I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia
Mac leaned against the rough graffiti covered wall, panting. He could hear Jack splashing back toward him through the flooded corridor they'd passed a few minutes ago. He looked down at the floor beneath him, nodding like he was agreeing with someone's wise suggestion. He sunk down onto it, glad it was reasonably dry.
Jack's soggy steps were approaching, and Mac covered a cough by clearing his throat and calling out to his partner, "Find an exit, pal?"
"Nah, man, but there's a big room at the end, all dry and warmer than …" Jack came around the corner and immediately dropped down next to his partner. "Hey, kid, hey, you okay?"
Mac forced his eyes back open. "Yeah, man, I'm good." Jack's skeptical face slipped firmly into place making Mac smirk. "Maybe could do with a hand up though."
Instead of pursuing further questions relative to his partner's less than awesome condition, Jack stood with a groan and extended his hand to help Mac up. Mac grimaced but made it to his feet in one reasonably smooth motion.
"So … big, warmer room?"
Jack smirked. "Well, warmer is a relative term, but I couldn't see my breath in there and it looks more structurally sound than some of these hallways. Plus, it's the furthest place from where good ole Hans blew the entrance and trapped us in here."
Mac smiled at that. "Jack, his name is Manfred Vogt."
Jack slung an arm around his partner's shoulders and as a testament to just how lousy the kid felt, he didn't protest the help. "Sure, that's a fine name, bud. But any crazy German thief who ruins my goddamned Christmas is gonna be Hans Gruber. Especially if he shoots at me and tries to blow me up. It don't matter if it's in the middle of the East German countryside instead of LA."
"At least you still have your shoes, man. So, you're one up on McClane so far."
Mac hesitated for a moment before they started slogging though the black water flooding the yet another hallway of the warren of underground tunnels they'd fled into after their exfil helicopter crashed, not ten minutes away from their rendezvous, freeing their prisoner within easy range of his cronies.
Then he made himself start walking, letting Jack help him stay on his feet. He just didn't have the energy to argue. He'd been coming down with something when they'd reported for the briefing about bringing in an international contract thief who terrorist organizations hired to steal valuable enough targets to finance their work.
"Jesus, that's cold," he grumbled. There were few sensations he disliked more than wet feet, especially in wet socks.
Of course right now, he was slightly more worried about wet lungs. First he'd been getting sick although he'd done his level best to ignore it. Then the crash had knocked him around a fair amount, probably busting up his ribs, and the run through the forest that terminated in this strange bunker that seemed comprised mostly of moldy rusty tunnels hadn't done his respiratory system (or any of the rest of him) any favors.
"It's pretty cold," Jack agreed, glancing with some worry at his overly docile partner. "Not gonna lie, feels not too awful on my ankle though."
"How bad is it?" Mac asked, remembering for the first time, that Jack had gotten dinged up a little, too.
"Better than the bullet graze," Jack said mildly. They paused when another explosion from somewhere not too far off rocked the tunnel they were sloshing through. Some dust drifted down, but that was all.
After pausing to see if another blast would happen, they started off again. "I'll patch that up for you as soon as we can find ourselves some light," Mac offered.
"That's something I think maybe I've got covered."
They exited the dark narrow tunnel, where the flashlight on Jack's phone revealed a large dry room that had to be at least fifteen degrees warmer than where they had been. Mac almost sighed with relief. He'd been shivering, and it felt like it eased almost immediately when they stepped into this large room. It felt almost like there had to be a fire going somewhere nearby it was so much warmer.
Jack eased Mac down onto an overturned set of lockers and made sure the light from his phone let his partner see the 'move and I'll beat you like a rented mule' look he was giving him. "No worries, Dalton, I'll stay right here. I don't have a light anyway."
Mac's phone had gotten crushed in the crash and he clearly resented having to rely on Jack for light at the moment. Jack gave him a knowing look, then asked, "What're the odds you have a dry lighter in your bag of tricks at the moment?"
"Easily calculable," Mac answered with a wry smirk. "But I'll spare you the math." He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew a hot pink Bic.
"Nice fashion choice for taking up one seriously filthy habit. You haven't have you?"
Mac grinned. "No, but Katarina smokes. She didn't have pockets, so when we went outside, she just asked me to hold it. Forgot to give it back."
"Good to see her?" Jack asked, as he went around and began lighting the wicks on the oil lanterns he'd noticed when he came to scope this place out.
Mac nodded, and Jack didn't fail to notice how pale his partner was in the warm yellow light from the lanterns. "It was. But …"
"But what?" Jack asked, wanting to keep his very sleepy looking partner talking and awake.
"Well, I maybe should have kept my promise to stay in touch if I was interested, because she's in a pretty serious thing with one of the guys who was on her detail at the safe house leading up to Wexler's trial." He looked almost sheepish. "But it was good to see her anyway. Nice to know that what we did maybe gave her a chance at … you know … life."
Jack sat down next to him, only too aware of how warm his partner felt, just through proximity. "We do good things, bud. Maybe one of these days, we'll get some good things back."
Mac shrugged, this time having enough warning of the rattling cough he was developing to bark it into the crook of his arm. "Yeah." The he bent forward and started unlacing his boots.
"Watcha doin', bud?" Jack asked.
"Taking off these wet shoes and socks. You probably want to do the same, man. Let them dry out some while we take a breather and I patch up that graze you got."
Jack grimaced but pulled off his boots anyway. Kid had a point.
"Ah, man," Jack groused.
"What?" Mac asked, his fatigue more apparent than he'd meant to let it be.
"Hans is after us. Stuff is starting to feel pretty dire. And now I'm barefoot."
Mac snickered and then sneezed.
"Bless you," Jack said automatically.
"I'm just going to be eternally grateful that we aren't at the top of a tall building and there is no chance I'll have to use a firehose to swing off fifty stories or so and break a window." He looked at Jack's very serious profile. "But I'm sorry we're stuck underground, man. I know how you feel about that. I'd take the movie high rise trope any day."
Not feeling like he could say anything reassuring about their current location or the fact that the bad guys had them trapped like rats in a maze, under ground in the middle of a heavily forested part of east Germany, in a set of WWII tunnels that had clearly not been entered in years, Jack just shrugged. "You think Riles can get a lock on our location down here?"
Mac sighed heavily, and it spurred another coughing fit. Jack's hand on his shoulder let him know his partner was a lot more worried about him than he was letting himself say. And honestly, he appreciated Jack keeping a lid on the helicopter parent bit, even if it meant the evening was going to be filled with Die Hard quotes and bad puns. "I dunno, man. I think we shouldn't count on outside help. I think we're going to need to figure this out on our own. Worry about help later."
"Usually," Jack mumbled. He noticed Mac just staring off into the shadows, his determination to take a look at Jack's grazed bicep lost for the moment in something else. Jack decided to just let the kid think for a minute.
As the wrung out his socks and hung them up on a nearby pipe, Jack glanced at Mac again. The kid was staring at a shadowed structure across the room. "What is it, bud?"
"That looks like a boiler," Mac said, more to himself than in answer to Jack's question. "But …" he got up and went to look at it more closely.
"It is!" He spun excitedly toward Jack. "It's a boiler, but it's also a steam generator. We might have power down here and if we have power … There's all sorts of possibilities!"
Jack grinned at the kid's sudden enthusiasm, glad he'd forgotten a little bit of his misery, even it was only for a moment. "What do you need from me, kid?"
"Um, we need to fill the reservoir with water … And we need stuff to burn …"
He started coughing again and it kept up until his face was beet red and he wasn't able to stand up. Jack got him to sit back down on the overturned lockers. "Easy, bud. Just take it easy." Unable to help himself he laid his bare wrist against Mac's shiny forehead. "Jesus, kid, you're burning up."
Mac nodded. "Yeah, I've felt better." He paused. "And when we get out of this, I promise I'll spend the weekend in bed eating Bozer's patented chicken soup and letting you be the world's biggest helicopter parent pain in the ass. But we gotta get out of this first. We have exactly no time for me to give in to the flu."
"Flu, huh? So maybe you'll finally concede my point that the flu shot is just another way for Medical to torment us for no reason."
Mac rolled his eyes. "Don't make me explain herd immunity to you again, Jack. It'll just give you a headache to match to one I've already got."
Jack chuckled softly. If Mac was still well enough to be a little condescending about science, he was probably alright. "Okay. I'll just leave it. You sound like you're ready with the math. And after you explaining the Santa math to me again on the way over here, I don't think I can take any more."
Mac gave a genuine laugh at that and this time it didn't turn into a cough. "Good."
"So what do you need me to do, bud?" Jack asked, wanting to execute the plan as quickly as possible. Both of them would be a hell of a lot better off on the Phoenix jet, with a medic, and maybe with some of Bozer's best eggnog if no other pain meds were forthcoming.
Mac pushed himself back to his feet. "I'll work on making a container to haul water and start filling the steam reservoir. If you could look around and maybe find some combustibles to get a fire going … If nothing else, we'll have heat and some light from it. And maybe a lot more. If I don't miss my guess we're in an undiscovered Nazi bunker from the war. There might be all manner of stuff we can use against our Hans Gruber just lying around down here."
Jack got up and patted Mac on his shoulder. "Alright man, but Just once, I'd like a regular, normal Christmas. Eggnog, a fuckin' Christmas tree, a little turkey. But, no! I gotta crawl around in this motherfuckin' tin can!"
Mac laughed lightly at that, as he started opening up cabinets. "Die Hard quotes I can handle given our situation Jack. But Die Hard 2 is off limits."
Jack grinned at him as he headed back out into the flooded hallway, in search of things to burn. "Alright, kid, you win, but all things being equal, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."
Mac managed to return his grin, and Jack thought it was a good one, not too forced.
"That's more like it."