Chapter Twenty-Two
Two weeks later
“Fuckin-A I can’t do this anymore!” Brock dropped the weights, letting them take an illicit bounce on the rubber mat. “You’re a God damned torturer. You’re fired.”
His trainer, a sixty-year-old dude who had no right looking as good as he did, smiled and pointed to the treadmill. Every muscle and sinew in his body screaming for mercy, Brock limped to the device, climbed aboard and started running. Twenty minutes later, he lay on the massage table, while some burly chick dug into his calves and hammies with what felt like knife-shaped knuckles.
“Ow,” he said, over and over again. But it fell on deaf ears. By the time she’d finished with him, he was a limp noodle, well past exhausted, which is exactly how he liked to spend his evenings—so tired he couldn’t even lift a soup spoon or a sandwich before he fell face-first into bed.
Tonight, he took a long shower in the gym’s fancy spa-like locker room after a thirty-minute soak in the hot tub, then headed for the juice bar, figuring he might as well drink his dinner. The cute girl behind the counter tried her usual hair-flip, eyelash fluttering mating dance on him but one other advantage of working out six days a week until he could barely walk was an inverse reaction to this sort of behavior. He flirted, of course. That much was ingrained in him. He’d consider it an insult to a beautiful woman if he didn’t. But his body remained unaffected. His brain blank.
As he watched her throw his dinner replacement smoothie together, he flipped his car keys around in his hand, antsy for some reason. He kept hearing sirens from emergency vehicles as they screamed past his gym. The first one when he’d been almost finished with the treadmill, and the rest while attempting to relax under massage torture. And now, there were more. It was as if the entire city of Grand Rapids were on its way to some kind of a crisis.
“Oh, wow, check it out,” the girl said as she handed over his drink. She was looking up at one of the many flat screens in the facility, angled so that you were never in any position not to see one. “Where is that?”
Unnerved, Brock ignored the outstretched smoothie and turned to take in the news, hoping it wouldn’t hamper his commute home from this suburban oasis of hell. What he saw on the screen took him a few seconds to comprehend, but once he had, he ran flat-out for the glass doors, the images etched onto his brain.
“Large warehouse fire on city’s south side consumes uncertified and illegal living spaces. Many already feared dead as firemen battle the blaze.”
He leaped in behind the wheel and screeched out onto the quiet street, realizing he was a solid twenty minutes on a good day away from that warehouse. The place Kayla refused to move from, no matter how hard Trent had tried to convince her otherwise.
After their violent confrontation and now-shared knowledge about Kayla, he and Trent had stayed in close touch since he’d returned from his honeymoon. Although Brock had gone out of his way to assure the man that he had no intention of ‘dating’ Kayla, or of anything else. Their situations were too fraught, too complex, carried way too much proverbial baggage.
The truth was, Brock missed her so much it kept him awake most nights, pondering what he might have done differently in his life, to deserve to be the man she needed. It had been a brutal set of weeks as he did all he could to avoid her, in direct opposition to how their relationship had been progressing before the wedding. He’d lurked a bit, making sure she worked her shifts, observing without being observed, out of loyalty to Trent, he self-justified. Which had not helped his psyche one bit.
He’d skipped meetings for a couple of weeks, burying himself in work. The water clean-up program did not require his direct oversight or presence, but he gave it anyway, as he researched the foundation’s next beneficiary—Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Grand Rapids. While he had not gone off meds—something he’d been guilty of before during times of high life-stress—he realized after missing the routine, he needed it, so he resumed his spot in the church basement, listening, sipping coffee, offering support where he could.
When his therapist suggested that he drop one of his twice-weekly sessions with her and attend a sex addicts anonymous meeting instead, he’d agreed. So now he got the church basement scene twice a week—once with the drug junkies and once with the perverts.
He skidded to a stop at a light and touched the ‘voice call’ icon on his car’s fancy media screen. “Call Trent,” he demanded. As he waited for the guy to pick up, he pressed his fist against the steering wheel, still hearing the sirens echoing in his brain pan.
“Hettinger,” the voice came through the car’s fancy speakers.
“Fire,” Brock blurted out. “Where are you right now? Can’t you hear the sirens?”
“What? Why? I mean…what fire?”
“Fuck, man. It’s Kayla’s building… It’s burning the hell down. I’m trying to get there but I’m stuck in fucking…suburban…traffic…hell!” He hit the horn with each of his last four words, urging the soccer moms and stay-at-home dads through the damn traffic signals.
“Her…building?”
“Yes. I don’t know if she’s working, but I don’t think so. It’s Thursday, usually her day off.”
“I’m on my way. Coming from downtown.”
“You’ll make it before me then. Ask Melody if she’s there.”
“Yeah. Got it.” The call ended before he could say anything else. He cursed and honked his way through the suburbs and hit the expressway at ninety miles an hour, willing some cop to try to stop him.
As he was exiting, he could see black smoke rising into the evening sky. His entire body seized up in panic but he kept the pedal mashed to the floor and ran three stoplights to get through the long stretch of auto dealerships between downtown and the south side, where Kayla’s building was going up in flames.
The scene was out of some nightmare movie version of a five-alarm fire. A half-dozen ladder trucks were assembled, all directing as much water as possible onto the blaze. Another dozen or so support vehicles ringed the building, with an outer phalanx of cop cars forming a barricade. Ten ambulances were lined up, their staff in varying degrees of helping survivors or staring, helpless in the face of the inferno.
Even stopped as far back as he was forced to, the heat was unreal, like standing inside a furnace. He could make out Trent’s Jeep a few cars ahead of him but couldn’t see him anywhere. As he shoved his way forward, determined to get closer and see if Kayla was one of the people being treated outside, praying that she was, and realizing that he may have hesitated and lost his one shot at happiness, he could hear Trent’s voice. Loud shouts of anger interspersed with increasing threats of physical restraint filled his ears as he snuck around one car and saw what was going on.
“My sister is in there, you fucking asshole. Let go of me!” Trent gave a final wrench of his arms, stumbled forward past the line of ambulances, and right at the burning building.
“Fuck,” Brock muttered as he snuck closer, getting glimpses of the soot-stained victims being given oxygen, some being loaded into the rigs, as more waited to take their place. He prayed that Trent had enough sense not to run into the damn building.
It would appear, however, that he did not.
As Brock watched in horror, Trent sidestepped a line of firemen, barreled right over another line and headed for an opening where the door used to be. “What a…hey!” A hand clamped around his upper arm. He turned to find himself face to face with a sooty fireman. “Sorry. I… I know that guy and…”
“I’m sending someone in after him, but I don’t want to do it. We’ve gotten everybody out we can. That building has about fifteen seconds before it collapses. Now, get the hell out of the way. Back there.” He gave Brock a none-too-gentle shove. He moved but stayed as close as he could, keeping tabs and praying harder than he ever had in his life.
Three firemen scrambled forward, following Trent into the building while the rest kept dousing the place with streams of water. He counted to twenty, then thirty, and the building stayed upright. When he got to seventy-five, he saw the upper floor flattening in slow motion, pancaking down and collapsing the lower floor under its weight. The flames shot up higher, singeing his eyebrows.
But there, out of the rolling smoke, he saw three figures emerge. The firemen, with a body draped over one of their shoulders. Without another thought, he ran toward them, terrified to see if it was Trent, or Kayla. The medics rushed forward, slapped the body onto a gurney and raced to an ambulance.
“No time! No time!” one of them was yelling. “Full saturation. We’ve got to get him to the hospital.”
“Move! I’ve got to cut a trach. He’s crashing!”
“Wait, watch out for the swelling. You’ll cause a PE.”
Brock stood, helpless, while the medics tried to save Trent’s life, wondering if the world had lost two Hettingers even as he understood that it was now up to him to find Melody and tell her.
The ambulance doors slammed shut in his face. His knees gave out and he dropped to the hot pavement, gasping for breath. Hands helped him up and guided him to another ambulance but he broke away from them, coughing even as he insisted he didn’t need anything. He had to leave. He had to find Melody.
“Wait! Sir! You should let us…”
But he ran from the hellscape toward his car, ignoring everyone and everything in his panic. As he drove like a bat out of hell toward the brewery, not knowing what else to do, he said, “Call Austin” to his onboard computer. But his voice was hoarse and he broke down coughing so long and loud the computer lady voice said, “I’m sorry but I didn’t get that. Who am I calling?”
“Forget it,” he muttered, swiping his lips and noting that the back of his hand came away black with soot.