The sound of screaming woke Roman Reigns. Or maybe it was the fire alarm. Wait, screaming and a fire alarm? Roman thought as he jerked properly awake, sitting up in his bed.
"Holy shit!" he cried, realising that his apartment was full of grey, acrid smoke. As a firefighter, he knew that he was already lucky to be alive. The smoke could easily have killed him in his sleep. If he wanted to stay alive, he had to get out of the building, fast. Living up on the sixth floor, it wasn't going to be an easy task if the fire was extensive, which the amount of smoke suggested.
Scrambling out of bed, he grabbed the t-shirt and sweatpants that he had tossed on the floor before getting into bed. It took him a matter of seconds to put them on. He didn't waste time trying to find some footwear. Getting out was a matter of life or death. There was no time to lose.
Grabbing another t-shirt off the floor to cover his nose and mouth with, Roman hurried towards his front door. When he opened it, he realised that the situation was even worse than he had feared. The smoke was so thick in the communal hallway that he could barely see a thing.
"Fuck!" Roman yelled. He could no longer hear any screaming. The fire alarm continued to blare away. There was an even more worrying sound, too. He could hear flames crackling, although he couldn't see any fire.
Starting to cough thanks to the thick smoke, Roman stumbled down the hallway towards one of the stairwells. It was only his firefighter training that was keeping him relatively calm. Anyone else in this situation would have been justified in panicking. Barely able to see or breathe, he had only the recollection of the hallway layout to guide him towards the stairwell door. Within thirty seconds that felt like thirty years, he found it.
The door was propped open, he discovered. There was a real blast of heat coming up the stairwell, along with thicker smoke. There was fire below, he knew. There was no escape that way. Now he began to feel panic building. There was only one other stairwell, on the opposite side of the building. If that was blocked with fire too, he was dead. That was the grim reality of the situation.
Moving as low as possible to avoid the worst of the smoke, Roman coughed and spluttered his way back along the hallway. He turned a corner and bumped into a wall that he hadn't expected to be there. He was lost, he realised, to his horror. This was big trouble.
Stay calm and think, Roman told himself. Above him, he heard loud crack. He just about had time to look up and see the ceiling coming down on his head. Getting his hands up protected him from the worst of the damage, but he felt something strike the front right part of his head hard, and he fell to the floor. He felt the warm trickle of blood start flowing down his face.
I'm going to die here, he thought, choking even harder on the smoke.
"Get up! This way!"
It was a woman's voice. Roman could barely believe it. He looked in the direction it had come from and saw an olive skinned woman with long, dark curly hair standing only a couple of feet away from him.
"Come on! Get up! Follow me!" the woman said urgently.
Roman forced himself to get to his feet. Pressing the t-shirt over his face again, he followed the woman, just about able to see her through the smoke. The red top she had on stood out quite well.
Totally disoriented, Roman stumbled along the hallway after the woman. He saw her disappear around a corner. The smoke had gotten so thick that he fell into the stairwell before he realised he had found it by following her around the corner. The first flight was only six or seven steps. Roman rolled down them, landing on the large corner step.
When he got back up again, he couldn't see the woman anywhere. She had left him behind as she made her escape. Thankfully, the smoke was thinner in the stairwell, and there was no sight or sound of fire.
Still coughing and stumbling, Roman made his way down the stairs. The going got easier the lower her got, but he could tell the smoke had gotten to him. Or maybe it was blood loss. He felt himself getting weak. All he had to do was make it to the ground floor before he collapsed, and he would live.
On the second floor, his legs went from under him, and he fell onto another corner step.
Crawl if you have to. Just get out, he told himself.
"It's going to be okay. We've got you," a man's voice said.
Rolling onto his back, Roman looked up at a firefighter wearing breathing apparatus. It was the most welcome sight he had ever seen. The mask made the face hard to recognise, but the voice was familiar. It was one of the guys from the night shift at the fire station Roman worked at. The name escaped Roman.
"Help me get him up. He's a big guy," the firefighter said to his partner, who also appeared over Roman.
"Hey, that's Roman Reigns. He's one of ours; works on day shift," the other man said. "You're going to be okay, Roman. We'll get you out of here."
After being rescued from the burning apartment building, Roman had been rushed to hospital in an ambulance, where he had been placed on oxygen because of the amount of smoke he had inhaled, and had needed staples and heavy bandaging for a fractured skull from whatever had hit him during the ceiling collapse.
Within a few hours, he wasn't feeling too bad physically, apart from a banging headache. Mentally, he was in a weird place. On one hand, he knew that he was very lucky to be alive. On the other hand, everything he owned apart from his car had been in the apartment, and was now likely ruined or destroyed.
Lying in the room he had been given was boring. It didn't have a TV, meaning there was nothing to keep his mind occupied. For that reason, he was delighted when Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose walked in through the open doorway. The two visitors were housemates, and Roman's closest friends on his shift. The three men had been like brothers to each other for several years.
"Rome! Shit, man, Orton said you're lucky to be alive," Rollins said as he walked in.
Orton, of course, Roman thought. That was who the name of the first firefighter who had found him. He would have to buy him a beer in the near future.
"Bro, you look a mess," Ambrose said sympathetically as he sat down on the one plastic chair in the room.
Roman pulled the oxygen mask down, leaving it around his neck. "I'm supposed to leave that on until they tell me otherwise," he said, his voice rather hoarse thanks to all the coughing he had done. "Thanks for coming down."
"As if we wouldn't," Rollins said. "We saw the news as soon as we got up. Obviously we recognised it was your place. Dean called the fire house to ask about you, and we learned you were here."
"Lucky to be alive by all accounts," Ambrose said.
"I thought I was done at one point," Roman admitted, shaking his head at the frightening memory. "I found a stairwell, but it was on fire. There was no way I could use it. I had to try and find the other one, but the smoke was so thick. I got lost in it, couldn't breathe, then the ceiling collapsed on me. That's how I got this," he said, pointing to the bandaging around his head.
"Might have knocked some sense into you," Ambrose said, a weak attempt at banter that drew smiles from the other two.
"I was lying there thinking that was it, then suddenly there was a woman standing there. I've never seen her before. Pretty sure she doesn't live on my floor. She was dark skinned. Not black, maybe middle eastern or something. She was very good looking. Anyway, she told me to get up and follow her. That's how I found the other stairwell. I don't know if I would have made it if she hadn't been there. Honestly, I think she saved my life. Unfortunately I lost her on the way down the stairs. Hopefully I'll see her again, and I'll be able to thank her."
"Sure sounds like you were lucky she was there," Rollins said.
"Lucky is right," Ambrose said. "Rome, do you even know how bad the fire was? We were worried that you wouldn't have made it when we saw the news footage."
"It was that bad?" Roman asked.
"Show him," Ambrose said to Rollins, who was much better at anything to do with technology than him.
"I'm on it," Rollins said. He got up and moved over to the bed to show Roman a YouTube video. The title of the video was Badbury Apartments Fire with the date in brackets.
When his friend played the video, Roman was shocked by what he saw. It must have been taken after his escape, for the entire building seemed to be going up like a roman candle. There had to have been people killed.
"Fucking hell. How could that happen? Are there deaths?" Roman asked incredulously. Fire codes stipulated that the apartment where the fire started should have been able to contain it. A fire in a stairwell should have been restricted to that stairwell.
"Unfortunately there are a number of people missing, feared dead. Apparently the fire spread through the cladding on the outside. There's video footage of bits of it falling off, on fire," Ambrose said.
"They covered a building in cladding that wasn't fireproof?" Roman asked, even more incredulously than before. It brought on a coughing fit, so he put the oxygen mask back on for a moment.
"Looks like it," Rollins said. "Listen, man, you're going to need somewhere to stay when they let you out of here. We've got room. It'll mean sleeping on the couch, but it pulls out into a bed."
"Thanks, guys. They told me it'll be a day or two before they cut me loose. Looks like I'll be starting over, pretty much."
"I've got you, man," Rollins said. "I've still got a bunch of the money my dad left me in savings. Take as much as you need to get help with getting yourself fixed up. Pay me back as and when you can."
Roman lifted his mask again, and offered a fist bump. "I appreciate you. Both of you."
Rollins and Ambrose stayed for almost an hour before they had to leave. Life was going on, and they had a shift to work.
"Take this key," Ambrose said, putting a spare on the stand next to Roman's bed. "If you get discharged while we're at work, get a taxi to our place. If not, call us and we'll pick you up."
"I don't even have a phone," Roman realised, shaking his head.
"We'll get you fixed up. I'm sure I've got a spare shoved in a drawer somewhere," Rollins said. "Rest up. If you're still in here tomorrow, we'll come visit again."
"Thanks, guys. Stay safe," Roman said.
"You too," Ambrose said. "Or is it a bit late for that?"
All three of them laughed as the two visitors left the room, Rollins closing the door behind them. Roman put his mask back on and lay back, feeling tired. From his position, he could still see through the window in the door. Suddenly, he bolted upright. A nurse had just gone past his room, walking with an olive skinned woman with curly, dark hair. He had only gotten a quick glimpse, but he knew for sure that it was the woman who had helped him during the fire.
"Hey!" Roman shouted after pulling his mask down.
It was no good. The woman was already gone.
"One day, somehow, I'm going to find out who she is and thank her," he vowed.
A/N: Thank you for checking out this first chapter.
Will Roman find the woman who helped him?