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His lips were ice cold. She tasted soot on his skin.
He wasn’t moving.
“Damn it!” she yelled between breaths. “Where the hell is the RSI?”
Oscar Martinez, a guy she’d gone through fire school with, spoke from beside her. He was a full paramedic, but he couldn’t intubate. He was trying to thread an IV needle into the back of Michael’s hand. “Next house over. Some teenagers got the whole family out the back, but they’re in bad shape. We’re waiting on another ambo from station fourteen.”
Michael couldn’t wait that long. How long had he gone without a pulse? How long had he been in that house?
He’d sent her two text messages today. She hadn’t bothered to read either of them because she’d been too pissed at the way he’d been blowing her off.
Two text messages. Two frigging text messages. How hard would it have been to read them?
Hannah choked on her breath again. “Come on,” she whispered. She pressed her hand to his cheek. “Come on, Michael. Wake up.”
No response. She blew another breath into his mouth, but his chest barely rose.
“Your brothers need you,” she said.
Irish glanced up. She met his eyes and saw the resignation there.
This might be a lost cause.
Her own eyes blurred.
And then she heard the rumble, as the ground started to shake.
CHAPTER 4
At first, Hannah didn’t understand what was happening. The sound wasn’t loud; more like a slow roll of thunder. The vibration of the ground under her knees felt more like a large vehicle starting up than anything else.
But then it grew stronger, until she had to put a hand on the ground to keep her balance. Someone somewhere was shouting. It took her a moment to make out the word.
Earthquake.
Irish didn’t stop the chest compressions, but she could see he was struggling to maintain his balance too.
A loud crackling echoed from her left, and she snapped her head up.
“The sidewalk!” said Oscar. He’d dropped to a knee, and now had a hand on the ground.
He was right—the sidewalk was splitting, slow cracks crawling along the pavement.
Firefighters were shouting, both live and from the radio on her shoulder. The team that had rushed into the house a minute ago came flying through the door, stumbling on the steps.
She’d thought nothing could overpower the cacophony of the trucks and radios and discordant fire alarms, but the new sounds brought on by this earthquake were deafening. Metal shrieked from everywhere, and Hannah could swear she saw the porch supports at the front of the house start to buckle. From the street, more shouts, more splitting pavement. Metal on metal as fire trucks began to slide and collide with each other.
“What the hell is going on?” said Oscar. He must have lost the needle; Michael’s hand was bleeding.
Wind ripped between the houses, sudden and cold, pulling smoke and debris from across the court. More shouts from the hose teams as water blew back, away from the flames, showering the rescue team with ice-cold droplets. Fire was in the air now, bits of flaming ash flying wildly.
One of the porch supports groaned, then cracked fully. The roof over the porch sagged.
“We need to move,” said Irish.
But they couldn’t. The ground bucked again, and Hannah watched the grass split and separate. The gap spread in a line from Michael’s body all the way to the road. She swore and shifted to the other side of his body, beside Irish.
It gave her a better view of the destruction around her. At the house next door, wood cracked and split. The house swayed for an eternal moment, as if buffeted by the wind.
