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Faurier shifted his weight, linking his hand with hers to pull her to her feet as he found his own, and Lucy slapped herself back to reality. He wasn’t going to like what she had to say, but that wasn’t about to stop her from letting the words fly.
“Faurier, we need to get out of here.”
“But—”
Shenopedhim with a lift of one hand. “I know you think you saw someone—”
“Ididsee someone,” he interrupted, with so much certainty that once again, she believed him by default.
But it didn’t matter. “Okay, but whoever might’ve been in here isn’t now, and this fire is moving too fast. We have to get out of here, otherwise we won’t.”
Even with the evidence of a squatter, who might well be his mystery person, they just couldn’t risk staying in here any longer. For God’s sake, the rules had dictated they not do search and rescue at all. Yes, their job was to save people, and yes, that meant risking their lives. But they couldn’t help anyone if they were dead, and this person—whoever he or she was—was nowhere to be seen. It was entirely possible at this point that they’d managed to escape through an exit at the back of the building, where no one else had seen them.
All things that had thankfully seemed to occur to Faurier, because he took in the fire, then shook his head. “Damn it. You’re right.”
The chunk of the ceiling that had fallen blocked their access to the window, eliminating their strongest exit route—Christ, could this call get any more difficult—and Lucy spun toward him. “Now what?”
“We’ll have to go back the way we came,” he said, his body pointed toward the door and his legs kicking into motion. Retracing their steps to their point of entry was their second-best strategy, and Lucy fell in behind him.
“On your six,” she confirmed, only pausing to slam the door shut behind them once they’d crossed the threshold back into the hallway.
Just in time for another section of the ceiling to come crashing down, blocking their only way out.
3
Sam swung toward Lucy out of pure instinct, his heart ricocheting off his ribs. She met him halfway, hooking her arms beneath his and yanking him roughly out of the path of falling embers and burning debris raining down from above. He fought for his failing balance, forcing his muscles to lock down in an effort to keep him upright. His next step told him that wasn’t fucking happening, instinct shoving him into damage control mode in less than a blink. Keeping his grasp on Lucy’s turnouts and his chest pressed to hers, he angled her toward the nearest wall, which her back met with a softwhump, and just like that, he found himself plastered against her for the second time today.
“Sorry,” Sam breathed, his brain—unreliable bastard that it was—short circuiting for just a second before recognizing that he’d caged her with his body. Of course, he was too slow on the uptake to do anything about it—like, say, move. “I didn’t want us to fall all the way down again. Are you hurt?”
“No.” She shook her head, the definitive movement dropping him fully back to reality. “Are you?”
Sam opened his mouth to say he was fine, but the skin on the back of his neck throbbed in tune to “liar, liar, pants on fire” (oh, the irony). But he wasn’t about to tell Lucy about the fiery chunk of ceiling that had managed to singe through his hood when he’d pulled her out of the way of that first falling beam. It was just a little burn, no big deal. He’d certainly had worse.
For example, being trapped in the dark hallway of a fully involved warehouse with no known escape route.
Yeah. Maybe running into this warehouse against Captain Bridges’s orders hadn’t been his sharpest plan ever. But comeon. He was a firefighter. It was literally his job to run into shit-sandwich situations in order to help people who couldn’t help themselves. Sam was one hundred percent certain he’d seen someone in the window, and that stuff that had been left behind in the room they’d just searched proved that someone had been here.
Goddamn, this fire was moving far faster than it should.
“I’m fine, yeah,” Sam said, stepping back from Lucy but unable to explain the tiny part of him that squalled at the move. “We need to find another way out of here.”
He turned to inspect the blocked side of the hallway, which was an absolute no-go, then took a few steps in the other direction. The hallway was clogged with smoke and shadows, any natural light that had filled the space moments before now obliterated. But it was the only path they could take, plus, they’d done search and rescue along the outer wall of the building, moving toward the rear. If they followed this path far enough, they’d run into a right turn that would take them to the C side of the building, which was the back. No way there wasn’t a rear exit somewhere along that wall, so Sam kicked his boots into motion.
“On your six,” Lucy said, not missing a beat. The flashlight strapped to her chest didn’t offer any more visibility down the hallway than his did, but it did let her see a few feet in front of her, which meant they wouldn’t get separated. Once upon a time, losing his sense of sight, especially when the shit was hitting the fan, would’ve made Sam panic. But he’d done dozens of zero-visibility training exercises in his tenure with the RFD, not to mention maneuvering through hundreds of active fires where visibility was animpossibility. So he couldn’t see. Yeah, it sucked, but he had four other senses and a hell of a lot of experience with how to use them to get himself and Lucy out of this cluster fuck.
Crouching down as low as he could, Sam flattened one hand over the wall beside him, feeling his way down the corridor as his feet propelled him forward. Heat blasted him from every direction, soaking his uniform beneath his turnouts and making the burn on the back of his neck sting like a son of a bitch, but he couldn’t let it slow him down. Scraping in a breath, he counted his steps, hope building in his chest with each one. They had to be close to the back of the building by now. They had to be—yes.
His hand met nothing but air as they finally reached the end of the hallway. But rather than breaking into a ninety degree angle that would guide them to the right, the space ended in a T, with the option to go either left or right.
And if they went the wrong direction, they could hit a dead end and be trapped inside the building with no way out.
“Whoa,” Lucy said, her boots clapping to a halt, her eyes going wide a few seconds later as she connected all of the oh-shit dots.
“Yeah.” Thoughts crowded Sam’s brain, each one moving faster than the last and all of them screaming for attention. This warehouse was clearly bigger than he’d realized. But it was also burning down, and he needed to get him and Lucy out,now. He didn’t have time to waste.
He had to rely on his gut and choose.
“This way,” he said, instinctively turning toward the left.
