"Where's Joanne?" he asked, an honest question that also gave him time to run a quick evaluation of his partner.
Roy looked better than he had at the scene or at the station, a small subtle change that he couldn't quite categorize as a physical symptom or lack of one. His eyes were brighter and his expression was not as tight. He looked more like Roy and a lot less like some wax figure dummy version of his partner, which had about the same amount of animation as Roy shown a few hours ago.
"She's parking the car," Roy said, with a look that said he knew exactly what Gage was doing. "You know, you could just ask me how I'm doing."
He shrugged. That would be a waste of time. "You'd just tell me that you're fine, when we both know you're not."
Roy sighed and then looked past him into the ER. "A lot of people here from the department. What's the word on our guys? Where are their families?"
He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned up against the wall to wait for Joanne, realizing the second after he'd done so that leaning was the first step towards relaxing and one step closer to sitting, which would be a slippery slope that led directly to lying down and that if he wanted to stay in motion, he'd better not start on that slope. He forced himself to stand upright again with a sigh.
"Chet's wrecked his right knee, an ACL tear. That's gonna screw him up for months, if not longer," he said sourly. "Cap's out of surgery. The hemorrhaging was coming from his spleen, a lacerated liver and perforated small intestine, which explains a lot. And because he's been textbook primary blast injuries so far, they're worried about Blast Lung 'cause," he shrugged, "you never know." He then took a deep breath before moving onto the bad news. "Marco's carboxyhemoglobin levels are about 25%..."
Roy's mouth dropped open. "What the…?"
"Yeah, I don't know if he didn't have a good seal on his mask or if his breathing apparatus got damaged in the blast, but it's not good. The good news is that while there's some edema, it seems mostly contained to his larynx, not the lower airway or alveoli. He's on high flow O2 and we're just gonna have to wait and see if that clears out the carbon monoxide."
Roy nodded his head in the way he did when he was processing things, not actually agreeing with what had been said.
"Their families are Brackett's office because we have enough guys here…" he waved his arm to include the waiting room, "to practically send replacements over to the scene, and because, you know, they're a little shaken up and because every so often, some reporters come through to get reaction statements."
He'd overheard the hospital administrator - O'Neill? O'Connor? O'Rourke? Something like that – pestering Dixie about the fireman cluttering up the waiting room and the corridor. He hadn't heard what Dixie had said but he'd seen her face and the way the guy who definitely didn't look Irish reacted.
"I think the hospital's working on setting aside a conference room or office for the Department so they actually have room for patients and stuff."
Roy was giving him the reciprocal once over so he glared his recognition.
"What? You can do it to me but I can't do it to you?"
"Roy, I'm fine," he said, recognizing that the fact that his voice sounded like a rusty hinge probably wasn't his best means of convincing anyone of that fact. "I just need some more coffee or something."
"Or something," Roy agreed, turning to wrap his arms around his wife as she came through the doors.
He woke, cramped and feeling as if his entire body had been tied into a knot and then baked in a 400-degree oven. There really wasn't any room to stretch his limbs either, since Brackett's office was still crammed full of people, some coming, some going, others holding court in the chairs they'd occupied since very early morning. And he didn't think he could actually stand up without assistance.
"About time you woke up," Roy's voice said from somewhere over his right shoulder.
He'd turn to acknowledge it if he could. If his right shoulder would slink back into its socket and let him turn his head.
His hands seemed to work though, and so did his fingers, so he rubbed his eyes and then the rest of his face as if he was rubbing life back into his skin.
"Wha time izzit?"
"Two o'clock," an unknown female voice from somewhere to his left replied.
It was a nice voice, a voice that definitely warranted further investigation, when he'd untangled himself and figured out how to move. And then he paused, trying to figure out if that was two o'clock AM or PM.
"Fourteen hundred hours," Roy said. "That's about four hours of sleep so you're right on schedule…"
His stomach growled, loud enough that a woman across the room looked up, as if to identify what on earth was making that noise or maybe hoping it was some kind of air conditioning unit turning on. He could have used a little A/C; he felt as if his face was burning.
"Yes sirree," Roy chortled. "Right on time."
Something else was making its needs known with an even greater sense of urgency, and Gage squirmed in his seat until his feet were flat on the ground. Then he tilted himself forward, out of the chair, grabbing the armrests at the very last minute to keep from falling and to help launch himself to his feet. And he managed to do all of that despite the snickering laugh that was being masked as a cough by his partner.
"Laugh it up, Roy," he said, not really recognizing his own voice.
Except Roy being Roy, didn't really laugh, not loud anyway; he snickered quietly instead.
He used his hands as much as his eyes, reaching out and grabbing the backs of chairs, muttering "hey, how are you doing?' to those both familiar and stranger as he made his way out of the oven that was Brackett's office and into the relief of the corridor and towards the men's room.
He really needed three arms, he'd decided: his left hand jammed up against the cool tile of the wall to keep him standing upright, his right hand to take care of the reason he was there in the first place, and a third hand to cover his eyes from the glaring brightness. Was it entirely necessary to light a men's room as if it was a surgical suite? Closing his eyes only brought partial relief because he could still see the glare, backlit in red, through his eyelids.
"That was a hell of an expensive rescue, Glenn."
He heard the voices as they came through the door but he didn't turn his head or open his eyes, assuming they were there for the same reason he was. It was impolite to actually, you know, really look at the other guys in the men's room.
"That rescue cost the Department seven experienced men, almost two entire Engine Companies including their Captains, for God knows how long, some maybe permanently. You know it's brushfire season, you know we're already shorthanded. What the hell were you thinking sending all of them in? Where do you think we're going to find replacements?"
Awkward, awkward, awkward, was the only word running through his head. That and a red flare of anger, as his brain stumbled into coherency from his all too brief four-hour nap. Those were not the voices of your average firefighters and this really wasn't where he wanted to be.
The other man said something quietly that Gage couldn't quite make out.
"No," the first, louder voice replied. "The civilian that Squad 22 went in after was just pronounced: carbon monoxide poisoning. Two men went in after a dead man, and then it was just compounded by multiple search and rescue efforts, sending in one team after another."
If his eyes weren't closed already, Gage would have closed them now. Instead he sagged a little against his left arm and finished up at the urinal. Now what? He couldn't just walk by the guys who were talking near the door, could he?
He thought about it for a minute. Yeah, he could.
He took his time about it though, gave the men at the door fair warning by detouring to the sink to splash water on his face. The cool water felt wonderful and he had to stop himself from filling the sink and submerging his head in it as he might at home or at the Station. Patting his face dry with a paper towel, he glanced into the mirror over the sink and saw the two men watching him, with narrowed and appraising glances.
As he walked to the door, Chief Miller, the quieter of the two men both wearing Chiefs uniforms, nodded to him.
"Gage."
Since he and Chief Miller weren't all that close, he assumed that still being in uniform and wearing a name badge had made the recognition a bit easier on the Chief, who had worked a shift at least as long as he had, probably longer, and looked it.
He nodded back. "Chief," he rasped. "Fire's knocked down?"
Miller nodded. "A little before 1300. Telephone Company's waiting to get in there, to start recovery operations, but the crews on the scene are still doing overhaul." He paused. "51s did good work, Gage. My prayers are with the men who were injured." His lips thinned. "And my wife is up in the ICU waiting room with some of their families. God willing, we'll have them back with us on the job soon."
Gage had never met the other man but his insignia was that of a Deputy Chief and he just nodded grimly in Gage's direction.
"Thank you, sir," he said, to Miller. And then because his partner wasn't there to stop him, he said, "Ferrara and Kelleher might have gone in after a dead man, but they didn't know it. We never do, but we go in and try to get them out. At least their families know that we tried to save them. Or him, in this case." He scratched his head and added a belated, "sir."
"Understood, Gage," Miller said.
Even he knew that was a dismissal so he nodded and slipped sideways between the Chiefs and through the door.
Back in the hallway, he took a deep breath as it occurred to him that he really had no idea who the other Chief was and he might have just done something Roy or Cap would consider incredibly inappropriate, idiotic even.
Sighing, he decided to go in search of something to eat and stuck his hand in his pocket to check for money.
"Johnny!"
He looked up and swung his head back and forth in the corridor, recognizing Stoker's voice but not seeing him.
"Hey, Gage. In the waiting area."
Of course. Hard to pick out one firefighter in a sea of firefighters. Even off duty, they tended to group together and somehow blend. Stoker was talking to a fireman slightly taller than him, dark-haired, mustached, grimy as if he'd just come off duty and vaguely familiar.
"Jack Haggerty, Johnny Gage," Stoker said. "Johnny, Jack is Snorkel 127's…"
"Lieutenant," Gage said, his brain finally firing and connecting the dots. He unleashed a real smile on the other man. "Hey," he said, reaching out to shake hands. "We owe you and your guys big time."
Haggerty grasped hands but shook his head. "Like I was telling this guy," he said with a nod towards Stoker. "Once you start that, you end up with 22s owing 51s and then 51s owing 127s and then 127s owing 51s since I understand you and your partner took care of my guys when they were stupid enough to eat some of that smoke and fall into a support beam and then who the hell knows who owes what."
"Nope," Gage said, still grinning. "I'm pretty sure we still end up owing you and yours for getting our guys out of there. How about you let me buy you a cup of coffee or something to eat in the cafeteria?" His left hand fumbled for the wallet he was pretty sure was in his back pocket and he saw Stoker smirk slightly in amusement.
"Another time," Haggerty said with a final handshake. "I just stopped in to check on my guys, who it turns out were already released, and check on yours. I'm pulling OT at 18s tomorrow so I need to get a nap, then some food and then some more sleep." His eyes shifted back to Stoker. "Keep me posted, okay?"
Stoker nodded and the two exchanged the kind of shoulder slaps that told Gage they knew each other pretty well.
"Hey, Mike," he said after a moment, and then he stopped and looked around and decided that maybe a little privacy was warranted. "How about you buy us some coffee and something to eat and I pay you back when I remember where I left my wallet, okay?"
In the cafeteria, over coffee and cheeseburgers, a side of fries and a slice of slightly battered blueberry pie, he told Stoker what he'd overheard and Stoker being Stoker, just listened and nodded at the right times.
"I'm glad I'm not a Chief," Stoker said when Gage was finally finished.
Stunned wordless, he over-poured the creamer he was adding to his coffee and it splashed onto the table.
"Shit," he said, under his breath because there were nurses and doctors and all sorts of people he didn't know sitting at the tables around them and he'd probably exceeded his quota for annoying people in positions of authority today. "See what happens when you go along and just say something so completely…. I don't know, out there, unexpected, not related. You know what I mean."
Stoker handed him a fistful of napkins and helped him blot up the cream.
"A non sequitur?"
"Yeah," Gage said, waving his hand in Stoker's direction in agreement.
"It wasn't actually a non sequitur since it was directly relevant to what you were saying," Stoker countered. "I don't know why Cap wants that job."
Gage blinked. Somewhere he'd lost the conversational thread, or maybe Mike had hijacked it.
"Well, I know why he wants the job, but every step away from the line just removes you from the actuality of firefighting. It becomes more about planning and deploying resources or ensuring you have sufficient resources to cover the fires. It's all about looking at the forecasts and run rates and where are the busiest stations and why are they the busiest ones and what do you do to distribute that volume of calls and manpower more equitably, and less about personally saving lives and property." Stoker shifted back in his chair and stretched his legs under the table. "I think the company officer is the boundary between fighting fires and managing firefighting. After that, you lose the hands on lessons, the immediate interaction with the people who depend on us."
It was, without a doubt, the longest bit of talking he'd ever heard from Stoker.
"Which, I understand is absolutely required," Stoker continued. "We couldn't do our jobs if we didn't have the necessary resources or had to cover a territory twice what we have, meaning double the calls or more. I just think when you spend so much time planning and allocating, you lose track of why we do what we do."
He nodded, mostly because he thought that's what Stoker was expecting. He was still processing the words and teasing out Stoker's underlying meaning.
"Plus, what else would we have done?" he said. "Not gone in after the guy?"
Stoker smiled at him, some kind of odd mixture of amusement and understanding, and then nodded. "You're right. From every point of assessment, the building was structurally sound, the search teams were properly equipped and trained, and it was about as safe as you're ever going to get at a working fire to send men inside. What else would we have done?"
Gage crumpled up the creamer stained napkins, tossed the wad onto the table and crooked an eyebrow. "And speaking of the search teams…?"
"Yeah," Stoker nodded. "Forgot you slept through some of the updates. Why don't we head upstairs and I'll fill you in."
They shared space in the elevator with an older couple who were obviously fretting about whomever they were visiting, so they kept the conversation non-specific until the doors opened and the couple stepped out on the third floor. Mike stabbed the button for six again.
"Cap and Marco are on six, in ICU, so let's start there," he said as soon as the door closed behind the other visitors. "Cap woke up again, and this time he stayed awake long enough for Karen to spend some time with him, which is good because she's trying to do the Captain's wife thing and support Marco's and Chet's families but I think she's still pretty scared herself."
Gage stretched against the elevator wall, still unkinking his back and shoulders. "He had major surgery. Probably going to sleep a lot the next few days."
"Yep," Stoker said. "They've got Marco in ICU too, monitoring his lungs and blood gasses, which from what Roy said still aren't all that great."
"It takes time to clear out the CO," he said, an automatic reassurance that didn't do much to calm the stab of alarm he himself felt at the update. Carbon monoxide on its own was bad enough, but there were dealing with a whole slew of other toxic inhalants on top of CO.
The elevator doors opened and they both turned automatically to the right, all too familiar with the exact location of the waiting room for the ICU.