One by one, he cuts her free, and when he finally slices one ofthe links in the handcuffs and frees her arm to move, she reaches out and latches onto my jacket. A soft sob cuts as harshly through my heart as the bolt cutters through the wire, and I glance down at her to find her staring up at me.
No longer is it only a fear of death that stares back at me, but the hope I tattooed on my chest.
“Almost there,” I tell her as Brody works up to her shoulders. He’s on the last couple of cuts when the room suddenly brightens. I look up at the ceiling, the storm of smoke raging like an inferno I’ve never witnessed before. I shout, “Brody!”
But he knows. We both know what’s about to happen. We have thirty seconds, maybe a minute if we’re lucky, before everything auto-ignites in this room.
A flashover.
The heat intensifies, pounding down on us from above, the smoke thick, black, and rolling. As he cuts the last cable, I see flames lick through the darkness, barreling down into the room.
“Go, go, go,” he yells.
She’s already in my arms, and I’m pulling, but Bryn screams something I don’t hear with the freight train thundering above. When I look down, I realize her other wrist is still chained.
She’s still not free.
“Brody!” I shout, my mask feeling tighter as the air pressure drops.
He stops his retreat to look over the bed at me.
Fuck, there’s no room with the smoke crushing down on us, most of him disappearing within it. But he sees Bryn’s wrist and launches half his body over the table, using the bolt cutters one last time to slice through the cuffs. Then I’m pulling her from the bed and the wires, towards the door, flipping her over so I’m above her and she’s below me just as the heat spikes once more to unbearablelevels.
Brody’s there at the end of the bed, grabbing onto me to help haul me out while I haul her. A second later, just as I get through the door with Bryn, the room is engulfed in flames, and I’m tossing her to the ground before I’m on top of her, covering her body with mine through the worst of the intense heat and flames that erupt into the hallway with us. Brody’s on top of me half a second later, being a secondary force to keep her safe, and somehow I manage to keep my body weight, along with his, from completely coming down and crushing her.
Shouts erupt in front of us, and then the sound of safety penetrates my senses as a nozzle is opened to combat the flames roaring out of the room we just occupied. Brody moves, sliding to where Bryn’s head is, grabbing her under the arms to take her from me. I stay over her, protecting her as well as I can from the heat and smoke while Brody moves her to the doorway to reception.
It’s like stepping out of a rolling fog and into sunshine when we go through the door. The difference between the massage room, the hallway, and reception is night and day. While it’s still hazy and there’s smoke lingering, the intense heat is gone, and I can see the ceiling instead of just black smoke everywhere.
Bryn sucks down a lungful of better air, but it sends her convulsing into a coughing fit in Brody’s arms. She’s not out of the woods yet. She needs oxygen. An ambulance. A hospital.
“Let me take her,” I say to Brody when we’re fully in reception. “I can carry her.”
“You’ve been in that heat for too long,” he says, shaking his head. “Let someone fresh take her down.”
“Here, here.” Someone rushes up behind Brody, and I look over his shoulder to find Tyson there, waving his hands to hand her over. “I got her.”
I grit my teeth to keep my snarl down. Not because I don’t trust my friend. I do. With my life, I trust any of these guys. I trust them with her life too. But I’m amped up, and all I want is to hold her in my arms, to make sure she’s okay, and get her to safety. There’s a compulsion in me that’s probably from some ancient time that pounds a drum in my chest and demands that it’s me who is looking over her, giving her protection, keeping her safe.
Logic and common sense win out, though. If it didn’t, Brody would have, the way he’s eyeing me as Tyson takes Bryn. This is the better move. Brody’s right, even if I don’t like it.
“Wy,” she croaks as Tyson lifts her in his arms.
“I’m right here, B,” I tell her, on Tyson’s heels, following him down the stairs, my mask sounding a lot like Darth Vader with the lack of oxygen rattling through it. Bryn’s eyes peer at me over his shoulder. “You’re going to be okay.”
That seems to be the permission she needs to slump against Tyson, her eyes closing.
Outside, a stretcher waits close by, but still a safe distance away, Quinn and Hailey ready to accept Bryn onto it.
I pull my mask off, the alarm blaring that my oxygen is out. The relief is overwhelming. Fresh outdoor air. The cool afternoon, late October wind weaving through strands of my hair that are plastered to my scalp with sweat when I pull my helmet and then hood off.
Tyson has Bryn on a stretcher as I list off the conditions inside and what Bryn faced while she was in there. Hailey takes it all in, listening to Bryn’s chest while Quinn puts an oxygen mask over her face, the two of them assessing and communicating as they go.
Bryn’s coughing on the stretcher, eyes watering, but she answers their questions as best she can. It’s hard to hear how bad her chest hurts and her throat burns, even worse to listen to thehoarseness and shallow breaths. But standing there looking at her, looking at the bright pink of her skin like she’s been kissed by a July California sun, knowing it was the heat of the room, is possibly the hardest.
Her right arm has deep indents where the wire cable dug in, and I can only imagine the rest of her must look the same. I know what that body looks like beneath her black uniform and can envision the lines that must mar her. My eyes drop to the cuffs at her wrist, anger clawing its way through me. It makes me want to find the fucking asshole who did this and murder him.
Not Eddie.
