop being chatty, Donovan,” Westin grated through the radio, and Alex arrowed his stare back to the bedroom, nearly engulfed by smoke and shadows.

  “I saw . . . something in the rear bedroom, east side. I swear.” His legs itched to bolt down the hall, but he settled for a lung-burning shout. “Fire department! Call out!”

  The only answer was the incessant rush of flames and Alex’s breath sawing in and out of his own ears.

  “Neighbors say there’s nobody home,” Westin radioed, yanking Alex’s attention back to the landing. “I can’t green light a search on a maybe. Not with a fire like this.”

  Alex assessed the line, a sharp curl of relief spiraling through his gut as he saw it advancing, albeit slowly. “We’re straight down here on the landing. I’m telling you, Cap.” He turned again, taking a few steps toward the mouth of the long, tightrope-thin corridor. “I had eyes on somebody.”

  “Is that an affirmative?”

  Alex paused. “Not entirely, but—”

  “Can’t do it, Donovan.” Westin’s growl was all bite, and for a minute, Alex froze. He hadn’t run a fire call in over five weeks, and his screaming muscles and overeager adrenaline were living proof. While they were able to advance the water line right this second, Alex knew shit could go south on a dime—hell, he’d seen worse consequences from more stable situations. His brain cautioned him to stay put, to stand down on the search and work with Jones to back up Everett so they could all put this fire out as fast as possible.

  But then the figure reappeared, and Alex lunged down the hallway.

  “Fire department!” he bellowed, sweat streaming between his shoulder blades as his heart pumped his blood on a lightning-fast circuit through his veins. Blocking out the shouts from behind him—presumably Jones’s—as well as the abundant stream of curse words coming in from the radio that were definitely Westin’s, Alex barreled toward the bedroom.

  A man, thin and frail and wrapped in a bathrobe, stood bent over by the bed, his face pale white and panic-stricken as his chest heaved with weak coughs, and holy hell, he looked barely a step away from keeling over.

  “Tried . . . to call out, but . . . I came home sick, and . . . I think I passed out. . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said with a shake of his head. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  He crossed the threshold to grab the guy and haul ass out of there, but he only got three steps inside the bedroom before his gut plummeted all the way to his feet. More than half of the Charlie side wall was on fire. Bright streamers of flame hovered over the doorway, reaching up to the ceiling in a malicious orange arc, and hell. No wonder the man hadn’t come running out to the safety of the hallway beyond.

  Alex reached for his radio with one hand while guiding the man away from the door with the other. “Donovan to command, I’ve got a man trapped on the second floor, Charlie side. Needs medical attention. Our exit is compromised.” Big. Fucking. Understatement. More than half the damn door frame had gone up in flames in the fifteen seconds Alex had been inside the room. “I need a ladder to this window, and I need it now.”

  “This fire’s burning like a sonofabitch. We’re trying to get to you, but it’s going to take a couple of minutes.”

  The man swayed in place, his coughs rattling all the way through him as he gasped for air, and Alex turned to yank the window as far as it would go against the sash. Ah hell, there wasn’t even so much as a tree or a porch roof within range of the twenty-five-foot drop, and a straight jump would be upper-level dangerous. “I don’t have a couple of minutes,” he said. “Hurry.”

  Alex stabbed his boots into the floor, looking around the room for something—anything—he could use to get them either out the window or past the deteriorating door frame. But there was nothing usable in the tiny room, and the odds of surmounting either obstacle were growing more shitastic by the second.

  The man collapsed into a heap on the floor.

  “Whoa!” All of Alex’s air abandoned his lungs on the shout. He hit his knees, the jolt running up his legs even through his heavily padded turnout gear. But the man was unresponsive, his breathing thready and irregular as Alex checked his vitals. He craned his neck to look at the window over his shoulder, and cold fingers of dread slithered up his spine at the realization that no matter how fast squad appeared with that ladder, he didn’t even have ten seconds to wait.

  “Okay, buddy.” Alex choked back the harsh tang of fear before scooping him from the carpet. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  The man’s frail body was an easy lift, even for Alex’s wailing muscles. The left side of the door frame was completely swallowed up by flames, so he swung the man’s body over his right shoulder. Locking his molars together with a determined clack, he aimed himself at the burning exit, not even giving himself a chance to second-guess as he burst past the falling ash and flames.

  And slammed right into Cole and Jones on the other side.

  “Christ, Teflon!” Everett shouted, and Jones reached out, sliding the unconscious man from Alex’s shoulder in a quick grab.

  “He’s barely breathing. Get him to Rachel. Go,” Alex barked. Relief blasted through the unchecked adrenaline, making his vision shaky and his mouth tilt upward into a holy-shit-that-was-close smile. He jerked his chin at Cole, signaling for his best friend to follow Jones down the hall so they could get the hell out of Dodge.

  But before Alex could take a single step, the door frame he’d just charged past came crashing down over the left side of his body, and then everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Zoe stood in the eerily silent hallway at Station Eight for what could’ve been a minute or an hour. Hell, it might’ve been a day, except that no firefighters or paramedics had come back through the door.

  Not that there was any sort of guarantee that they would.

  Something twisted in her chest, dangerously close
to her heart. Between the blow of not getting the Collingsworth Grant and the showdown with her father, this night had already destroyed both her confidence and her faith. The numb shock of losing the grant had quickly worn away after the phone call with the director, leaving raw streaks of pain in its wake. Hope House was so in need, its residents so deserving of the money to make their temporary home a better, safer place, with warm food and a chance for more. Zoe had worked for months on end to make it happen, throwing not only her heart and soul into the effort, but asking everyone around her for a piece of theirs as well.

  She’d believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that she would get that money so she could finally make a real difference at Hope House. To the point that she’d risked everything.

  And lost.

  With her nerves feeling like they’d been scorched over high heat and left to stick to the bottom of a frying pan, Zoe blinked herself back to the firehouse, where fresh waves of dread stuck into her like needles. Her breath trembled in her lungs, her chest rising and falling in shaky bursts. The black-framed photos marching down the wall in front of her slid back into focus, and tears re-formed in her eyes as she looked at them again. Oz and Andersen, their faces creased in concentration as they hung from harnesses off the side of the practice tower, a dizzying four stories above the ground. O’Keefe at the back of the ambulance, arms outstretched as he helped a woman huddled helplessly on the gurney in front of him. Alex and her father, arms slung over each other’s shoulders with smiles they might not ever wear around each other again. And Brennan and Mason Watts, hamming it up for the camera in the engine bay, both of them blissfully unaware of the tragic consequences that would wreck the career of one and take the life of the other.

  Alex had promised her he’d be okay, that everything would be okay. But clearly, risks failed. Hell, she hadn’t even made it to the final selection round for the Collingsworth Grant before her leap of faith had fallen spectacularly flat. How the hell could he make a promise so enormous and expect to keep it when every single time he went to work, his life was literally on the line?