At least the factory isn't on fire, Johnny thinks.
That's about the only positive. Not on fire. Well, okay, and as far as he knows there aren't any bombs in here, either. So far. It may not be on fire, or rigged to explode, but it is abandoned and partially collapsed and he and Roy had a hell of a time getting through the rubble to the poor dumb teenager who'd decided to go exploring, put his foot through a rusted-out stair tread, and pulled the rest of the staircase and part of the wall down with him.
The patient's been rescued—lucky guy got away with only a broken leg and a couple scrapes for his trouble—and Roy's out there with him, well away from all the mess. Johnny perches carefully about eight feet up inside the twisted wreckage, surrounded by rusty metal and jagged concrete. He wormed his way in here just fine, but the real trick is gonna be getting back out again without bringing anything else down on him.
Roy looks up from where he's splinting the patient's leg. "You got it, Johnny?"
"Yeah."As far as daredevil stuff goes, this doesn't even rank in Johnny Gage's top twenty ways to risk life and limb, but it ain't exactly fun. At least he can get a good story out of this one, maybe. Mindy likes his stories, and he's hoping for a second date.
He reaches a foot out, tentatively, to a concrete chunk that looks fairly sturdy, and when it holds, he puts the rest of his weight on it, ducking under a metal crossbar that's filthy enough to give the whole station tetanus. Another step, twisting his midsection around the sharp edge of a broken stair, his lower back just grazing a piece of rebar that pokes at him from the equally-dilapidated wall. Duck, twist, slide. He takes shallow breaths, carefully, trying not to catch himself on anything. Easy does it. Nearly out.
Now he just has to climb down. A chunk of rubble shifts beneath him, and above his head something groans ominously. He yanks his foot back, tries again in a different spot.
The pile lurches, metal screeching, little bits of concrete tumbling down the wall.
Time to go.
Johnny leaps off of it just as the whole thing collapses with a thunderous crash, sending a massive plume of dust billowing up to the holes in the ceiling. He rolls the landing and scrambles to his feet while the adrenaline judders through his bloodstream, a warning of what might have been.
—broken leg, concussion—
"Johnny!"
—dislocated shoulder, desk job—
Roy jogs toward him and Johnny casts a lopsided smile at him like a lifeline, cresting it over his pounding heartbeat, his heaving ribs. "Well, that'll wake you up!" He shakes an errant chunk of debris out of his sleeve, tosses the worst of the dust out of his hair. "I'm fine, Roy. In fact, I think it even fixed my backache!"
Roy just shakes his head, and the two of them get to work.
He is fine, because that's how this works. All Johnny has to do is run his mouth until the feeling goes away. If he speaks fast enough, gets it out of him, his hands won't shake.
"Guess I almost bought it in there, huh?"
"I started a perfect IV, even though the patient was a little squeamish."
"Had the fire been backlighting the subject, that puts us in a whole different ballpark."
Johnny's hands are steady, now, as they load the patient into the ambulance, as Roy tosses him the keys to the squad and gives him another once-over that he probably thinks is subtle. Johnny tries not to let it get to him. He's fine. "You know, we could market that! Lots of people have back problems these days, and—"
Roy shuts him up by grabbing his chin with one hand and checking his extraocular movements with the other.
It started when Johnny was a kid. The anthropologists would show up with their tape recorders and their cameras and he didn't have a word for how it made him feel so he found a hundred, a thousand other words instead, drowning out the feeling until the word for it didn't matter anymore. When he was twelve he spun them a fantastic story about how that patch of stinging nettle over there was an important site, has been for generations, oh no, you can't wear shoes in there, man, that's just rude, why would you even think that was okay. Of course he'd had to go barefoot, too, but he kept talking and the words meant it didn't burn as badly.
"I'm fine, Roy! Now, if you run into Mindy, don't forget to tell her I said hi-"
Roy pulls the door closed with a long-suffering sigh.
Johnny rolls his shoulder, loosening a cramped muscle, and prepares to follow them in.
When he was fourteen and he showed up on his aunt's doorstep and she asked what happened to your face, Johnny, he knew keeping quiet was as good as blabbing so he talked instead, something about how Steve was mad 'cause he asked Suzy out and how was he supposed to know Steve was takin' her to the dance anyway. Never mind that if it had been Steve who busted him up Johnny would have gone home like normal, and Steve wouldn't have left bruises ringing his neck. He talked and talked and she finally sat him down at the table with a hot meal and a bag of ice—and a place to sleep, in the spare room—and didn't bring it up again.
Just keep talking. That's all it takes.
And it works perfectly well until the day it finally doesn't.
It's one thing to know you're in a tight spot and it's another thing to be able to do anything about it. Here, in a building that most unfortunately is on fire, Johnny only has the former, not the latter, and it wouldn't be the worst except that Roy's also stuck in this mess with him. They're searching through a warehouse-slash-unlicensed-dump-site—soon to be a former warehouse-slash-unlicensed-dump-site, at this rate—and the last guy out said he thought his buddy was in one of the back rooms somewhere. Of course, he also said that they didn't store anything here besides packaging supplies and that sure as hell ain't true. Johnny can barely see for the smoke and it's hotter than hell in here and the piles of who-knows-what everywhere certainly aren't helping. He tries not to give in to paranoia but man, he's got a bad feeling about this one.
The place is a godawful maze, and after another turn he finally spots the doorway—and the storage drums. Some kind of chemical.
Damn.
Roy's just behind him with the HT, and Johnny turns and signals to him. He watches Roy raise the radio to call it in, open his mouth to speak—
Too late.
The floor jolts beneath him and suddenly it's not dark in here anymore, it's bright, blindingly bright. Johnny tries to duck away from the explosion but his feet have already left the ground and he's flying, flying. It feels like it takes a year but it's probably only a couple seconds before he slams to the floor, landing on his air tank. Pain shoots down his spine and through his ribs, and he rolls to the side, trying to catch his breath but he can't—
He coughs, gags. "Roy?!"
No answer.
Johnny flops onto his belly and looks around again. He can't see any better from this position. Sweat pours into his eyes, stinging like acid.
Where's Roy?
—skull fracture, chemical burns—
Johnny gulps a deep breath and a cough skewers him from neck to pelvis. He ignores it as best he can and starts to crawl, searching. His ears ring something awful.
Did Roy make it?
—crushed under a beam, running out of air—
He blinks, hard, trying to clear his vision, and then he realizes it's his facemask that's the problem, pockmarked and blackened and useless. He reaches for it, and just gets a hand to the fastenings when everything goes dark again.
The next thing Johnny knows, he's trying to get his eyes open and it burns, they burn, everything burns—
The ground's moving underneath him. He cracks his eyes open and all he sees is gleaming white and it's not the ground that's moving, it's the ambulance, he's in an ambulance. A shape leans over him, ashen-eyed and filthy-faced and reeking of smoke.
Roy.
Roy made it.
Roy's okay.
He comes up with half a dozen pithy comments that oughta make this whole thing better—
"Can't a guy catch a nap around here?"
"Jeez, Roy, you look terrible. What've you been up to?"
"See? Nothin' to it."
—only he tries to speak and nothing comes but silence.
His throat's wrecked and he can't get the words out. He tries, God, he tries, and his throat seizes up and it's like swallowing fire all over again. He coughs and coughs and coughs, gasping in between, and it's nowhere close to enough.
"Johnny! Can you breathe? No, don't try to talk, Johnny, don't try to talk, just—"
—Roy, crumpled in a heap and not moving—
—Roy, burnt and blistered, turnout coat still smoking—
—Roy, still and blue and cold because they were too late, too late—
No. Roy's okay, Roy's okay and now it's Roy that's trying to take care of him—
He tries to push himself up and Roy pushes him back down, oxygen mask in hand. "Hey, take it easy!"
Roy gets the mask on him, holding it so firmly that Johnny has no chance to even try to get a word in. "Breathe. It's okay. Deep breaths, Johnny, come on."
He can breathe. The oxygen soothes his lungs even as terror claws its way up him but without speaking he can't fix it.
He needs to say something. It's like purging poison, only he can't get it out so he has no choice but swallow it back down. Maybe he can do that. All he has to do is bury it deep, cover it over and smooth it down and no one has to know—
A wracking tremor shudders through him.
"Hey, easy, easy."
Roy doesn't understand. He needs to get it out.
His stomach twists, and churns, and all he sees is deaddeaddead and it's too much to take. He's going to be sick. He tries to wrench his head away and Roy's hands pin him in place, probably thinking that he's trying to get away from the mask. His stomach roils and heaves -
No, no, he isn't gonna puke on himself, he isn't. His hands scrabble against the mask, against Roy's arm, and Roy finally seems to realize something's up because he lifts the mask, just enough.
Johnny slaps his hand across his mouth in the universal 'gonna hurl' symbol and Roy springs into action.
"Whoa, okay! Hang on."
Roy gets him by the shoulder and the hip and tries to roll Johnny towards him, but he is not about to puke on Roy, either, thank you very much. He fights it, and Roy finally lets him go the other way because the alternative is aspirating and it takes all of five seconds but feels like forever. Roy has to crouch over him to stick the basin in front of his mouth, but he makes it in time, and that's what matters, really.
It feels like he throws up everything he's ever eaten but he knows the body doesn't work that way, and anyway all he's had is two gulps of coffee this morning before the tones went off and he can't even moan to himself once it's all up because everything hurts—
It's not the same as words.
Roy's got water to his mouth, now. "Here. Rinse and spit."
He thinks about stinging nettle and loose ends and character weakness and buying the farm—
He spits.
Roy cleans his face with a piece of gauze, which comes away black with grime. When it's done Roy tries to roll him back over, set him to rights, but Johnny digs in his knees and tightens his stomach and pays for it in the million burning knives that drive up his back and through his chest. He stays put, and before Roy can make something out of that he reaches his hand up to grab the mask, holds it to his own face.
He can't look at him, he can't; he'll only see what he thought he was going to find. He needs the words to get it out of him. He squeezes his eyes shut, not that it helps.
Roy's voice is soft. "Johnny."
—the flames roaring and the walls buckling and the pipes bursting and Drew Burke's widow sat weeping in a cracked plastic chair—
"You got something you're not telling me about?"
If only he could talk there would be nothing to tell him. He wants to burst out laughing. A laugh tries to escape his throat and sets off another coughing fit.
For some reason, Roy doesn't find that very reassuring. He reaches out and works his fingers beneath Johnny's, holding the mask firmly in place, and puts his other hand to Johnny's shoulder, rubbing slow circles until Johnny's lungs start to settle down. When the cough finally subsides he slides his hand up and under Johnny's collar to curl his fingers gently around Johnny's shoulder, just where it meets his neck. His hand is rough, callused - but warm. Alive. Alive.
—smoke and heat and a screaming roar and all he sees is a body sprawled at the bottom of the stairs and then—
—the kids, tears streaming down their faces—
—dress uniform and votive candles and the sickly-sweet smell of too many flowers—
Forget trembling hands, the shakes take him full-force, shivering him from his feet all the way up to his head.
"Johnny?"
This time, when Johnny pulls his face away from the mask Roy lets him, and he manages to make his voice cooperate, just barely. Just a little. "Roy," he whispers—mouthing the word, hardly even any air behind it, but Roy hears him.
He reaches up again, blindly, searching for Roy's arm, and hooks his fingers into the sleeve of Roy's jacket, and squeezes as tightly as he can. Maybe if he gets it tight enough his hands will stop shaking, at least. "Keep talking. Please." He squeezes tighter, praying that Roy will understand. "Please."
Roy draws in a breath, and Johnny just hears it over the noise of the road. He lets it out again, and presses the mask back over Johnny's face. His hand on Johnny's shoulder squeezes, minutely. Warm. Solid. Alive. Another shudder rolls up Johnny's back.
"Okay. Okay, pal. It's all right. It's all right. The victim we were looking for was out already. His friend just hadn't seen him. Our guys are okay, too. And now we're headed to Rampart, and you're going to get looked at because your throat needs some help. And I'm okay, it's just some bumps and bruises, which is a good thing, because—" He falls silent, and from the corner of Johnny's eye he can just see him thinking, frantically, trying to come up with something. "—because then otherwise Brackett would keep me overnight and, uh…. all the… nurses, the nurses would throw themselves at me, and I'm - I'm a married man, you see—"
The laughing fit threatens to wreck Johnny's lungs for good, but the shaking finally stops.
Okay, he thinks. Now it's all right.
