He didn’t grab her legs, the way he originally thought he might. That would just make things even harder. Not enough leverage. He’d have to move too much to pull them, and he could end up actually hurting Marie.
Instead, he grabbed her around the waist, firmed his grip up using her very convenient belt, and asked. “Are you ready?”
“I was ready five minutes ago,” Marie snapped. “What the hell is taking you so long? Just enjoying your chance to feel me up finally?”
He snorted at her tone—which was so typical of her—and then started pulling, dragging Marie and her cargo slowly through the tunnel in the broken building.
Chapter 21
They came out of their first rescue high as kites and twice as flighty, elated at how easy it had been but positive that the next rescue would be a whole lot more difficult.
Though at least they now had a method. Or at least a place to start.
They called out for other people who needed help—because everyone in the building had grown quiet when they heard Marie and Pete talking to the first woman, like they were all trying to help their rescuers concentrate—and found someone else within ten feet of the first woman.
This one was harder. There was no easy opening, because of course there wasn’t. But they were trapped under a large block of wood that looked like it might have once been part of a floor. Between the three of them, Marie, Pete, and Judith—the woman they’d just saved—managed to lever the wood up off an opening that held a father and his baby daughter.
The man took almost no time to crush Marie to him in a hug, and then Pete.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Pete pounded the guy awkwardly on the back, thinking that he could have done without this weird show of public affection, and then shouted out for more people.
Before long, they had a group of ten people, each of them spreading out over the building and calling for others who needed to be saved. When someone found a person who was trapped, the entire group headed over and came up with a plan to get them out. Sometimes it was simple: a large piece of rubble holding the person in that only required lifting. Sometimes it was more complicated: lots of rubble and lots of digging.
But each rescue meant more people in their crew, and more people meant easier rescues. More minds working on complicated problems, figuring out a solution. More people to calm the person who was stuck while the rest of the team sorted out a way to save them.
By the time they thought they’d rescued everyone who had been trapped in the building, they had a crew of about thirty people. Pete looked around at them, feeling a pride he’d never experienced before and feeling like these people were more than just random citizens of Anchorage that he’d never met.
These were people he’d helped save. People he’d come for that no one else was coming for. They would still be stuck there if it wasn’t for him and Marie, and who knew whether anyone else would have even showed up.
That made them practically family, as far as he could see.
He wanted to scorn himself for a thought like that, just because it was so emotional. So unlike him. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
“What next, Cap?” one of the men—Barnie, he thought—asked, hitching his little girl up on his hip. “Pretty sure we’ve got this building cleaned out. Anyone still in there is hurt and can’t tell us where they are.”
Pete jerked at the title—he was the second person to call him that since Mueller, and the other person was dead—but nodded firmly.
“As much as I hate to admit it, you’re right. There’s a whole city of trapped people out there, and as far as I can see, no one else is doing one damn thing about it.”
Pete was moving for the street, trying to figure out where they might find another group of people—and whether they’d actually have to work to find them, or whether they could just follow more screams—when Marie appeared at his side.
“Nice pep talk, hero,” she muttered.
He could hear the laughter in her voice. But it was colored by something else. A tension that he recognized from the column of taught muscle running down his own back. They could both make jokes. They could both pretend like they were fine.
This wasn’t funny. And neither of them was fine. They were trying to get people out of collapsed buildings without any sort of machinery or even tools to support them. They’d been lucky so far. But what was going to happen when they came across someone who was hurt too badly to move? Or someone they couldn’t get out?
And that didn’t even start to address the bigger elephant in the city: the military, and the idea that they were probably going to be searching for Pete and Marie soon.
They hit the street and turned right, toward the more heavily populated part of town, and when they got around the next corner, all of them moving quickly, he realized that they were about to find out exactly how they’d react when they came across a situation they couldn’t solve.
Right in front of them, in the middle of the street, an entire wall lay across the asphalt. It looked like it had fallen right off the building in one piece, tipping over like an enormous domino and hitting the street without breaking.
It had also fallen right on top of a man and a woman. Or rather… not on top of them, but with them caught underneath. Their legs were underneath the top of the wall, their torsos still sticking out.
He and Marie were running toward them the moment they saw them, neither of them bothering to say anything.
Pete slid to his knees just to the side of the woman, who was the closest to them, and put a tentative hand to her forehead.
“Ma’am?” he asked softly. “Ma’am, are you awake?”
“She stopped moving about ten minutes ago,” the man next to her croaked, his voice broken and his eyes shut. “She’s my wife. I tried to get her to keep talking. Figured the military would be here any moment to get us out. Figured if she was still awake, she’d have a better chance of lasting long enough. But I couldn’t reach her. My hands…”
He stifled a sob, and Pete realized that his hands had gotten caught under the wall, too. He’d been lying right next to his wife but hadn’t been able to touch her, no matter how hard he’d tried. He’d had to watch her dying right in front of his eyes, unable to do anything about it.
Marie moved to the man’s side and quickly felt for his pulse, murmuring something that sounded comforting. When she looked up, though, Pete could tell that it wasn’t good news. And how could it be? This man had been half-crushed by an entire wall. The internal bleeding had to be slowly draining his reserves, and he didn’t even want to think about the organ damage and broken bones underneath that wall.
She shook her head slightly, telling Pete exactly what he’d expected, and he took a deep breath and told himself firmly to get it under control. They’d known they weren’t going to be able to rescue everyone. But that didn’t mean they didn’t have a job to do.
If this guy was going to die next to his wife, the least they could do was sit here with him and keep him company until he was gone. No one deserved to die alone. And Pete wasn’t going to let this man go through something like that.
He’d already been through enough.
He thought it took about twenty minutes, though it was, without a doubt, the longest twenty minutes of his life. The guy stopped talking soon after they found the couple, seeming to relax a bit at the thought that someone else was there to take care of things. Maybe he thought they were going to save him.
Or maybe he was just glad he wasn’t alone.
Either way, he drifted away a little while later. Marie, who’d had her hand on his pulse, looked up and met Pete’s eyes, and he knew that the guy had left them.
He felt his heart squeeze in sheer regret that they hadn’t been able to save him. And then he got started on the next problem, because they didn’t have a whole lot of time for regrets. Not right now.
“Right,” he murmured.
“Well, we’ve done the best we can for him, I’m afraid. Now let’s go find people we’re capable of saving.”
He stood up and turned back toward the group of people they’d already saved, seeing a range of both horrified and respectful looks. He could definitely understand those. He was feeling much the same way himself.
“And no one even came to help them!” Judith said sharply. “The city is falling down and we have both cops and military in this town, but they’re not here to help us? Where are they? What the hell are they doing instead of their jobs?”
“Honestly, the military doesn’t seem to have much interest in helping the people at all, from what I’ve seen,” Marie muttered from next to Pete.
Pete was just opening his mouth to reply to that when he saw Judith’s eyes shift over his shoulder and widen.
Half a second later, by his count, he felt the cold nose of a gun pressed against his temple, and heard the safety click off.
“On the contrary,” a deep voice said firmly. “We’re doing everything we need to right now. Saving people. Securing the city. Recapturing the refugees who escaped.”
All the breath left Pete’s body in a huff, but he knew it was already too late for him to do anything. The military, who should have been doing something far more useful, had managed to catch up to them while they were doing something else.
And this time, he didn’t think they were going to be able to just walk out of the military compound.
Shit.
Chapter 22
As usual, the moment things got tight, Marie started running her mouth.
It was something Pete had started to think he could very definitely count on from her. Unfortunately, it was also one of her worst—and most dangerous—traits. One that she seemed completely unaware of, and incapable of controlling.
Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe she was completely aware of it and just unwilling to bother trying to control it. Maybe she actually thought it made her strong—or effective.
God, maybe she thought it actually helped.
Pete really wasn’t sure. And he definitely didn’t have time to think about it right now, as the military guys—if they were real military at all, which he was starting to doubt—were frog-marching them back down the street, toward the military compound they’d already escaped once.
“Where are you taking us?” Marie was snarling right now, struggling in the arms of the man who had the misfortune of being tasked with arresting her. “We have rights, you know. We’re American citizens, and you can’t just arrest us because you feel like it, or because you don’t like us. We haven’t even done anything! We were just trying to help people get out of the rubble! Because you were missing in action, I might add. Maybe if you guys were actually doing your damn jobs, we wouldn’t have had to be helping them, did you ever think of that? Huh? Did you?”
It was those last two questions that got her shoved, Pete was pretty sure. And even though he was on her side, he could kind of see why.
First of all, he could remember wanting to do the same thing to her himself.
Secondly, she was definitely pushing too hard, in a situation where she should damn well know to keep her mouth shut and think rather than shouting.
That didn’t change the fact that she was his partner, though.
He stepped forward quickly to come between her—where she was now laying on the ground, snarling—and the would-be soldier who had been leading her, who looked like he wanted to do an awful lot more than just shove her.
“You have no right to treat a lady like that,” Pete said calmly. “I don’t know who you are or what you guys think you’re doing, but I can guarantee that your superior isn’t going to take nicely to you roughing up the prisoners before he gets a shot to talk to them. Particularly when one of those prisoners is a woman. You do have ethics, I assume, and you do have your commands from the military, which include, in slightly more formal terms, treating prisoners—and especially women—with respect.”
Yes, it was a gamble. No, he didn’t really have any idea whether the superior officer in question—whoever they were—would care that this kid, who couldn’t be more than eighteen, was shoving Marie around. But he knew how the military worked. At least… he’d known how the military had worked before.
He could only hope they still operated by some of the same rules, and had some of the same ethics. Further, he had to hope that these men were actually part of the military, or they wouldn’t give one single fuck what the terms of service were when a kid signed with the army.
He must have guessed right, though, because the kid made a face at him and then backed off, grumbling about uppity females who didn’t know their place.
Pete felt his mouth quirk. Marie was definitely uppity. And she definitely didn’t know her place when it came to being able to keep her mouth shut in the face of men with guns. Didn’t believe in giving anyone respect or figuring out that some people might actually know more about something than she did. ”Uppity female” could definitely describe her.
But she was his uppity female, and he wasn’t going to let her get hurt. Not if he could help it.
Besides, he’d gotten used to her attitude. These days, he actually kind of liked it.
He turned around, throwing the guy who’d been holding his elbows off, and ducked down, managing to get his hands—which were handcuffed in front of him—under one of Marie’s arms and lift her up again.
Her face was dangerous, in that I’m Going To Do Something Really Ill-Advised sort of way, and Pete worked to catch her gaze, then shook his head firmly.
Now’s not the time, he told her with his mind. We need to figure out how to get out of this, and making them angry isn’t going to help.
He couldn’t even imagine what his face looked like right now. Probably all drawn-down eyebrows and twisting mouth as he literally tried to speak to her with his mind. Anyone else would have been howling with laughter.
Not Marie, though. She just stared at him, narrowed her eyes with dislike at what he was saying—big freaking surprise there, he thought—and then nodded once.
He let out a quick sigh of relief. Thank God the woman was at least going to listen to some reason. Maybe it would give him a chance to figure out how they were going to get out of this current mess.
He turned back to the guy who’d been escorting him, who was now wearing a very lovely shade of scowl.
“That look doesn’t do much for you, you know,” Pete said with half a grin. “It’ll leave wrinkles, even in a face as young as yours. Don’t worry, I’m not going to cause any trouble. I’d like to know where we’re going, though. And I second Marie’s question about why we’re under arrest. Last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to try to help people out of a collapsed building.”
The guy’s face lightened up a little bit at Pete’s tone, though it didn’t go all the way to friendly.
“You also killed soldiers the last time you were on the base,” he said coldly. “And that part is a crime. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
He walked up, grabbed Pete’s hands, and spun him around so that he was facing the military compound again. And then they started marching once more, the hands on his arms tighter this time, their pace quicker.
Well, shit. That whole killing soldiers thing was going to come back to haunt them, now—not that they’d had any choice in the matter at the time. The first guy had killed Jack with a point-blank and totally hasty shot. He hadn’t even given Jack a chance to explain why he’d been saying what he was saying, or try to talk his way out of being killed.
There had been zero reason to kill the guy. As far as Pete could see, that particular soldier’d had it coming. He’d started the fight.
As for the guys in the courtyard… Well, if he’d hit any of them, it had only been because that had been the only way to get out of there without being killed themselves.
Somehow, he didn’t think these guys were going to accept either of those things as an excuse.
>
More was the pity.
He exchanged a quick glance with Marie, her eyes telling him that she’d come to the exact same conclusions—and the same worries—and then he noticed movement in the shadows behind her. He squinted at the movement, trying to figure out what was going on back there. Was there something in the darkness? Or was it just a snowbank settling?
More snow falling? More ash and debris floating through the air?
Then the thing that had been shifting stepped into a slightly lighter shadow, and Pete saw exactly what it was.
Benny, one of the guys they’d saved. He was scowling at the soldiers who had arrested Pete and Marie, and when his eyes turned to Pete’s, he gave one slow, simple nod, and then ducked back into the shadows.
Pete had no idea who Benny had been in his previous life, before those earthquakes trapped him in that building and Pete and Marie managed to save him. But it looked like he knew a thing or two about melting into the background.
It also looked like he was on Pete and Marie’s side in this—probably because Pete and Marie had been there to help him and his daughter out of the collapsed building when the military guys were too busy doing whatever it was they’d been doing.
Pete could only hope that the rest of the group felt the same way.
And that they found a way to act on it. Because right now, he was fresh out of ideas, and he didn’t think this group of so-called soldiers was going to give him any fairer of a trial than those convicts back in Mueller had.
“So let me get this straight. We killed soldiers, we escaped their little compound, and we were evidently already in trouble when we arrived,” Marie hissed out of the side of her mouth, walking as close as she could to Pete so that she could talk without the soldiers hearing her.
Hopefully.
“How bad is that, really? I mean, are we going to be able to defend ourselves at all?”
Stone Cold Fear | Book 3 | Ice Burn Page 12
