He was too close to her. That should have been all the warning she needed. But Andy was mentally whirring, the adrenaline rush from the fire and the weight of the smoke-choked infant in her arms roiling her stomach. She was simultaneously dizzyingly high and suffocatingly low. Her eyeballs were on fire, tears running freely as she tried to keep up with Engo’s grumbling chatter.
“Used to be, before the Towers, before all the new regs, that you only used your tank if you needed to,” he said, kicking over the burned-out skeleton of a wooden table. “Because guess what? Sometimes you’re in the mess for more than a half hour. And backtracking so I can swap out a tank is more dangerous than sucking in a little burned plastic. You think I’m gonna leave Jakey to do a one-man floor clearance because I’m worried about getting dioxins in my lungs? Honey, I smoked my first cigar when I was seven and a half years old.”
“Engo,” Andy said.
“I feel alive sucking in smoke. I’m serious. I’m a freak. It gives me energy. The Native Americans do smoke ceremonies. They breathe it in on purpose. How come when they do it it’s culture, and when I do it I’m an insurance liability?”
“Engo.”
“What?”
“I want to talk to you.” She stopped, stood in the still-steaming room with him. “About Ben.”
The older man was suddenly cackling, a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Woman, listen to me. You gotta understand. When a guy’s about to shoot his load, he’s not thinking straight. Okay? Now, I know what you’re like. When girls are about to come they got half their brain thinkin’ about the guy, the other half thinkin’ about what they’re makin’ for dinner, and the other half thinkin’ about some bullshit their mother said to them eight years ago that they’re still angry about.”
Andy stared at him.
“Guys aren’t thinkin’ about any of that.” Engo swept the air with his gloves. “It’s just music in there. Chaos. Destruction. Little bits of electricity smashing together. There are no words. If we manage to say anything at all, it’s a miracle. So he said the wrong name. Big whoop. You gotta get over it.”
“I’m over it,” Andy said. “What I’m not over is that you all know about it.”
“So?”
“I’m gonna get fired.” Andy tried to look pleadingly at him. It was working. He was softening, being drawn in. “And I can’t have that.”
“You’ll get another posting,” Engo sighed. He’d stepped closer to her now. She could see his deep pores, feel his breath on her upper lip. Sourness of old sex recalled from the memory cells in his belly. “You’re not the first broad in the job to get under a guy, Andy.”
“There’s more to my story, though,” she said. “There’s stuff Matt doesn’t know.”
“What stuff?”
“Worse stuff. Things I did back in SD.”
Engo’s radio crackled. A single burst of static. Andy looked at it, reached up and felt for her own, wondered why she and Engo weren’t on the same channel. Her first instinct was that she had somehow slipped off the operations channel on her own radio. Then she watched the older man click back onto ops.
“You can tell me all about it later,” he said. He swung his arm back. Andy felt all the breath leave her as Engo punched her hard in the stomach.
He dragged her across the floor by her boots, got her down the hall and into a room at the back of the building before she could unhitch the spasm in her diaphragm and suck in air. She screamed, turned over, kicked at him. Andy knew how to fight, but the oxygen tank and the hundred-pound bunker gear made it nearly impossible, made it like she was wrestling in mud. Engo flipped her onto her belly, put a knee into her backside and pressed down on the oxygen tank and wrenched her left arm behind her. Andy screamed as she felt his bare fingers fishing around at her shoulder for her radio.
“What the fuck are you doing? Stop! Stop!”
He laughed. A dark, low laugh Andy had heard before, one full of an evil confidence, experience. She ripped the tag off her PASS device with her free hand, just to do something, just to feel like she wasn’t completely helpless, the immobility alarm emitting a squealing sound as Engo unbuckled her radio from her chest and put it on the ground beside her face.
“Engo, stop! Please! Please!”
“Yeah,” he said from somewhere above her. “I’m gonna need you to cut that out. I don’t want words. I just want screaming.”
He yanked her wrist down, pinned her hand between his knee and her belt. Andy’s eyes bulged and her howling mouth gaped against the floor as his hand worked its way into the collar of her jacket, his fingers finding the subclavian pressure point deep behind her collarbone expertly. He pushed down. The pain rocketed through her, electric and blinding, drawing guttural screams that were well beyond her control.
Somewhere past the white noise of her agony she heard Engo click his radio.
“Jesus-fuck, Matt! Andy is 10-45 here. Urgh, God. She’s— She’s— Hang on! Hang on! Matt, she’s slipped down a-a-a collapse point in the floor back here. Rear of the building, east. She’s hanging off a girder.”
There was no response. Engo’s fingers worked up and down on the pressure point. Andy could feel the pain band-sawing back and forth from her jugular all the way down her twisted arm. She fought the need to vomit, trying to get up the strength in her thighs to roll him off her back. Her free arm swung across the floor, pushing papers around, scrabbling at her pants and jacket, trying to find something, some weapon, or a handhold. There was nothing. His knee was crushing her fingers, making the bones grind together.