Chapter 7 - Face to Face in the Rubble
Brooke’s lips were blue. A two-inch jagged shard of structural aluminum was driven deep into her right groin, right above the femoral artery, pinned down by the four-hundred-pound weight of the collapsed stage framework. Every time she breathed, bright red blood welled around the metal edge, foaming with deadly urgency.
She was dying, and she knew it.
Beside her, Chloe looked up into the blinding glare of Nora’s headlamp and began to shriek hysterically. "Help us! Help us! We're going to die in here! Get this off her! My father is a senator! Get us out!"
"Shut up," Nora commanded. The authority in her voice was so cold, so absolute, that Chloe’s screams choked instantly into silence.
Nora crawled directly to Brooke’s side. The dust was so thick it coated Brooke’s eyelashes like frost. Brooke looked up, squinting through the dirt and agony into the face beneath the tactical helmet.
For two seconds, their eyes locked.
Recognition hit Brooke like a physical blow. The pale, blood-spattered face above her wasn't an anonymous firefighter. It was Nora Halloran. The girl she had humiliated on the quad. The girl whose name she had turned into a campus meme. The girl she had laughed at for carrying a cheap, threadbare red bag.
And there, resting beside Nora’s knee in the pulverized dust, was the exact same faded red bag, its white cross stained with soot, its brass zipper gleaming in the headlamp beam.
"N-Nora...?" Brooke’s voice was a frail, bubbling gasp. Tears cut clean channels through the thick dust on her cheeks. "You...?"
"Don't talk," Nora said, her fingers already pressing into Brooke’s neck to assess her carotid pulse. It was thready, racing at one hundred and forty beats per minute. Her skin was clammy—stage-three hemorrhagic shock. "Brooke, listen to me carefully. The truss has pinned the impalement against your femoral sheath. If I lift the truss without securing the artery, you bleed out in ninety seconds. If I leave the truss on, your pelvis crushes completely when the ceiling settles. Do you understand?"
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Brooke began to tremble violently, clutching at Nora’s tactical sleeve with fingers that had manicured acrylic nails broken to the quick. "I'm sorry... Nora, please... I don't want to die down here... God, please, my legs... I can't feel my legs..."
"Look at me," Nora ordered, her voice dropping into the same calm, unyielding tone she had used on Marcus five years earlier. "Look at my eyes, Brooke. Stop crying. Panic will drop your blood pressure and kill you. I am the Chief Medical Commander of this scene. Nobody dies on my watch if I can help it. Now look at me and breathe."
