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No running now. He’d spent the better part of five minutes driving the pins out of the hinges only to go from the frying pan into the fire.
Smoke filled the hallway as he fought upstream through a pit of swirling gray haze, searching for Jan and Nova.
Crackling and popping sounds came from every direction. The walls beside him. The floor beneath him. The ceiling over him.
Yep, worse than any wildfire.
“Nova! Where are you?” Booth shouted into the smoke-filled hallway. “Help is coming. Finn’s trying to find a safe way in.” A way that wouldn’t send the whole building crashing in on them.
He slammed into the ladies’ room. Nothing here.
“Nova!”
He continued down the hall and tried a side exit. No dice. Someone had jammed all the doors on purpose.
Whoever had done this had set fires at every exit and doused the place with gasoline. The local fire department was en route—he’d called them the second he’d escaped—but they were miles away. Jump base had tools and equipment for wildfires, not buildings.
Booth radioed Finn. “I can’t find them anywhere. They have to be in the museum. It’s the only place I haven’t checked.”
“Ten-four,” Finn said. “Can you get in there?”
“Hang on.” Booth ran through the smoke-filled lobby to the history room and paused at the entrance. “It’s fully engulfed, but yes.”
“Good. I’ll grab my saw and cut an exit hole in the southwest corner. I don’t see any fire or smoke there…yet,” Finn added. “It’ll be a miracle if my blade can cut through the metal siding without breaking a chain, but just get there.”
“I’ll make it happen.” He’d find Nova and Jan, get them to the spot, and let God handle the miracle.
Booth pressed a sleeve over his nose and jumped through the pile of burning rubble. He scanned the room.
Where are you, Wildfire Girl?…C’mon, give me a sign.
There! Through curtains of black smoke, he spotted her red hair. She was crouched beside a lump on the floor, kicking at a log three times the diameter of a telephone pole.
And was she…? Yeah, she was wearing one of those old bug-eyed gas masks from the early days of firefighting. He’d laugh if the situation weren’t dire.
He closed the expanse, crushing charred remnants of museum artifacts underfoot. “Nova!”
Her head twitched an acknowledgment, but Nova didn’t stop driving her boot into the wood. “Give me a hand!”
One of the logs used to mimic the trees smokejumpers and hotshots felled had come loose from the wall anchors and fallen, pinning Jan’s legs.
Blood trickled from a small cut on the older woman’s cheek.
She wasn’t moving.
For one heart-stopping instant, he feared the worst. Then the slow rise and fall of Jan’s ribcage eased his clenching gut.
Not dead. Unconscious.
Was kicking the thing really the right way to help Jan?
He gripped Nova’s shoulder and gave her a firm shake. She wrenched to look at him. “Hey, take a breath real quick. We’ll get her free.”
She gave one sharp shake of her head. “No. I can’t…I can’t…Just help. We’ve gotta get this off her now!”
Nova was right. Bulging pipes skewered the flaming walls on every side, destabilized further by each crashing ceiling section bringing down the building overhead. They were living on borrowed time. Minutes at best.
“I know. We can do this. We’ll lift it together. Here, take my gloves.” He pulled one off.