He tensed again when the screaming increased in pitch, and was just about to jump up when he felt Marie twitch.
Shit. Marie. He was crouched down like this because she also needed protecting. He couldn’t just jump up and leave her here by herself.
Hell, he wouldn’t have been able to leave her by herself no matter how hard he tried. She’d insist on coming, regardless of his feelings on the matter. He’d been around her long enough to know that, at this point.
“Should we go help them?” Marie gasped, unfolding herself suddenly, like a butterfly actually jumping out of its cocoon.
Pete fell backward, just to keep from getting hit in the face with one of her alarmingly sharp elbows.
Then he looked back toward the city, squinting to try to see through the dust and debris floating through the air. He couldn’t see one damned thing, though, and so he didn’t answer for a long moment. He wasn’t going to be able to know what to do unless he could see what they were working with, and that wasn’t going to happen until he could actually see what was left of the city.
Rushing back into a city that was in the midst of falling down on itself also wasn’t high on his list of things to do. He’d be a lot happier out here in the field. Where there weren’t buildings to fall on them or carousels exploding right as they happened to be running by.
The screeching increased in volume once more, and Marie actually reached out and poked him.
“Pete,” she said, her voice tight with tension and fear. “Shouldn’t we go help? Someone’s hurt.”
He glanced at her and saw that her face was almost as tense as her voice, the wrinkles between her brow looking so deep that he wondered suddenly whether they were going to stick—and how much she’d hate it if they did.
There was a time when he would have found that thought funny. Back when he’d first met her at Mueller and thought she was nothing more than enormous pain in the ass. That was a lifetime ago, though. These days, she was…
His partner. Someone he’d come to rely on. Someone he’d hate to lose.
He realized it with such a sudden jerk that it brought him right out of his thoughts and back into the real world.
And the screaming. The destruction. The absolute chaos of the world turned on its ear.
“I heard you the first time,” he growled, staring into the dust. “I wasn’t answering because I don’t know. I’m not exactly keen to go running back into that without a plan of some sort. I’ve had about enough of people and things that try to kill us.”
“You and me both,” she muttered back. “If I’d known teaming up with you was going to result in me running for my life 90 percent of the time, I definitely would have thought twice about it.”
He cast her a very wry look. “Would you, though? Because I seem to remember you being the one that was insisting on accompanying me everywhere. And you with your constant ideas about how things should go. Whether we should go right or left, or give that person a chance to become our friend. You’d hardly let me go anywhere on my own or make my own decisions, if I’m remembering correctly.”
She shot him an equally sarcastic look. “And if I’m remembering correctly, that saved your life a time or two. Maybe even three.”
Well, that was a good point. Though Pete had exactly zero intention of admitting it. The woman was already too full of herself. He wasn’t going to add to that by admitting that she’d saved his life once. Or twice.
Three times.
He turned back to the town and tried to turn his brain, which seemed to be way too scattered for the task at hand, back to the problem they were facing.
One: Anchorage, experiencing earthquakes unlike anything he’d ever felt in his life. Even when he’d been in San Francisco for the one that actually knocked down part of the building he was sleeping in.
Anchorage, not built for this sort of action, literally falling down around their ears.
Two: The military after them. True, he was hoping—assuming, really—that they had more important things to think about right now than two refugees who’d escaped from their fort. But still, they had to be part of the equation. They hadn’t meant to treat Pete and Marie nicely, and the last thing Pete wanted was to fall back into their hands.
Three: Lack of power. So finding a working vehicle if they needed to escape was going to be a lost cause. Yeah, he might find cars that weren’t locked. Yeah, he might be able to figure out how to hotwire them if he did, using his pretty basic knowledge of how engines and their wiring worked.
But that hotwiring wasn’t going to get them to start if their engines had been fried by the EMP event.
A city falling down on its ass, destroying itself, the military after them, and no real way of escaping unless they found that warehouse, and Clyde truly had kept stuff that wouldn’t have been affected by an EMP. And those cars—if they existed—happened to have gasoline in them.
He didn’t like their chances. He liked them even less if they went back into the city and either got trapped by a falling building or got re-captured by the military.
Shit. What was the right move, here? People needed help out there, and every instinct in his body was screaming for him to do something about it. He also didn’t think Marie would let him live to see tomorrow if he didn’t get out there and help them. He’d seen how soft her heart was, and though he thought that some of the scattered, clueless behavior had been an act, he didn’t think the empathy was.
He’d seen her trying to save the prisoners back in Mueller, even after they’d started killing Pete’s men.
She’d do the same thing here. And he was having a whole lot of trouble faulting her for that. He’d grown up in this city, and that meant that these were still his people. Hell, he probably even knew some of them—or had once. His parents weren’t here anymore. They were long gone.
But as far as he was concerned, anyone from Anchorage qualified as family.
At that moment, other voices joined into the screaming, some of them screeching in pain, others shouting for help or their loved ones. It was like the entire population had suddenly realized that it was in trouble at the same time, and had started making noise about it. Hell, maybe they’d all just been in shock and had finally come out of it enough to see what was going on.
It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that there were people in trouble, and he was still healthy and whole—mostly—and could get them out of that trouble. Maybe.
If he was incredibly lucky.
He jumped up without saying anything else, reached out for Marie’s hand, and pulled her up when she gave it to him. Then he started running for the first voice he’d heard, his mind roving through the things he had at hand—not nearly enough—and how he was going to be able to pry people out from under the buildings that had fallen on them.
This wasn’t going to be easy. But his heart was telling him that he had to do something. No matter how much he hated playing hero.
Chapter 20
They hit the street and were immediately blinded by the dust, like they’d gone through some sort of invisible curtain that had been penning the dust over the city’s streets. Not allowing it out into the field.
Keeping it near the buildings that had caused it.
It was an insane thought, and Pete knew it had to be wrong, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. There was something about the cloud being penned in around the buildings that seemed fitting. Like the city itself had become a tomb and if he could just get the people—and himself, and Marie—out of that tomb, they’d survive.
They’d be safe.
“Stupid,” he hissed to himself
He’d gone too long in this strange dystopian world, and his imagination was definitely starting to spin out of control. Making this whole thing into a work of fiction that he could have sold in New York. The city wasn’t a tomb. This wasn’t some enormous trap that they could all escape, into the fresh air and wilderness of Alaska.
He wasn’t go
ing to open a door into another world where none of this was happening and some queen ruled over a fantastical land full of snow.
Still, he was willing to bet that out in the forests and plains that surrounded the town, they would be a whole lot safer than they were in amongst the buildings.
Because as they hit the snow-packed street and darted forward, he realized that there were still a whole lot of buildings in here to fall. True, many of them had collapsed, their brickwork and concrete sliding out into the street to cause roadblocks like crazy, but a whole lot of the buildings were still mostly upright.
Too many of them could still come down to the ground if another earthquake hit.
Which made this even more dangerous than he’d realized. Because those buildings might still be standing, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think that they were structurally sound. No, their foundations had cracked, their walls were shuddering, and their beams were probably already sliding to the side. They had to be holding on by a freaking thread, just waiting for a gust of wind to blow them over.
Oh God, could wind blow them over? Were they also in danger of a brisk wind? He’d never thought of that before, but now that he did—
“Is it me or do those buildings look distinctly unstable?” Marie huffed, working hard to keep up with him.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” he responded gruffly. “Let’s hope the wind stays down and we don’t get another quake. I don’t want to find out how easily they’ll come down. Fucking Alaska, still building with old-school engineering.”
“Hey, we’re not supposed to get action like this up here,” she muttered. “I, for one, plan to lodge an official complaint.”
Pete’s mouth turned up in a smile, despite himself. How very like her to think there was someone to complain to about things like this.
“With who?” he asked. “The Ministry of the Weather? Because if you’re talking to them, can you also mention this whole thing with the EMP/weather thing? I am not a fan, and I think we deserve compensation for everything we’ve had to go through.”
“I’ll also add that snowstorm,” she said. “Because God, I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to feel my nose, fingers, or feet again. And you don’t just forget that sort of experience. Also, the fact that I had to slaughter a deer. And sleep outside with a bear breathing down our necks. All things I’d like to speak to the manager about.”
They’d been dashing forward, running in what Pete thought to be the general direction of the screaming, and suddenly he realized that they’d almost reached it. It hadn’t stopped—in fact, he thought, it had gotten louder—and though his conscious mind had been paying attention to Marie and her words, his subconscious must have been directing him.
Because now they were right on top of it.
It was coming from what had been a building to his right, and he reached out, grabbed Marie, and yanked her after him as he turned, rushing right toward the pile of brick and stone, his eyes roving over it and trying to figure out where the hell the screamer was hiding.
God, it didn’t look like anything. It looked like the entire building had actually exploded and then come raining down on the ground again. The only reason he knew it had been a building at one time was that he knew this neighborhood and could remember what had once been there.
An apartment building. With a daycare center on the first floor.
Oh, God.
They came to a screeching halt right at the edge of the rubble and looked at it, their chests rising and falling as they tried to regain their breath.
“What was it?” Marie asked quietly.
“Apartments and a daycare center,” he answered shortly.
“Oh. My. God.”
“My thoughts exactly. The good news is that the daycare center was probably closed, courtesy of the lack of power. No one would have been going to work, so no one would have needed it. The apartments, though…”
A chorus of screams started up again from right in front of them, and Pete immediately flew back into action. This time, he didn’t even think about it. He just knew that he had to get people out.
He had no idea how many people might have survived—or how they’d done it. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting them to safety before anything else happened.
It took him and Marie about five seconds to figure out where they needed to go first. They located the screamer closest to where they were standing—who seemed to be stuck under an enormous part of the roof that had somehow managed to stay whole during its descent—and crouched down to where they could see a triangle of open space.
“Hello?” Marie called. “Hello, are you in there? We’re here to get you out, but I’m going to need you to stop screaming.”
Her voice was calm and comforting, like she had the whole thing under control, and Pete was immediately glad she was there to handle that part of it. God, she actually sounded like a nurse. That nurse who stood by your bed in the hospital and told you it was all going to be okay while the doctor tugged at your leg to reset a broken bone.
The one that held your hand and gave you a lollipop to distract you from the pain.
And the only person you bothered to visit in the hospital afterward.
And that might all be a memory from his youth, and maybe even a part of the reason he’d made his way into the NG in the first place, but none of that mattered right now.
All that mattered was that the screaming in front of them stopped abruptly, replaced by a soft sobbing.
“I’m here!” a woman’s voice called shakily. “Thank God someone’s out there. Are you free from the building? Are you going to get me out? How? Who are you?”
Marie put up a hand and made a ”hold on” sign—like the woman under the rubble could actually see it, and like they were having some sort of normal conversation, rather than one that involved them both having survived a massive earthquake that had trapped the first in a collapsed building. “One question at a time, ma’am. First, how old are you? Is there anyone else in there with you? Is anyone hurt?”
She turned big, scared eyes on Pete, and he gave her a firm nod.
“You’re doing terrific,” he said. “Just find out what we’re dealing with and then we’ll figure out how to handle it. You’re doing great.”
No, he’d never imagined himself being in a position where he wanted to encourage Marie about anything she was doing. Nine times out of ten, she was doing something reckless that he totally disagreed with, and encouraging her was the last thing on his mind. Hell, nine times out of ten, she didn’t need any encouragement. She was the most self-assured person he’d ever met in his entire life.
Too self-assured.
Right now, though, she was so obviously in over her head that he was surprised she hadn’t spontaneously exploded from the sheer anxiety he could feel bleeding out of her.
Still, she nodded back to him, firmed up her shoulders, and turned back to the rubble, where the woman had gone quiet.
“Are you still there?” Marie asked nervously. “Miss?”
“It’s just me,” she answered, sounding suddenly closer. “I live by myself. I was here when the world started shaking. What happened out there?”
“Earthquakes,” Marie said quickly, moving forward into the space—and toward the voice. “Two of them, by my count. Or did you feel more?”
“Only two,” the woman said. “Keep talking. I didn’t know how to get out, but I think…”
Seconds later, fingers suddenly appeared in the space, their tips—which was all he could see—wiggling and dirty.
“Oh my God, the exit is right there?” the woman asked, her voice shaking now with what had to be joy.
Pete dropped down to his knees and took the offered hand, too surprised to do anything else. He’d thought they were going to have to dig the woman out.
He would never have guessed that they’d be able to show her the way.
That didn’t mean, of course, that she’d be able
to get all the way out.
“There’s an opening on this end that looks like it could fit a small woman,” he said, nudging Marie gently out of the way. She grunted in annoyance, but he glanced quickly at her and shook his head. “This might all come down,” he told her quietly. “If it does, I don’t want you in the way. I want you in a place where you can get out.”
Her eyes became even bigger at that, because she obviously hadn’t thought about it, and he left her to it, turning back to the trapped woman.
“Is there an opening in there that’ll fit you?” he asked.
The woman grew quiet, then, and her hand disappeared for a long moment.
Then she came back. “I think so. I can get my shoulders through it, but the trick is going to be my hips. It’s going to be tight. I don’t know if I’ll be able to move once I’m in there.”
“Hands first,” he said immediately. “Get your hands to me and I’ll pull you out. Actually…”
He turned and looked at Marie closely. That opening was big enough for a small woman, and he definitely wasn’t that. But Marie could probably fit. She could definitely get in deeper than he could. She might be able to reach the woman and help him pull her out.
She might also be crushed by the building coming down on her while she was trying it.
“I’m in,” she said, without even asking what he was thinking. “I can hear your thoughts from here, and I’m in. Let’s do it.”
He didn’t let himself consider how dangerous it was. He didn’t let himself think twice about how they could all die—starting with Marie. He just nodded firmly and got out of the way, watching as she ducked down and shimmied into the opening like she’d been born to crawl through tunnels. A second later, he could only see her ass and her legs.
“I’ve got her!” she shouted, her legs straightening with effort. “But she’s right, it’s too tight in here to have any leverage. Pete, you’re going to have to pull us!”
Pull them. That, he could do. He was in the midst of a city trying to destroy itself, but surely he could pull two women out of a collapsed building. Without getting anyone hurt or killed.
Stone Cold Fear | Book 3 | Ice Burn Page 11
