Page 97 of Marcus

Marcus managed to make it a good fifteen feet away from the plant before he passed out.

“Sir, please, you have to keep the mask on your face.”

Hard plastic was shoved over Marcus’s mouth as his vision cleared, and he came back to reality. He took in the chaos around him. No, that was a lie. It wasn’t chaotic inside the ambulance. In fact, the paramedic working on him did so with a calm demeanor and steady hands.

He dragged in a lungful of the oxygen pumping through the mask, but it didn’t feel like it helped to actually give him air.

“Breathed in too much of that smoke—your lungs are going to feel like hell for a while,” the man explained.

From the front of the ambulance, a new voice called back, “Did you hear the other guys back there?”

“Yeah,” his paramedic replied, “guess there was a body inside, and all the windows were busted out with crowbars and gas jugs. It’s a fuckin’ maple farm, eh? What happened back there?”

He swallowed the roughness in his throat.

He knew what came after this.

Marcus blinked.

The white ceiling of the ambulance stared back at him.

“Cella—Tiff?”

The man passed him a look. “We’re almost to the hospital. I’m about to give you a shot. It’s going to calm you down, let you relax for a bit.”

Fuck.

Marcus didn’t want anything.

He just wanted to know if Cella and—

A sharp prick in his arm followed the sensation of something cold rushing through his veins.

And that was that.

“Marcus! Marcus!”

“Sir, please step back from the gurney—”

“That’s my fucking brother, back off.”

“Sir, he’s going to be fine, but he needs better oxygenation and—”

All at once, Marcus’s brother colored his vision. He wasn’t sure what had been in that shot the paramedic gave him, but it knocked him out good. Whether or not that was the medication’s intended purpose, he couldn’t really say.

But it worked.

“Cella called Ma,” Chris explained fast, “and we’re working on it, okay?”

Marcus opened his mouth to talk, but it fucking ached.

His throat killed him.

“I know,” Chris said, “you don’t gotta talk, man.”

Marcus shook his head, his thoughts running a million miles a minute. The mask pressed tight to his face fogged with every breath he took, and while it hurt to do it, he couldn’t help the need to breathe.

“The enforcer,” he mumbled under the mask.