Watch Me Burn
copyright 2011, Enfleurage
Summary: On a steamy summer night, Station 51 is called out for what seemed to be a simple house fire
A/N: This was my first story in the Emergency! fandom and I'd probably tweak it a bit now, but am resisting the urge. Sincerest and heartfelt thanks to Kelmin for her support then and since
A/N: This was my first story in the Emergency! fandom and I'd probably tweak it a bit now, but am resisting the urge. Sincerest and heartfelt thanks to Kelmin for her support then and since
Chapter 1
"What were you thinking?"
Gage, of course. Under the best of conditions he didn't possess a filter, or rarely bothered to use it, and these were about as far from the best of conditions as Hank Stanley could remember.
"Gage, Desoto,' he barked. "You have less than two minutes to search that house and find whoever it is that's in there. Move it!"
They were masked already and with one lingering, doubting glance in his direction, they jogged toward the house, air bottles bouncing against their backs. Gage pulled his helmet on in the last few seconds before he ducked into the front doorway after his partner and was swallowed up by smoke thicker than coastal fog.
"Kelly, Lopez, cover them."
Technically it wasn't even a two-story house. The back half of the first floor of the one and a half story bungalow was already lost and it was just a matter of minutes until the house was fully involved.
We can't save the house now, just buy us enough time to get the victim out safely.
The man on the ground bucked up again and Stanley briefly wondered what on earth Gage had found so alluring about rodeo riding. He kept his balance and threw his weight, hard, onto the knee grinding into the man's lower back. With his right hand pressing down on the back of the man's neck and his right knee between the man's shoulder blades, he fumbled with his left, non-dominant hand for the HT in the right hand pocket of his turnout.
Where the hell were the police?
Almost immediately the man's nonstop vitriolic barrage against the 'whore' in the house was redirected to the Fire Department in general and the Fire Captain pinning him to this damp bit of patchy lawn adjacent to the Engine in particular.
"When I get up,I'm going to butcher you, you sonovabitch! I'm going to rip your fucking balls off and shove them down your throat. I'm going to take an axe and splatter your blood over this entire goddamned neighborhood…."
Stanley scowled downward, checking to make sure the man's arms were still pinned beneath him and then did his best to tune out the threats, each uglier than the last, as he tried to figure out whether Gage and DeSoto could have reached the upper level of the house yet. Assuming the stairs weren't already gone.
"Cap, you need some help?"
Stoker was dividing his attention between the Engine's panel, the fire, and his Captain and as much as Stanley wanted to ask for rope - Gage might be the fastest but Stoker's knots were as slip proof as the man himself –one of them need to stay focused on the job that they'd actually been called out to do.
"Get a blanket and their equipment out." With a glance at the smoke seeping upward from the opened windows of the half story, he added, "And a burn pack." There might not be flames up there yet but it was probably hotter than hell.
It was still light enough on this steamy summer night that he could see his wrist watch when he glanced down at it, and just smoky enough that he had to squint to make out the actual time on the watch face. He'd reported Station 51 as on scene at about 2015. Eight minutes. It seemed a lot longer than eight minutes.
He'd been hearing sirens for the last thirty seconds, unsure if he'd conjured them out of his own need or if they were really there, and he let himself smile, briefly, as the distant noise grew louder, identifiably the familiar whine of an Engine. Identification was confirmed by the reassuring sound of an air horn echoing around a curve of the meandering residential streets. While he needed local law enforcement to take this man, this monster, off his hands so he could do his job, it was just as much of a relief to be able to hand over command of the scene to the Captain of another Engine Company. He was watching the fire as best he could, but splitting his attention between it and the struggling man on the ground. He needed to be in motion, checking the fire's progress from a number of sightlines, checking in visually and audibly with his men. Instead he was squinting toward the gloom of the front rooms where Chet and Marco, just inside, were doing all the actual fire fighting so far, tracking their progress from how the hose slithered across the grass and trying not to panic about how completely blind he was to the fire's behavior, how far it'd advanced, whether the fire was already threatening the neighboring houses or was still a few minutes away from doing so.
It was an unpleasantly humid and still night, lacking even the semblance of a breeze, which left his shirts – both under and uniform – sticking to his torso but which had also so far kept embers from neighboring roof shingles.
Thank God.
Engine 36 slowed as it encountered the herd of neighbors that inevitably accompanied a residential fire. Usually they were on the sidewalks and underfoot but this herd was skittish and had been even before the man under his knees had gone nuts; they'd stayed a couple hundred yards away on the other side of the street.
Bill McDowell had one foot on the pavement before his Engine was anywhere close to stopping and Stanley assumed that 36 – en route to the call - had heard Stoker's request for local law enforcement at their scene and understood that it was for more than crowd control.
"Hank…" 36's Captain trailed off as his head swiveled from the Squad's open compartments and then to the house, sweeping back to 51's Captain's kneeling on a snarling stranger. "What do you have?"
Stanley gave him a wry grin at the unspoken but very clearly implied 'what the hell?'
"Bill, I've got two of my men inside searching for a victim on the upper floor, another two covering their exit. " He glanced downward. "I also have a police situation and need you to take over the scene."
McDowell stared at him for a few brief seconds, mouth partly open as if he wanted to say something,but instead gave a brisk nod and turned away to snap orders at his men.
Stanley sighed in relief as Engine 36's lineman deployed to protect the north and south exposures.
That brief second was all the distraction the very angry man underneath his knees needed.
The man threw all his weight up on one side, kicking upward with a foot and catching Stanley on his left side, just above his belt. Falling, mouth open trying to draw a breath that wasn't coming, Hank tasted dirt instead, dirt and grass and smoke, and felt another blow – fist, boot, he couldn't tell, wasn't sure it made a difference – connect against his lower back. He groaned into the dirt and another blow snapped his head to the side.
It took a few seconds for him to make sense of the voices he heard, shouting and furious, but the weight pressing him into the dirt was gone and he blinked his eyes open to see Mike Stoker's worried face a few inches away.
"You okay, Cap?"
"Yeah," he said, pretty much automatically. He rolled to his knees and after a quick internal inventory, was pleased to discover that it was actually true. "I'm fine. That jackass hit me in the helmet which probably hurt him a lot worse than it did me."
Stoker didn't look convinced.
"How about giving your Captain a hand up, Michael?"
He let Stoker pull him to his feet; more relieved than he wanted to admit that one of those angry voices he'd heard a minute earlier was Vince Howard's. He let his eyes follow Vince and Bill McDowell as they pulled the lunatic to the back of Vince's patrol car, Vince's voice rising and falling, words indiscernible but drowning out whatever the guy in handcuffs was spewing.
"Cap."
Stanley turned back to the fire and let out a sigh as DeSoto pushed through what was left of the front door, arms wrapped around the legs of the woman lying limply over his shoulder and wearing DeSoto's air mask. Gage was right behind DeSoto, turning to yell something at Kelly, his words swallowed up and lost in the noises of the fire and then he trotted in DeSoto's wake to the yellow blanket spread in front of the squad.
Stanley jogged over to them as Gage opened the burn pack. He helped him lay it out and then opened the squad's O2 case, fitting the mask over the unconscious woman's face as Gage set up the biophone.
"How is she?"
He knew what his eyes told him. Female, age approximately thirty but could have been younger under bruises that were clearly visible since her sundress left very little actually covered, and what looked like second degree burns scattered across her arms and legs. She'd been coughing before he'd given her the oxygen mask.
"She took in a lot of smoke," Gage said, never looking up from his examination of the victim. "It was a bad scene up there, Cap. A real bad scene."
He helped spread the sterile sheets and watched as Gage poured saline on her legs while DeSoto looked for an unburned spot on the woman's arm to get a BP.
"Hank."
Vince Howard stood a few feet away, his expression unsettled and hard to read.
"I'm going to need a statement."
"Now?"
Which came out with a little more disbelief than he'd intended, considering how happy he'd been to see Vince a few minutes earlier.
"I'd really like to get him out of here," Vince said, "get him someplace secure." And then almost conversationally, he said, "So, was it you personally that he wanted to kill or the entire County Fire Department?"
Stanley wasn't quite ready to joke about it yet. "Probably anyone who got in his way."
"It's a damn good thing that he didn't have a weapon back there. If he had, he might have done you some damage."
"Oh, he had a weapon alright," Gage said, never looking up from shining his penlight into the woman's eyes, checking for pupillary response. "Cap took a loaded gun away from him."