Trial by Fire

A man wakes in an inferno, and it's an uphill struggle to make it out alive before he falls into the fire

He could hear crackling, and wondered if his ears had gone to s**t again. Bloody things used to pop all over the place, driving him insane until he'd suffered a minor operation to fix them. He did not want to go through that nightmare again.

                But his second thought was that it was very, very hot; the air felt like it was on fire. He was breathing fire.

                In fact, now that he thought about it...

He couldn’t actually breathe. The air was too heavy. Too poisonous.

                His head pulsed with dull but reverberating pain, and he fervently wished to go back to the darkness. But, some remnant of awareness urgently told him how important it was that he open his eyes. He needed to move. 

                So, feeling like his skull would shatter at the slightest movement, he slowly cracked his eyes open.

                At first he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. His mind whirled sickeningly, inconstant and slow like a rusty old car struggling to get going. As the seconds ticked by and his thoughts sharpened slightly, he realised that he was looking at a wall. At quite an odd angle.

                He was lying down on his front, and felt the rough crunch of dust and debris biting into his temple as his senses began to wake up. Lying on a floor.

                On a dusty floor.

                Every muscle ached and alternately screamed and whined in protest as he forced his arms to tense, struggling to lever his body up from the ground. They shook violently, and his vision stuttered from a view of the wall to one of the floor, covered in white dust and debris.

                What was that? A concrete column? Broken in half, lying just beside him like the jagged end of a snapped bone. Lucky...it had almost landed on him.

                His lungs constricting, burning, he tried to take a breath, any breath, deep or shallow. But his throat locked down, rejecting the smoky air in admonition. His lungs didn't want such air.

                Smoky? Ah, that wasn't just his vision, then. Thick, grey smog clung to every particle he tried to breathe in.

                Now propping himself up on his hands, he tried to move his legs to drag himself forward, to at least begin to find some purchase to get to his feet. His left leg painfully creaked forwards as his behest, the knee bending to dig into the sandpaper beneath him. But the right one jarred, and he found that he couldn’t pull it forwards as easily.

                He tugged harder, and felt a crunch answer him. It made him turn, and he gazed on the mess behind him will dulled amazement. He was in a corridor, he recognised that much. But it was blocked behind him now...had the ceiling caved in? A large slab of flooring had fallen down, with the support beams lying scattered like...a game of kerplunk.

                His right knee was trapped between two of these, held in an awkward position to the side, which explained the crunch it had made when he'd tried to twist it round.

                Well, there was no time to faff around trying to find a way to safely free it.

                He would have taken a deep breath in preparation, but that still seemed impossible, and he yanked his knee free. Watching it detach from the concrete, in a detached fog, he registered the disturbing way it seemed to click around whilst realising that he really should have felt pain from it.

                But he felt nothing. Even the burning in his lungs was fading away.

It was quite bizarre actually. His knee was definitely fucked, an accepted medical term, and was very difficult to move. By rights, it should have been in agony. But it held him as he paused there on hands and knees, trying to gather up the strength to rise to his feet. Wondering how the hell he was going to get to his feet.

                So weak...

                Then he was on his feet. How? He frowned in puzzlement and struggled to adjust to the sudden change in perspective. Staring ahead...

                The reception area was that way, wasn't it? Bones in his neck crunched as he craned his head backwards... to look up at the huge hole still sprinkling dust down from above him.

                Oh yeah. He'd fallen through the floor. A silly thing to forget.

                There'd been a crash, and he'd gone to the window to see what it was, that massive bang of shattering glass. He'd seen...just people looking shocked and running towards the building. He'd left this office and had just been crossing the CID bull-pit when the explosion...

                The building had shook, right down to its foundations, it had seemed. He'd been thrown to the floor...

                And he'd kept on falling.

                Ahead of him now, something massive was ablaze, the fire spreading from it to cover the walls in a violent orange sheen. Squinting past the flames, he thought he could make out the shape of a van, blackened and blurred as it was.

                It was very close to the corridor entrance into the reception area, his way out. The fire roared out intermittently to cover the space, like some kind of gauntlet you saw in tv game shows.

                Well, he certainly couldn’t go the other way; the corridor was blocked that way.

                So, his legs feeling like hunks of dead flesh, he struggled to drag them forwards. One step at a time. One step...two step...skimming the soles of his shoes lightly across the rocks and grime covering the floor. He placed his hand upon the wall, steadying himself as he fixed his gaze upon his goal.

                His Mecca. Out into fresh air. Gods, he needed fresh air.

                How long could someone go without breathing?

                He shied away from the grabbing orange fingers as much as he could as he slowly edged into the obliterated reception area. But really he had to concentrate much more on actually walking. The darkness was constantly threatening. His priority had to be getting out, no matter the obstacle. The flames may have licked him, but he didn't feel them as he flattened his back against the wall and stopped a few steps away from the main source of the fire.

                What prick had driven a flaming van into the middle of a police station reception?

                The flatness of the wall was a Godsend against his back, though the balm of relief threatened to relax him too much. He wanted to close his eyes, but feared that he'd never open them again.

                There it was. The shattered glass front that promised escape. He could practically feel the cool air against his hot skin.

                The trouble was getting across the burning inferno first.

                The fire had searched out the fresh air too, swarming around the gap and reaching out into the night sky. Hogging the entrance. And the walls to either side of the entrance were on fire as well; he couldn’t use them to support himself.

                As he was looking around, trying to make his brain think about his options for escape, his eyes snagged on something to his left, almost hidden amongst a mess of splintered and broken wood. He squinted, trying to look closer and figure out exactly what it was...

                The reception desk. Wasn't that the reception desk? The wooden walls that had protected it from aggressive criminals or family members of criminals hadn't quite held up against a massive explosion of fire. Amongst the debris, there was something black...perhaps not unusual in a place scorched by fire, but still...

                It was a pair of legs, encased in tights. The realisation sent electricity crackling through his battered chest. Legs.

                It gave him the strength to start moving again, and he immediately regretted stopping at all. His right knee kept locking, and every muscle seemed to be sending out a sedating balm begging him to rest. To simply go to sleep here.

                The twisted and charred remains of the desk area had protected whoever lay behind it...somewhat, a little. It still remained in part, specifically the part on the side he was approaching. He examined the tall, blackened remains of the protective barricade; there wasn't a gap big enough to walk through on this side, and the fire was too close, too hot for him to go around to the other.  Well, he might as well use the convenient lack of pain he was experiencing.

                He slowly lowered himself to his knees, never mind how jarred and unstable the movement was, and punched at the burned and weakened wood. It wasn't too hard, considering the state of him. He watched his knuckles scrape and begin to bleed, his palms tearing as he pulled at the jagged and splintered edges of the wood until he'd made a decent sized hole. He only felt the shards of wood embedded in his hands as he crawled his way through, pressing them flat against the ground. As he hauled the rest of his body through, staring down at his hands as his knee locked and almost sent him face first onto the floor again.

                Ooh, there was a very large splinter embedded beneath the fingernail of his right middle finger, blood seeping around it and washing through the nail bed. That definitely looked like it should hurt.

                He frowned in disgust and cringed a little, but forced himself to ignore it as he crawled over to the now visible body lying half protected by shielding debris.

                It hadn't been entirely successful in its protection.

                The body was a woman; he could tell that much. Adult version of school shoes for girls that the dress code here dictated be worn, regulation black skirt reaching the knees and a light blue shirt. All burned, holes showed in places, revealing red, glistening, ruined flesh beneath.

                She was so burned...

                But he recognised her all the same. Hell, he saw her face practically every day as he came and went from this place. Chirpy little Madison Wright, pretty in a kind of geeky way in her glasses and pulled back, black hair. Her face was seared, the flesh already swelling up in an effort to heal the damage.

                "Madison?"

                He tried to say it, but as he moved his dry lips he was aware that no sound had come from them.

                Placing strangely un-trembling fingers upon her throat, he felt a very weak but unmistakeable thrum against them. She was alive. She was alive.

                What could he do? He couldn’t leave her here; she was too badly burned and a rescue party would never rescue her in time.

                But, although not fat by any means, 'little' Madison Wright really wasn't so little, and he could barely carry himself.

                What other option is there?

                He instinctively rejected, shrank from, how difficult, how impossible he knew it would be. How much pain and effort it would take when he already felt so tired. But, he slowly edged his arms beneath her anyway, one under her knees and the other supporting her just below the shoulders. He hitched her up, making sure he had a good enough grip on her...

                And he prepared himself as best he could.

                Hurt. This will hurt. Can't go into the darkness. Must stay awake.

                With all the suddenness of a flash of light, he hauled himself to his feet.

                He was barely aware of slamming into the wall as he flew backwards, barely aware of her weight in his arms. His mind shot towards unconsciousness as though slung from a catapult. By the thread of his teeth, by clawing onto wakefulness with his fingernails, he only just managed to stop himself from falling into the darkness. His vision blanked out for a couple of seconds as he fought to make his way back, and images fluttered across the darkness like a broken film reel. Too fast for him to grab hold of them.

                The real world, burning as it was, came back into focus, his eyes again fixed on what was now their salvation. He adjusted Madison in his arms slightly, weakly curling them around her; he didn't want to drop her.

                The door to her little hidey hole had been blown off its hinges, leaving him a simple exit to walk through. All he had to do was walk.

                How long could someone go without breathing?

                It seemed to take an age for the message to travel from his brain to his legs, begging them to get going. Slowly, so very slowly, he began to move.

                Forget Hercules and his bloody tasks, each of the steps he now took were more effort than all of those tasks combined. The complexity of his thoughts dwindled away until only the most basic of commands remained.

Keep going.

Get out.

Keep going.

                Little starbursts of light were beginning to appear in his vision, sparkling at its edge as though in a dream.

                How long could someone go without air?

                He was holding his breath, that was all. He'd breathe soon. Soon, he promised himself as he walked.

                Even in his state, he knew that, if he survived, he would always remember every detail of this journey. It wouldn’t be dulled by the fog, made indistinct by weakness ...

                Come to think of it, he realised that he couldn’t actually move the left side of his face. Why was that? A stroke? A burn? It seemed to crumble when he tried to move it, so he stopped trying.

                He'd come to the entrance to freedom, veiled by fire as it was. There was a gap free, as with the corridor the flames only occasionally managed to reach all the way across it. He could get past there. Maybe.

                He turned his back to the fire to better protect Madison; she'd been burned enough already, and held her much closer to his body so she wouldn’t scrape against the glass shards still clinging on to the building front.

                Just a little further, shuffling sideways like a crab, just a little further...

                The air was cold out here, a release from the oven. He could only feel it against his skin though...his lungs still weren't working. Why didn't they want the fresh air either?

                He was reaching the end, he could feel it. As far as he could go with no breath, no air, the weakness was spreading through his bloodstream now, the passive protest of his muscles finally taking its effect.

                Over.

                Vaguely aware of falling to his knees. Thinking that the impact had definitely fucked his right one once and for all.

                People swarming around him. Madison's weight being lifted from his arms.

                Ah, sweet relief. She was as safe as she could be now.

                He could close his eyes, and welcome back the darkness.

 

                Chaos. It was the only word Jack could find to describe his surroundings at that moment. Fire crews and paramedics swarmed around the area, lit up as it was by red and blue lights, the spray of water against the flaming building catching the colours in droplets as it arced towards the fire. Police officers, uniforms covered in varying degrees of white dust and plaster fragments, watched with him as the firefighters battled against the blaze that had consumed the station's reception area.

                Some of his colleagues were already organised, ushering prisoners rescued from custody into temporary holding. Most just watched the carnage with silent, wounded horror.

Who could have done this?

                Most had escaped without harm, others with just bruises and a few cuts, shocked and stunned. One officer had been dragged from the destruction by another, unconscious with mild burns and smoke damaged lungs. An ambulance had already screamed away with him.

                They didn't even know who was unaccounted for yet, so early as it was. So stunned as they all were.

                At first, Jack couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. The image his eyes gave him was formless, strange and unrecognisable, a burned creature with too many legs and arms. Then, after he blinked, he realised the figure was a man, carrying another...

                "Ben?" He murmured softly, beginning to move around the border tape to get closer to the broken figure that emerged from the shattered remains of the building front like Jesus rising from the dead.

                Already, paramedics were rushing urgently towards the two wounded, briefly obscuring them from Jack's vision as he ran closer. He watched in horrified disbelief as Ben fell to his knees, wincing at the audible crack that whipped through the air as his knees impacted the concrete. The unconscious figure, nothing but a horrifically burned hunk of flesh from what he could see, was quickly spirited away by several paramedics to a nearby stretcher. All of them ignored Jack as they shot towards the next available ambulance...

                Had that been Madison?

                "He's not breathing!"

                Jack whipped around at the words, urgently spoken but without a hint of panic as one of the paramedics relaying Ben's condition.

                Not breathing...it felt like his blood had turned to ice. Dear God, no. Jack had never been Ben's biggest fan; the younger man had targeted him as a shark eyeballs its next meal from the moment he'd arrived. Viciously ambitious, highly intelligence and devious to the point where he could outwit the Devil himself, Ben had had Jack looking over his shoulder so often it looked like he'd developed a twitch. So far, through nearly thirty years of experience, Jack had managed to stay one step ahead of him, and he thought, or hoped, that by now he'd gained enough of Ben's respect to be safe from his attack. Ambitious Ben may be, but in the two years he'd worked at this station he'd also revealed, well hidden as was, a deep sense of honour and loyalty difficult to break once formed. Ben, unlike many similar to his personality, at least respected those of his enemies deserving of it. His stubbornness...no, Jack checked himself, his strength had just been proved to everyone who'd watched him stagger out of that burning building. An irritating, infuriating, dangerous and strong human being, he'd certainly gained enough of Jack's respect as he'd tried to turf him out of a job.

                He couldn’t die like this.

                The Detective Superintendant stared at what he could see of the prone body as the paramedics worked on him, passing ventilation equipment to the man who was trying to get Ben breathing again. Small. He looked so diminished, covered in soot and dust as he was, his suit suddenly seeming two sizes too big for him. By changing his position, Jack could get a better look at him, at the shiny red burns marring the side of his face and back of his head, the ugly head wound that had bled a river, bright and shocking in its colour, down to his jaw line. There wasn't an inch of skin not covered in blood or filth.

                Eventually, with all the efficiency of the best of their profession, the paramedics had succeeded in an emergency intubation. Ben's face became dominated by the breathing tube attached to a large purple bubble that a paramedic periodically squeezed...

                Breathing for him.

                With five men and women working as one, the paramedics lifted Ben up as gently as possible, and quickly loaded him onto a trolley, speeding him away to an ambulance faster than Jack could blink. He was left standing there, stunned; this night was becoming more and more dream-like from his perspective.

                'He's not breathing...'

 

                Uniformed Inspector Maria Atwood had never felt so tired in all her years. She slowly wandered her way through the hospital corridors, almost unaware of the beds, wheelchairs and patients that occasionally moved past her. She was a woman well into middle age, her face weathered yet handsome; her soft green eyes could be as piercing as they were perceptive, but now they were simply dulled and darkened with all they had seen that night. Never in a million years...

She'd been a police officer for over half her life, beginning as a fresh faced young PC and ending as the formidable yet fair Inspector, all at the same station. Her copper hair was streaked with grey now, and she had more wrinkles than she liked to admit to; but she was proud of the years that had created them. Not a woman to be messed with, as tough as the streets she could navigate with her eyes shut; but all who worked with her knew her mothering side. She protected her uniformed officers with a lioness ferocity, listened to their problems and helped to solve them...

                Today it was up to her to visit and hover over those officers wounded in yesterday's attack. Two had been standing at the admissions desk in reception when the van had hit, and they hadn't made it out in time to escape the explosion. Both were a concern for smoke inhalation, steadfastly attached to ventilators as their damaged lungs struggled to work alone. Bruises, burns and cuts, but both would live, and both were out of danger and resting now.

                Madison was a different story.

                An involuntary sigh escaped her as the young woman crossed her mind. Madison's face had been damn near unrecognisable, puffed up as it was, her eyes nearly swelled shut. The doctors were still working over her extensive burns, trying to keep her oxygen levels up. Her lungs were so badly damaged, her body suffering internal bleeding from the force of the explosion.

                Her chances looked slim.

                Maria could always have left the giving of bad news to the Super; he was above her in rank after all, responsible for them all...and it wasn't as though Madison had been a police officer under Maria's care anyway; she was a receptionist. A sweet, happy receptionist who had never failed to lift the mood around her. A young woman with a husband, and twin two year old sons who would miss her. No, calling Rob so he could at least say goodbye to his wife had been the least Maria could do.

After being punched in the stomach by bad news, she was really hoping that Jack had something better to tell her. Ben had spent a long time in surgery, and Maria knew that he hadn't been breathing by himself when they'd taken him away in the ambulance...

                Please, no more dead.

                As she rounded a corner, she slowed to a brief halt when her eyes found the crumpled figure of the DSI, leaning in the doorway of a room as he was. Jack's hair had just managed to go grey before he lost it completely, and now white wisps, thin and cut short, still clung on. Years of police work showed on him as much as they did on her, a weathered face that had seen too much, and dark blue eyes that stared listlessly into the room he almost seemed to be guarding. Like her, he too was tough and caring, maybe that was just what the job did to people over time. Instilled a sense of responsibility to those around them.

                She drifted over to him, moving into the room a little as her saddened gaze took in its occupant.

                Ben looked much better without the grime and soot coating his skin. His burns had been dressed; Maria could just about see the pristine white of the bandages covering the left side of his face. His entire left arm, rested carefully upon his stomach, was swathed in bandages, running all the way up and over his shoulder and wrapping around his chest. She could barely see his sleeping face, covered as it was by a large breathing mask, the kind with straps that went around the head, pouring oxygen into his damaged lungs.

                At least he wasn't hooked up to a breathing tube anymore. What made her wince most of all was the sight of his knee; the pea-green blankets had been tucked around it, away from the metal scaffolding that was buried into the joint. It looked so sore...

                She turned back to Jack, whose troubled gaze was still rested upon the unconscious patient as though he hadn't noticed Maria there.

                "What's the damage?" She asked softly, studying his grim features to prepare herself for any bad news, even as she inwardly cringed at the thought of it. He didn't answer her at first, the darkness of his expression making her fear the worst.

                "He has severe lung damage; there's lot of fluid build up they have to keep an eye on, makes it hard for him to breathe. But the doctors say that they should heal...some scarring will be left, but I don’t think he was ever planning to run a marathon anyway.
                "He has four broken ribs, and about three cracked ones from a heavy impact; they've been set. Second and third degree burns, mostly to his left side and back...
                "Cracked skull, concussion, his right kneecap was entirely split in two; he's going to need more reconstructive surgery on it. They didn't want to do too much now...wanted to give him a chance to get stronger, I don't think he reacted well to the anaesthesia. How he walked out on that, I will never know..."

                Maria turned back to the bed, observing Ben now with more amazement than fear as Jack listed the extent of his injuries. He'd heal, and had performed nothing short of a miracle...

                "Walked out carrying Madison in his arms." She pointed out, suddenly feeling like smiling despite herself. Trust Benjamin Hart to flip the bird to a raging inferno.

"B*****d couldn’t just be lucky; he had to be extraordinary as well." Jack agreed with a thin smile, "what's the news from the station?"

                Maria shrugged a little, "as you'd expect," she said blithely. "We're working on gathering the CCTV from shops up the road, the station tapes are still in the station at the moment, but I expect we'll have them pretty shortly. The fire's out, and the firemen are still assessing the building to see if it's structurally safe. Jason Parker and Niamh Ryan are in Recovery, out of danger...and Madison's husband is with her now. She's still holding on.
                "I did have a brief report from the safety inspectors." She added, wondering if she should share the information with Jack, tired as he was. But, he perked up at her words.
"And?"
"It looks like a lot of the support beams and columns were damaged by the explosion, they think the van was filled with barrels of gasoline."
"That would explain the force of it."
"Hmmm...they're having trouble getting deeper into the station as the ceiling of the corridor leading in from reception is blocked by debris, " she paused, "the ceiling caved in; there's a big hole in the floor of CID." She looked significantly at Jack, watching his eyes widen and the colour drain from his face as he looked to Ben's still form.
                "Christ," he murmured, "he fell through the floor...that's why his ribs were broken."
"And his knee; I think he must have heard the van crash and was on his way to reception when it exploded. The floor gave out from under him."

                To Maria's surprise, Jack huffed a slight laugh, a reluctant smile tugging at his features as he gazed at their literally fallen Detective Inspector.

                "He doesn’t do anything by half, does he?"