Megan as they continued into the living room, which was worlds hotter than the bathroom had been. He prayed the heat wouldn’t have her passing out. Just in case, he helped her along every few seconds by wrapping his free arm around her waist and pulling her forward. She wasn’t limp in his arms, which was a very good thing, but he could feel how weak she was, that she was fighting to stay conscious with everything she had.
Finally, they made it to the tip of the hose. “You’re doing great,” he called out to her. “All we need to do is grab the hose and follow it back down.”
He took her hand in his and placed it over the rigid pressurized hose. When he was confident that she had it, he moved behind her to help push her along, lifting her when her legs collapsed on her every few feet or when she was coughing too much to move on her own.
It was damn hard going through the heat and smoke, even in his turnouts with his air pack, and he admired the hell out of her. He should have been carrying two dead weights out of the apartment building, not just one little girl. Megan holding it together like this was going to be the difference between life and death.
“Turn around,” he yelled to her when they reached the landing at the top of the stairs. “We’re going to go down backward. And we’re going to keep moving, no matter what.”
He moved behind her again, going lower on the stairs to catch her in case she fell. Her little girl was stirring in his arms and he prayed she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of this fiery hell.
A loud booming noise sounded and he looked up to see part of the wall beside the front door that he’d kicked in falling down in sheets.
Grabbing Megan, he moved with her and his daughter as quickly as he could down several steps. She had her head lowered and her arms over her hair to protect herself from falling sheetrock.
“Keep moving!” he yelled.
Every second that ticked by as they made it down one more step, and then another, was long and fraught with peril. He could feel how thin the well-worn steps were and knew they could crumble at any point.
By the time he could hear his crew yelling over the sound of the mini-explosions that kept going off all around them, he decided it was time for speed. He went to his feet to get down to the bottom as quickly as he could with one person under each arm.
Almost at the bottom of the stairs, he could finally see what had stopped his partner from coming back upstairs to assist with more hose. A huge ceiling beam had fallen down over the rail and it had sent the whole area around it up in massive flames. Judging from the water and smoke pouring off of it, he guessed Eric had been focused on putting that fire out before it took out the entire staircase and stranded Gabe and his victims upstairs.
Somehow he needed to get around the beam, but it was still too big and too hot for him to pass without putting Megan down. Damn it, he didn’t want to leave her there alone where anything could happen to her while he took Summer outside.
Thank God, just then, through the smoke he heard a voice yelling, “Give them to us,” and a moment later Eric and Todd were pulling both mother and daughter from his arms and taking them to safety.
Amazingly, it wasn’t until that moment that Megan lost consciousness, her strong fingers that had been gripping at his arm going limp as Eric took her from Gabe.
As he yelled, “The mother just passed out,” to Eric, Gabe’s attention was so focused on her that he waited a moment too long to hurdle the smoking beam.
He heard the loud crack a split second before a chunk of ceiling came flying down straight onto his forehead. He hit the ground as hard as the beam had hit him. Darkness swam before his eyes.
The last thing he heard was the motion alarm on his belt going off.
Chapter Two
Megan Harris woke up with her daughter in her arms. They often snuggled at night after a late movie or if Summer had a bad dream, but something felt different. Not just the bed, but the itchy spot on the inside of