They went back through the foyer to the fire door, swimming through smoke that was so thick it looked like mud washing against Ben’s mask. The alleyway was slightly better, the smoke pouring upward from the blown-out windows of the second-floor apartment where the guy in the boxer shorts had been. The bulk of the fire was up there now, chewing through his carpet, furnishings, slithering through his walls, heading for the third floor. Ben could see the floor of the boxer guy’s apartment peeling down into the middle of the restaurant, a collapsed card in a house of cards, half his belongings spilling into the middle of the dining room floor and feeding spot fires there. Incredibly, the wall separating Cristobel’s restaurant and Borr Storage was intact, at least as far as Ben could see—maybe fifteen feet into the smoking ruins.
“Motherfucker!” Engo yelled.
“Come on.” Ben pushed him. They picked their way into the blinding heat and darkness, falling onto their knees before long, crawling beneath collapsed partitions, shoving aside piles of smoking bracken that had been tables and chairs. The floor under Ben’s hands and knees was so hot he knew that if he wasn’t wearing fireproof gear he’d be burned down to the bone by now. Ben stopped while Engo gripped and shoved a bent and buckled deep fryer out of the way, using all his body weight to bash it aside. There was a crumpled section of the brick wall between Cristobel’s restaurant and Borr Storage just where Ben and the crew had hoped there might be: behind the bar, where drill points for plumbing had weakened the structure. Engo beckoned and Ben came up beside him, and the two worked side by side, pulling bricks out of the pile and hurling them into the smoking mess around them. Ben looked back, and through a gap in the rubble he could see spray from the fire hoses out in the street hitting the underside of the collapsed ceiling, chasing flames that were turning and massing in the apartment above. A thin wave of blue and yellow fire was washing over the ceiling, chasing the oxygen spewing into the cavern of the burned-out restaurant.
When they’d made a hole big enough to crawl through, Engo fell on his side and dragged himself forward, using the brick and bits of jagged rebar to haul his body through the oddly shaped gap without snagging the tank or its straps on anything. Ben expected, somehow, that Borr Storage might be untouched by the disaster. But the pressure wave of the explosion had buckled the wall of storage boxes on the restaurant’s side, spewing shiny brass drawers and their contents all over the floor. Ben glimpsed stacks of cash, paperwork, velvet jewelry boxes through the smoke now pouring in through the hole they’d just made. The front of the room was darkened by smoke creeping in through the busted glass security doors, around the iron roller shutter mounted behind them, and into the foyer and office area.
“This way! This way!” Engo shouted. Ben pushed past him, followed the darkening smoke toward the office. He went by a doorway and saw that a curtain and a leather couch were on fire now in the waiting area, embers having worked their way into the room somehow, through the tiny slits in the roller door maybe. The whole room was lit red and flashing from the engines outside. Ben rushed to the huge desk dominating the center of the office, yanked out a drawer that was upholstered with velvet and lined with a hundred keys sitting in little special mountings like wedding-gift silverware. He pulled the drawer so hard in his haste the whole thing flew out and spilled the keys everywhere.
“Fuck!”
“It’s-okay-it’s-okay-it’s-okay.” Ben pulled Engo up as he bent for the drawer on the floor. He pointed to a label on the front of the second drawer. “That was one to a hundred!”
Ben grabbed the drawer marked “400s” and slid it open carefully, fished out key 408, which was lying in its velvet bed above a brass-plated label. He ran back through the offices. In the seconds it had taken them to retrieve the keys, the fire in the waiting room had reduced a potted palm tree to dust and was crawling across the carpet toward the front desk. Ben knew that soon the smoke easing out of the roller security door would be thick enough to tell the teams outside that the fire had crossed from the restaurant to the storage facility. He and Engo needed to get out of there before someone came through to try to knock down the fire in the waiting room.
“Ben and Engo, I need a sitrep.”
“We’re on location, sixth floor, trying to locate the civilian,” Ben lied.
“Engine 97 sent two guys up there through the back, and they’re reporting the civilian is in their custody and they’re on their way down,” Matt said. Ben could hear the tightness in his voice. “Again. A sitrep. Now.”
Ben worked a hand along the rows and rows of brass boxes in the dark, knowing he should find 408 on the right-hand wall in the corner but counting down anyway, from the thousands to the eight hundreds to the six hundreds. Engo was waiting for him in the corner, a gloved finger on the box and his eyes huge in the mask. The smoke was thickening. Ben jammed the key from the drawer into the left-hand slot in the front of the box.
“We must be on the fifth floor,” Ben said into the radio. “I thought we were on the sixth. We got another civilian here. Will keep you updated.”
“Partial collapse on the first floor is worsening,” Matt said. “Don’t descend. Wait for the ladder.”
“Got it.” Ben found the key he’d been given by the lawyer in the pocket of his bunker trousers. He took it out, slid it into the right-hand keyhole in the front of drawer 408.
If Engo hadn’t moved, Ben wouldn’t have seen him. But the slight shift the older man gave to steady his feet directly behind Ben made him slip into view. Ben saw him in the shiny reflection in the polished brass front of the shelf. The image wasn’t so great, in the smoke and the darkness, that Ben could see the gun in Engo’s hands. He just saw the stance. The planted feet. The arms extended. The hands together and gripped around a black object, that object pointed directly at the back of Ben’s skull.
Ben felt a rush of icy clarity hit his body, beginning at his head and racing down his entire being, light-speed fast, like he’d plunged right into the Hudson.
He made a show of turning the keys, twisted his hands but not the keys themselves.
“Jesus! Fuck! It won’t…” Ben yelled. “It won’t go!”
He saw Engo adjust his aim. Ben took a step back, fake-twisted the keys again.
“It won’t turn!” He let the desk key go and gripped the lawyer key with both hands. “It’s stuck!”
Engo dropped his aim and stepped up beside him, as Ben hoped he would, the gun at his side, his gloved hand coming up to try the key.
Ben smashed him in the mask with his elbow. He used the moment of stunned surprise to grab and twist the gun out of Engo’s grip.
Ben stepped back and shot Engo three times in the chest. He went down, collapsed with his head bent forward on a pillow of brass boxes spilled from the busted shelves on the opposite wall. Ben went back and turned both keys in drawer 408, slid it out and lifted the lid. He dumped the contents on the floor, rummaged around, and beneath a nest of papers he found six baseball cards housed in chunky fiberglass capsules. He slid them into the inner chest pockets of his turnout coat and looked toward the offices, where he could hear the unmistakable sound of guys working the roller door open with a Halligan bar. He was on his knees, about to slip back through the hole in the wall into Cristobel’s restaurant, when he felt the impact of the bullet in his back.
For a moment, he was in that apartment again, wherever it had been, scrambling through the smoke looking for the teenager who wasn’t there, and the roof beam spearing him right between the shoulder blades had fallen again, so full of soundless and complete power it was like he’d been hammered down by the hand of a Titan. He was flat, voiceless, breathless mouth gaping in the mask, the pain coming after the impact, a decent few seconds later, a fiery pain that spread outward from his heart, right to the tips of his fingers.
And then he could move again, and he did move, turned on his side and looked back at Engo and the fucking gun in his fingers, the gun he himself had dropped on the carpet in his haste to open the box with the cards. Taking the shot had been the last thing Engo could manage on the earth. The eyes that stared at Ben through the mask were unseeing. Ben turned again and crawled, whimpering and groaning with the pain it caused him, through the hole in the wall and back into the restaurant.
It was raining ash in big, black, fluttery handfuls as he commando-crawled along the wet floor of the restaurant, thinking if he could just get to Engo’s Subaru he might get a second wave of movement and energy like the one that had hit him after the paralyzing pain of the bullet wound receded.
Ben got to the street, pulled himself onto the asphalt, yanked his tank off and let it clank loudly on the ground, the mask a rubbery hellish sucking octopus he had to wrestle from his cheeks. He tasted cold, clean air, knew the fire was being beaten somewhere above him, even as black butterflies of ash landed on his gloves and face. He turned himself over, or no, actually, was turned over and hauled up against the wheel of Engo’s car. Andy was there, ripping open the collar of his coat, yanking the jacket apart, spilling the baseball cards in their special cases all down his blood-soaked belly and lap. Her eyes flicked over the cards, eight million dollars’ worth of absolutely nothing in her weird upside-down world, giving them half a second of her time before she batted them out of the way to rip open Ben’s undershirt and examine the exit wound. He sat there and felt the life draining out of him and wondered, idly, if the items he’d stolen and killed for that she was carelessly kneeling on now were the most expensive she’d ever dealt with, or if she’d spent the last few years doing just this: brushing off diamonds and jewels and stacks of cash to get her hands wet with villainous blood.
When she realized what he already knew, she sat down beside him, and wiped at the tears pouring from her eyes. He only noticed then the enormous gash in the side of her head, right above her temple, directly above her ear.
“I found Gabe,” she said. She was holding his hands now, pulling his gloves off, gripping his fingers with hers. He remembered taking her hand in the dark as she slept, and it did something to stave off the strange coldness that was beginning in all his limbs. When Ben tried to squeeze her hands back, he found he couldn’t. His head was heavy. His mouth must have twitched, because it inspired a smile in her.
“He’s okay.”
“What?”
“He’s okay,” Andy said. “He’s alive.”
Ben gave a little laugh. She was smiling and crying and laughing above him.
“Jake,” he managed. “Was it—”
“Yeah.” Andy nodded. “Luna’s gone. I’m sorry, Ben. I’m sorry. But she’s gone.”
Ben wanted to thank her, to laugh more at it all, the horror and meaninglessness of it, but he was so tired, and it felt better just to let her stroke his hair, whoever the hell she was, and hold him.
She must have read his thoughts, because she said, “I’m Dahlia.”
Ben thought about the name, held it in his mind, turned it over. He felt it roll from meaning everything, into meaning nothing, into meaning everything again as lights flickered out inside him. He watched the smoke coiling up into the night sky and listened to the sirens and thought that her name wasn’t so bad, as far as last things to ever hear went.