Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113270 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 566(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113270 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 566(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Tad Hanson can do anything when he has to. There’s no other option.
“Abigail!” I yell, choking on the lack of air my rapidly shallowing breaths are bringing to my respirator. Panic doesn’t help—ever. And yet, I can’t seem to turn off the personal connection that it’s not just anyone in here. I can’t seem to compartmentalize that it’s my wife and my daughter and that they need me to be the one who can save them. “Lucy!”
“Tad,” my brother Randy says, his voice muffled by his own air mask and gear. “Let me by!”
I don’t listen, pushing forward instead and contorting my body to fit through a tight space formed by two fallen beams. The alarm on my air tank already rings its warning of approaching depletion, but I ignore it.
Even upon arrival, I could see the house was lost. The flames licked twice as high as the roof, and both walls on the sides had started to give in, and now, as each moment passes, it claims more of the beloved structure my late father-in-law built with his own hands.
But my wife and daughter are inside. I won’t leave without them.
I can’t.
I’ll keep going until I can’t anymore—even if it kills me.
45
Tad
“Dammit!” I scream, slamming my phone down onto the floor of the truck as I fishtail around the corner of Maple, not even pausing for the stop sign before making my turn.
Breezy’s still not answering her phone, and Bennett isn’t picking up either. Randy’s the only one who answered, and I hung up on him as soon as I got the message across—my place is on fucking fire, and Breezy is probably inside.
Sheriff Pete slides around the corner behind me, his lights and sirens going as I floor it until the speedometer hits sixty-five. Trees pass in a blur, and the distance between me and the tail end of the fire truck in front of me closes at a dangerously fast clip.
I cut off the turn, just missing the culvert and ditch as I pull into my driveway alongside the fire truck and come to a stop a millisecond too late, the front end of my truck blowing a hole in Randy’s newly repaired fence.
I don’t bother shifting to park or turning off the ignition before jumping out and taking off at a run for the house.
Fire rolls unchecked from the seam of the roof, and smoke billows wildly from the windows at the right side of the house.
“Tad!” Norah yells as I hit the porch at a run, ripping the storm door open with brute force and hitting the interior one with a flying shoulder.
“Breezy’s inside!” I yell back. I don’t look in their direction after that, but by the sound of Norah’s scream as she calls Bennett’s name, I’d say he isn’t far behind me.
I don’t care. My only focus is getting to Breezy and getting her out of this house alive.
The heat is instant and suffocating and there’s smoke everywhere.
Fuck!
I drop to my hands and knees to limit my smoke inhalation enough to keep from passing out and crawl through the kitchen and down the hall toward the living room. It’s fully engulfed, a hollow shell of what it used to be and by the looks of things, the likely source of the fire. I keep moving, my throat burning and my eyes in tears from the fumes. There’s a harsh bang, the sound of something giving way in the living room and falling across the hall behind me, and I hear Bennett curse loudly before more muffled screams take up just outside.
My ears ring, my heart racing and my head pounding from the lack of air for even just a couple of minutes starting to get to me. Sweat pours down my face and off my body as I fight to put one hand in front of the other in a bear crawl.
Twenty feet feel like a hundred yards as the heat and fumes and closing flames beat against me, but when I finally make it to the back of the house, a small glimmer of hope renews me with a burst of energy.
The door to the master bedroom is closed, and the flames in the attic have yet to break through the ceiling above.
Climbing to my feet temporarily, I put a shoulder to the door and shove, breaking it from the jamb and splintering the wood on the bolt side. Smoke curls wildly at the ceiling, but for the first time since entering the house, it’s not thick enough to cut off my sight yet, and I move quickly around the bed to the other side of the room.
Oh, thank God.
Finally, a breakthrough. Relief and anxiety and urgency fight for supremacy as I see her.
Breezy—horizontal across the floor, just outside the bathroom door, in a T-shirt and wet skin.