Chapter 4 - Through the Flames
The storm raged violently as Boone’s old Ford pickup truck roared down 2nd Avenue, its tires spraying freezing slush into the dark night.
I sat in the passenger seat, clutching a trauma medical kit in my lap. I knew it was against every hospital policy for a head nurse to leave her shift and accompany a volunteer into a dangerous police situation, but I couldn't stay behind. If Maya was wounded, she needed immediate medical intervention—and Baby Girl Parker needed her mother alive.
"She was always afraid of the dark," Boone muttered, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly the leather cover creaked. His tremors had vanished completely, replaced by pure, adrenaline-fueled focus. "When she was seven, whenever a thunder storm hit, she’d crawl into my lap and ask me to sing that old military marching song."
"We're going to get her, Boone," I said, checking the sterile bandages and morphine injectors inside the kit. "Detective Vance called for backup. SWAT is en route."
"SWAT will take twenty minutes to breach," Boone said, slamming his foot on the accelerator as the truck blasted through a red light. "In a fire, twenty minutes is a death sentence."
Up ahead, near the frozen banks of the Des Moines River, thick black smoke billowed into the icy sky. An old three-story brick industrial warehouse was engulfed in roaring orange flames.
Two black SUVs were parked near the entrance, their doors wide open. Three men in heavy winter coats stood near the loading dock, holding handguns, firing shots into the burning doorway to prevent anyone inside from escaping.
"Stay in the truck, Clara!" Boone commanded, throwing the truck into park fifty yards away.
Before I could protest, Boone kicked his door open and stepped out into the freezing storm.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't take cover. He charged straight toward the three armed men like an unstoppable force of nature.
"Hey! What the hell—!" one of the gunmen screamed, turning his weapon toward Boone.
Boone closed the distance in three massive strides. He grabbed the gunman’s wrist, twisting it upward with a sickening CRACK, disarming him in a single fluid motion. He swung his heavy elbow backward, striking the second gunman square in the jaw, sending him flying backward onto the icy pavement.
The third gunman raised a shotgun, pointing it directly at Boone’s chest. "Don't move, old man!"
Boone didn't even blink. He lunged forward, grabbing the barrel of the shotgun with his bare, scarred hand, pushing it upward just as it detonated, blowing a hole into the wooden awning above. Boone drove his massive shoulder into the gunman’s ribs, slamming him against the brick wall until the man collapsed unconscious into the snow.
Without wasting a second, Boone tore his coat off, soaked it in a puddle of freezing slush on the ground, wrapped it over his head, and ran directly into the roaring furnace of the burning building.
"Boone!" I screamed from the truck window.
Inside the warehouse, the heat was blinding. Support beams were crackling, dropping showers of sparks and burning debris onto the concrete floor. Dense, toxic smoke filled the air, making it impossible to see or breathe.
Boone pressed forward, his burned skin screaming with phantom pain as the heat reminded his body of Kandahar.
"MAYA!" Boone roared, his voice echoing over the roar of the fire. "MAYA! IT'S DAD!"
Silence answered him, save for the crash of a falling wooden roof truss.
"MAYA!" he bellowed again, coughing heavily as smoke burned his lungs. "LILY IS SAFE! YOUR BABY IS SAFE! I HAVE HER, MAYA!"
From high above, on a crumbling metal catwalk near the third-floor ceiling, a faint, terrified sob echoed through the smoke.
"D-Dad?"
Boone looked up through the wall of flames.
Trapped on the edge of the collapsing catwalk was a thin, frail young woman. Her clothes were torn, her face covered in soot, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as flames licked at the iron steps below her.
"Maya!" Boone yelled, rushing toward the rusty spiral staircase. "Don't move! I'm coming up!"
"Dad! The stairs are gone!" Maya screamed, pointing down.
The bottom half of the iron staircase had collapsed into a pit of burning wooden pallets. There was no way to walk up.
Boone didn't hesitate. He rushed to the base of a heavy industrial support pillar directly beneath the catwalk. Ignoring the searing heat of the metal, he grabbed the iron rungs of a maintenance ladder and began to climb, pulling his massive body up through the black smoke using pure, raw upper-body strength.
The metal rungs burned his bare palms, tearing away old scar tissue, but he didn't slow down.
He reached the top platform just as the structural bolts holding the catwalk began to shear off with deafening loud CLANGS.
"Dad!" Maya sobbed, collapsing forward into his arms.
Boone wrapped his massive arms around his daughter, pulling her frail, shivering body tightly against his broad chest, sheltering her from the falling sparks just as he had sheltered her baby girl six hours earlier.
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"I got you, baby," Boone wept into her soot-covered hair, his massive body trembling as he held her. "I got you. I'm never letting you go again."
The metal catwalk beneath them gave way with a horrific screech.
