Consumed (Firefighters #1)

by J. R. Ward

  He was not going to miss filling out paperwork, traffic jams, or his chronic bad elbow. He was glad his parents were already dead.

  He really hoped he got to see his twin brother on the other side.

  Yeah, it would be almost worth all this just to see John again.

  Likely not in heaven, though, given the way they had behaved all those years. But Hell was more fun, wasn’t it? And he’d sure as shit know more people down there.

  He was never going to know who the next president was going to be, or whether that raise he’d put in for would have gone through, or if that mole on his back was melanoma or not. And his landlady was going to be pissed. Out of the original four of them who had rented her shit hole, Mitch was in rehab, Moose had just gotten married, Jack was going to end up moving in with his sister . . . so it was just him left.

  Who was going to get all his crap out?

  Probably the boys on the crew, and they’d divvy up the good stuff—

  Aw, fuck. He was going to get added to the list, wasn’t he. That horrible list they lifted whiskey to at the end of a long off-duty night when they were saturated drunk and the emotions they liquored up to forget came plowing back through the buzz like charging bulls.

  It was the list of the fallen who had died in the line of duty, the ones who were missed every day and night, the ghosts who followed them on every call . . . the regrets that didn’t just have titles in all caps, but faces, clear as day.

  Daniel Michael Maguire. Would they recite him in order as the newest one, or by his brother, John Thomas Maguire?

  Anne would drink to him. Anne would raise her glass and think of this night and feel the tightness in her chest and the sting in the corners of her eyes. She would maybe remember the laughs. She would definitely think of working this fire. And she might just recall that one time they’d made love.

  In the end, though, he would be another thing she ran from.

  If he could have apologized to her for that, he would’ve, and wasn’t fate a bitch. He wouldn’t be dying now if he hadn’t saved her, so she could regret him and carry the guilt around with her for the rest of her life.

  One-handed.

  As he shut his eyes against the memory of that axe he’d swung, he had a passing thought that he should bang the pipe again.

  And that was it.

  The end.

  chapter

  6

  Victor “Ropes” Rizzo got out of his truck and flicked his cigarette to the ground. Crushing it with his boot, he ignored the way his heart pounded in his rib cage. Up ahead, on the far side of a ring of frozen scruff, the barbequed remains of an old abandoned warehouse were like a corpse at the end of an autopsy.

  Holes everywhere. Leaking bricks. Whole sections gone.

  Fire trucks were clustered at the collapsed northeastern corner, their flashing lights overlapping to form a surging red glow that showed little good news. Those brick outer walls had collapsed into a slope that was tall enough to require climbing, and his first thought was that if somebody was under all that weight, they needed a pine box. But at least the blaze was wholly contained, the hoses off, the steam as yet rising into the night sky while smoke, its not-so-distant cousin, lingered like a specter of the dead in the cold post-traumatic air.

  As his nose tingled at the old, familiar of soot and chemical stink, his eyes tracked the movements of firefighters from both his 617 stationhouse and the 499 while they picked around the debris mountain, their bodies throwing shadows over bricks, concrete blocks, sections of wood.

  He hitched his shoulder brace up a little higher under his parka and walked across the cracked asphalt. Incident command had set up post out of one of the engines, but he went right by the—

  “You’re not cleared for duty, Rizzo.”

  He shook his head at Captain Baker. “I’m going in. Sorry.”

  “You’re med’d out.”

  “So file me under concerned fucking citizen.”

  “I am so fucking tired of all of you!”

  Rizzo blew a kiss and marched across to the rescue efforts, his boots crunching over stones slippery from what had been sprayed and then frozen. A couple of the boys sifting through the pile looked at him, and one even spoke up, “No way, Rizzo.”

  Of course it was his fellow 617 Chuck Parnesi—but at least the 499’s crew stayed out of it. Then again, you didn’t get involved in another family’s drama.

  “Seriously, Rizzo—”

  “Did I hear someone talking?” Rizzo started to climb up on the pile, his balance all marble-on-an-old-table because of his bum-ass shoulder. “I didn’t think so.”

  “Your arm’s in a sling.”

  “And again, I say, wouldn’t it be a waste of a someone’s time to comment on what is my fucking business.”

  As Chuck got into a debate with himself, Rizzo tripped and went down to his knees on the uneven slope—but a gloved hand presented itself to help him up. It was Robert Miller, a.k.a., Moose, from the 499. Danny’s old roommate. The man’s civilian clothes were soaking wet and covered with ash, and there was blood smudged down the front of his shirt. His eyes were pits of suffering, his face pale beneath his trimmed beard.

  Rizzo didn’t hesitate to take what was offered.

  The 617 and the 499 houses were not friends. They were not buddies. They didn’t mix down at Timeout Sports Bar; they didn’t work out or do off-duty second jobs together; they didn’t clap each other on the shoulders and yuk it up if they met in town.

  Bust a beer bottle over your head was more like it. They were competitors: for resources from the city, recruits from the academy, performance on the job. Except here was the thing. Both sides suffered from ah-hell-no-that’s-my-little-brother syndrome. They were allowed to pick on the other guy, but no one else could, and in this situation, when a fellow firefighter was buried in debris? As far as Ropes or any of the other guys at the 617 cared, it was one of their own—and nobody was going to stop digging until they recovered Danny Maguire . . . or his remains.

  With grunts and curses, firefighters were hefting charred beams, toasted office equipment, and bundles of bricks still mortared together out of the warehouse, the metastases growing on either side of the massive hole in the flank of the three-story structure.

  Ropes knew better than to try that shit with his arm, so he got busy with his flashlight.

  Holy shit. So much of so heavy.

  This had to have been a manufacturing facility first, before it had become a warehouse and then a crack den. But why would you put the machinery on the second floor? Lot of weight to crank up to a higher level.

  But people were idiots.

  As he picked his way through, being careful with where he put his boots, there was the sound of dipping water from all directions, the cold tears of the extinguishing effort falling from anything and everything. The going was uneven, dangerous, and even though the removal effort involved a dozen men and women, there was still so much that he had to mount as he shined his beam down.

  Ropes lasted about a nanosecond before he ripped off his sling. His bad shoulder, the one he’d popped out of the socket again, immediately protested the freedom of movement, but it could fuck right off with that.

  Training the flashlight into the slick mess, he searched for a reflective flash, a wink of movement, a sign, a sound, a—

  Too many lost.

  The thought barged in and took over, replacing everything save his visual acuity. But goddamn it, how many more times was this going to happen? How many searches after how many accidents where good men and women were lost? As the crazy bell started to go off in his head, he did what he could to dim the noise; in the end, though, all he could do was ignore it and try to focus through the distraction.

  The mental effort was harder and less successful than ever, the opposite of a muscle exercised regularly: Instead
of getting stronger, his ability to withstand the chaos in his head was weakening, and his terror was that he was burning out.

  If he wasn’t doing this job? What the fuck else was there for him.

  More with the careful footsteps, higher on the mound of twisted, mangled, burned-out crap, harder with the going now. In his heart, he knew this was not a rescue situation but a recovery one, and he pressed on because he was very well aware that chances were better than not that someone was going to have to do this for him at some point—

  “Ropes.”

  He stopped and glanced over to the left, expecting to see a guy wanting to get his attention. But no one was there.

  He’d heard his name, though. He absolutely had heard his name.

  Frowning, he turned in that direction, and thigh-high’d one knee to get over a mangled desk. His flashlight, as he trained it into the tangle, was so bright that the wet patches on the blackened metal and charred wooden beams sent strobes back to his retinas, making his vision dance.

  An instinct that made no sense whatsoever drew him to a juncture between two more I beams and what appeared to be a printing press and some travel trunks. It was about fifteen feet back from the opening that he’d heard Sister had been pushed out of—arguably out of range. From what he’d been told over the phone, the collapse had occurred right as Danny had been shoving her from the building, so no, Ropes decided. Not here—

  The movement was so slight, and occurred just as he was swinging the beam away, that he nearly missed it. And even as he pivoted back and did a reexamine, he was convinced it had been a smaller piece of wood or metal slipping down to the concrete floor and catching the light.

  Frowning, he squatted further and braced his good hand on something that was still warm from the fire.

  And there it was. Way down in there. The telltale reflective flash from the sleeve of a firefighter’s PPE.

  Ropes whistled loud through his front teeth as he got down on hands and knees. “Danny! Maguire! Danny! Give me a sign. Move your hand!”

  As every single person in the collapse looked toward him, the wait for a response was forever. And then an eternity after that.

  But it moved. It fucking moved.

  “Maguire!” Ropes shouted as the others fought their way in his direction. “Stay with me, Maguire!”

  Come on, my man, Ropes thought at the guy. Don’t die on me now.

  But that arm didn’t shift positions again . . . as if the man’s last action on earth was to get help that did not get to him in time.

  “Stay with me, Maguire.” Ropes’s voice cracked as people tried to get a strategy for lifting everything away without causing another collapse. “Goddamn it, man, stay with me . . .”

  chapter

  7

  University of New Brunswick Hospital, Downtown New Brunswick

  Anne didn’t so much wake up as rock climb her way back to consciousness, her will using ethereal secures to pull herself to a surface breach of awareness and reasoning. And with baseline awareness came dull pain, her body carpeted with sensations that had been filed down by the morphine she was on.

  It had to be morphine. Percocet made her nauseous.

  As she opened her eyes, her hearing tagged along for the ride, the soft beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor reassuring her that she was alive. The hospital room was the color of oatmeal and had all the variability of decor you’d expect from Quaker Oats: no extraneous furniture, drapes, or even framed posters. The mini TV was off, and the bed next to hers was empty—

  Higher reasoning returned with the speed and aim of a boomerang, bringing with it that image of the smoke clearing to reveal the inside of that warehouse just before the collapse.

  “Danny!”

  With a surge that was more will than wellness, she went to sit up, get up, go find him, except there was an IV line in her right arm—oh, screw that. She reached over to pull it out—

  And brought up a stump.

  A carefully bandaged, medically addressed stump. The wrappings were bright white, and there were more layers of them at the top, the end bulbing out in a reverse taper. Like she had fennel for an arm.

  Shock, the medical kind, not the emotional sort, made the monitor go into an alarm, and thanks to her medical training as an EMT, she reached over and turned the noise off. Then she just stared at the stump, her eyes blinking over and over and over again.

  As if that would change the channel to something less horror movie, more kid-friendly cartoon.

  Except . . . nope. The batteries on the proverbial remote seemed to be dead. She was still looking at what was a very traumatic injury, even if it appeared to have been properly treated . . .

  There was pain, she realized, in a place that no longer existed. Her missing palm and fingers were registering a three-dimensional, resonant pain, the severed nerves still talking like there hadn’t been a divorce of the nuclear family, as if Christmas morning still had the same five people at the table, around the tree.

  Nausea swelled in her belly, a beast awakening, but thank God someone had anticipated that. There was a horribly pink plastic bedpan at the tips of her fingers—

  Remaining fingers.

  “Oh, God . . .”

  As she grabbed the pan and tried to curl onto her side so gravity would help the evacuation, every muscle and bone in her body screamed, and tears made things wavy and indistinct. Not that her vision mattered. Memories came hard and fast, eclipsing the hospital bed, the anonymous room, the medical equipment, and even the pain.

  Danny bursting into the collapse to save her. Danny yelling at her through his mask. Danny . . . with the axe.

  And then, once again, that last moment, through the hole in the outer wall, her savior staying behind.

  There was no way he survived.

  Anne’s tears were hot on her cheeks as more images of Danny came to her, the weight of the loss increasing as the sediment layers of what they had shared grew higher and higher. Moose’s wedding was the worst. When they had danced. When they had . . . done what they did later.

  It was impossible not to view the series of memories as her brain’s version of phantom limb pain, her yearning emotions like nerves now servicing that which no longer existed. Danny was gone. Whatever they had had together, those currents of connection and bolts of passion were now tied to a void. For the rest of her life, be it long or short, all of that potential would never be answered, no Polo for the Marco.

  “Danny,” she moaned. “It’s my fault—”

  And right on cue, there he was, opening the door.

  Not Danny Maguire, no. Her brother, Chief Thomas Ashburn, the legend himself.

  Tom was so tall and so broad that as he came in, the hospital room shrunk down to a shoebox, the ceiling shortening to mere inches, the walls crowding in until she couldn’t breathe. He looked the same, with that prematurely gray hair, and the hard, handsome face, and the aura of power and authority—and yet he was not the same, at all.

  For once, his eyes were not narrowed with suspicion. Far from it.

  “Oh, God, Anne,” he said hoarsely. “You’re awake.”

  She looked away from his sympathy. There was a temptation to lean on him, use his strength to help herself, rely on her big brother to make all this better. But that was a getaway car with no brakes and a kidnapper behind the wheel.

  “You never call me by my real name.”

  “Tonight’s different.”

  Closing her lids, she braced herself. “Did they find Danny’s body? Be honest. I’d rather know now.”

  “They got him out. He’s in surgery.”

  “What?” She sat up so fast, she went faint. “Danny? Danny—they got him out?”

  “Yeah. They did.”

  The trembling came on quick and with violence, and as she sank back down onto the pillows, Tom took a step fo
rward like he was thinking of helping her. He stopped that before she could tell him to back off.

  “Anne.”

  For once, his eyes were sad, and that was far from a comfort. The sympathy from him made her realize how there was no one in her life that she could trust.

  “When can I see him?” she asked.

  The door swung open, an annoyed millennial in a nursing uniform bursting in.

  “Not now,” Tom snapped.

  The young woman stopped short and looked at him like he was suggesting she’d voted for Trump. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m talking to my sister. I’ll tell you when you can come in.”

  The nurse glared up at the mountain in front of her. “I’m here to check on the patient’s vitals—”

  “Her blood pressure spiked and is normalizing. Same with her pulse. No change on oxygen stats. IV lines running clear and her urine bag does not need to be emptied. Good-bye.”

  “I’m getting my superior.”

  “Do that.” He pulled the door open and nodded to the corridor. “And I’ll throw them out, too.”

  “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re not in charge here—”

  Tom leaned down and spoke slow, like he’d made a call about her IQ level and it was not a compliment. “I’m telling my sister about the man who nearly died saving her life. Who is currently being operated on for an internal bleed that, if it doesn’t kill him from blood loss, will probably make him stroke out and leave him a fucking vegetable. So yeah, get your goddamn superior, get the hospital president, call the fucking pope—and I will throw every single one of you out of this room. Are we clear, or do I need to draw you a diagram.”

  The nurse stared at him with such shock, it was clearly the first time anyone had not provided her with a safe, supported, emotionally aware and nurturing, microaggression-free educational platform.

  And also, Tom was being a total dick.