Breathless (26 page)

across the floor into the center of the
plant. Standing there, he surveyed the interior of
the factory that had taken Alex from him. He took
note of the dust, dirt and grime that made up the
building and turned up his nose. Tad moved from
the center of the floor towards the offices. He was
sure that Alex would go there to seek sanctuary and
call for help.
Alex watched Tad's shadowy figure move across the
floor and head for the offices. She continued to sit
silently hoping that Sam and James weren't too far
behind Rob. She shed a tear for Rob, praying to
God that Tad hadn't killed him. Her thoughts were
interrupted when she heard Tad break the glass to
Francine's plant door and shove it open. Alex
looked longingly at the entrance way where she
came in and wondered if she could make it to Rob
and get him and herself out of this mess. The police
couldn't have been too far behind him.
Deciding
to go for it, Alex stood up and tried to exit the
building.
James watched silently as the coroner and his
assistant wrapped Francine into a body bag and
placed her on the gurney.
He glared at Dominic as
he was tended to by a paramedic; the fact that their
assailant had lived and Francine was now a cold
corpse, along with his unborn child tore him in
half. He remembered the last time he and Francine
had been together.
She had been sure that that
was when she had conceived the baby. He had only
been thinking of Alex and picturing her during that
mating. Sighing, he reached a shaky hand into his
shirt pocket and grabbed the package of cigarettes
.
He had to toss a few before finding one that
wasn't smashed or broken.
Igniting his lighter,
James inhaled the nicotine and winced at the pain
in his ribs, back and jaw.
"Sir, we should have a look at you too," offered the
paramedic approaching him.
"No. I'll be alright for a while," he said rejecting
their offer. James stared passed the paramedic to
where Dominic was loaded into a police cruiser in
handcuffs.
Officer," James called, "you have my
statement.
Can I go?" One of the officers nodded
and James reached into his back pocket and called
Sam.
"Sam. What's going on?"
"James, you better get up here; it doesn't look
good. "
Sam stood outside the plant and eyed the wrecked
car and Rob's pale face.
He and another unit of
paramedics had reached Hasani ten minutes after
Rob had called him.
They found Rob inside the
truck in a puddle of blood and barely
breathing. "Will he be alright," Sam asked one of
them as they loaded Rob into the ambulance.
"It's going be close," he responded closing the doors
and running around to the front.
"I'll be right there. "
James hung up the phone and watched as both the
cruiser and the coroner's car pulled away from the
scene, leaving him in an uneasy quietness. Easing
himself into his car, he rushed to Hasani to
hopefully save the life of the woman he loved. He
couldn't imagine losing them both in one day.
Tad climbed the stairs to the R&D offices and
looked out the observation window.
He had not
found Alex in any of the offices or rooms downstairs
and hoped to trap her upstairs.
As he looked over
the factory, he saw a faint image move from the
back of the building towards the door where he and
Alex had come in, "Gotcha," he whispered a
malicious smile on his face as he turned and
hobbled back down the stairs.
Alex heard the office door shut and turned. Tad
was running as fast as he could towards
her.
Terrified that he could possibly catch her in
this condition, Alex turned and headed for the
inventory pit.
Tad saw Alex bolt towards another section of the
factory and headed after her.
"You can't escape
me now," he hollered.
Alex heard Tad's threat and panicked realizing that
the inventory pit would make her a prime
target.
As she turned to go back in the other
direction, she saw Tad getting too close for her
tastes and headed back towards the weld shop only
to be cut off by him.
Alex realized her only hope
was to lose him in the inventory area.
Doing a one eighty, Alex turned and raced away
from him. Tad saw the reaction and raised his gun
to fire at her. Alex grunted as a bullet caught her
shoulder and she slid to the ground reopening the
wounds on her left leg and enflaming the ones on
her right. Tad saw Alex hit the ground and continue
to slide until she was hidden from his
sight. Realizing he needed to make his escape, Tad
looked around the building until he spied an exit
sign in the back near a large stand of machinery. He
was heading for it when the loading dock doors flew
open revealing fifteen uniformed officers all aiming
their weapons at him.
"Freeze, Pierce," yelled one of the policemen.
"No way," Tad whispered shooting at the officers
who stood in the doorway.
"Fire," one of them ordered as they began to return
Tad's shots.
James drove up the driveway at that time and saw
the officers shooting into the plant.
Fearing for
both Alex's life and the lives of the officers, James
rushed out of his car and over to Sam.
"Their shooting toward the weld shop; they'll hit
one of the tanks!"
Sam looked at the officers and their angle and
realized that James was right.
He had just begun
to run full steam for the leader of the uniformed
officers, when a loud explosion erupted from the
plant and a ball of fire spewed forth from the
doorway.
Chapter 26
Alex landed on her chest and rolled onto her good
shoulder after being shot down into the inventory
pit. Gasping for air and trying to ignore the pain of
the wound in her shoulder and on her legs, she
searched around the receded space looking for a
place to hide from Tad. Seeing an opening under
the cement stairs, Alex remembered what Doug had
told about the hollow in the floor. The last owners
of the building had built something resembling a
bomb shelter underneath the cement
flooring. They had reinforced a section of the
regular floor with steel and covered it with
cement. Alex recognized the gape underneath the
stairs as the entrance to that room.
Dragging her
legs, Alex crawled into it and hid under the cement
steps to wait. Then she heard the rattle of the
loading dock doors and the shout of the police as
they cornered Tad inside the factory. Alex cringed
further under the steps as Tad shot at the police
officers and they returned fire. Just as she was
about to crawl out, she heard the explosion and
tossed herself deeper into the recesses of the gorge
and covered her head as the cement and steel
encasement crumbled around her.
Tad knew something was wrong as a loud explosion
rocked him and sent him flying through the outer
door.
He landed on his right side in the quagmire
that ran above the creek bed in a shower of sparks,
metal and glass. The flames were intense as they
followed him out the door, singeing his legs and
arms. The smell of his hair and skin burning from
the heat made him retch onto the ground and
eventually he passed out from the pain.
James and Sam were tossed unceremoniously onto
the concrete as the blast made its way out of the
plant, searching for more victims.
The police
officers who had been standing in the doorway
were nothing more than burnt corpses thrown
backward/ shattering on the ground as they
landed.
James was terrified.
Picking himself up off the ground, he helped Sam up
and then turned as if to run into the plant to find
Alex. Sam grabbed his upper arm and watched as
the fire trucks arrived and began to douse the
flames which licked at the roof and promised to
collapse the whole structure.
"Is there anyone inside," asked a fireman who
approached James and Sam.
"Yes, there is," James spoke up, his voice catching.
"Where?"
"I don't know. She was being held hostage inside. "
"What," exclaimed the chief.
Sam turned and
explained the situation as quickly as possible
knowing that every moment counted for Alex,
"We'll find her," pronounced the chief as he
grabbed his radio and apprised his men of the
circumstances and demanded that they search
everywhere for her.
"James, I need to check on Rob," Sam said quietly
beside him.
James nodded and watched as the
fireman continued to charge into the building,
extinguishing flames, searching under rubble and
drowning hot cinders which threatened to reignite
the building.
"Alex," James whispered as
memories of her ran through his head.
They made
him remember the laughing eyes, soft skin and the
way her face lit up during their lovemaking.
He
could feel her touch on him, smell her perfume and
taste her lips and hear her whispering, "I love you,"
in his ear as they rode the wave of passion.
James
backed away from the building; he couldn't bear the
thought of losing her too.
Alex felt the splash of water on her face before she
heard the voices.
The heat had been intense and
she was sure she was missing more than a few
hairs.
She had been knocked unconscious by the
blow of a piece of concrete to her forehead and
tried to move an arm only to discover she was
pinned in a steel and cement tomb. Summoning a
breath, Alex tried to yell. The sound was drowned
out by a wave of sirens and she tried again, "Help,"
she hollered, waiting for a reply. Nothing. Alex
fought to remain awake and listened as the voices
faded towards the other side of the building and
then come back toward her.
"We've searched everywhere, Chief. There is no
sign of her.
The flames must've gotten them
both.”
"Keep searching. This guy is close to hysterical as it
is," he replied thumbing over his back towards
James who still stood dazed staring at the plant.
Alex realized that they were going to walk away
again, when she summoned another deep breath
and screamed for help.
This one took all the
energy she had left and she collapsed.
"Did you hear that," asked the fireman.
"Yeah, I did. Somebody go get Mr. O'Reilly. I want
to know where we are. "
James followed the fireman into the building that
was once home to Hasani Industries.
He looked
around at the damage and knew they would never
recover in time to fulfill their contracts. The
company was ruined. He approached the chief with
a heavy heart half expecting to be asked to identify
Alex's charred remains. Only when he asked if
there was a way for Alex to be under the floor, did
James understand.
"Yeah, there is. If she had gotten away, she could
have crawled under the floor.
The previous owners
created a fallout shelter of sorts into it. Like a
mechanic's pit," James described feeling
optimistic.
"Where would it be?"
"We're standing on it."
"Did anyone search this rubble," he asked and
smiled when he got a negative reply, "She's in
here.
Let's go to work and be careful.
If she's
injured and we screw up it could be worse," he
warned before shrugging off his overcoat and
carefully removing pieces of cement.
Despite his injuries to his face and back, James got
down on his knees and began digging as well. He
tossed pieces of cement towards an already
searched area and prayed that she was alive. Out
of the corner of his eye, James saw Sam leading
some others into the building to begin digging
out. It was Morgan and the rest of the Hasani team
banding together to find her.
Sam's fingers were bleeding from the steel shrapnel
and concrete that he kept catching his hands
on.
He looked to his left and saw that mostly
everyone's hands were going to need treated for
cuts. All of them would need tetanus shots. Sam
looked back down, pushed a large slab away and
saw red hair.
"I've got her," he shouted increasing his efforts to
remove the steel from the unmoving form.
James heard Sam's shout and rushed to the hole he
had created.
Sam had just removed a large piece
of flat steel that revealed Alex's bruised face which
sported a nasty gash on her forehead.
"Alex," he
called to her, tears streaming down his face, "Alex,
honey, please wake up," he begged reaching down
to brush a lock of hair away from her eyes.
"Let's get the rest of this shit off of her," the chief
ordered as the rest of the firemen and Hasani
employees chipped away at the debris on top of
her.
Tad heard the sirens and felt the ooze of blood from
the gashes on his arms and legs and
head.
Groaning he pushed himself up, sat in the
quagmire and watched unobtrusively as the firemen
rushed to extinguish the flames from the
explosion.
As soon as the flames were out, he
silently, he slunk to the door he was blown out of
and watched as the fireman walked through the
plant obviously searching for something or
somebody.
He smiled when he ascertained that
they were searching for him and Alex.
"Well, I'm
alive," he snarled viciously hoping the same wasn't
true for Alex. Still watching, he saw as the group
focused their attention on the large amount of
rubble near the front of the building and the last
place he had seen Alex. Grunting, he pushed
himself to a standing position and reached out to
steady himself with a nearby tree. He had to know
for sure. Slinking around the front of the building,
he grabbed a spare fireman's overalls, jacket and
hat and limped into the burned out structure. Tad
had just placed himself in an easily escapable
position when he heard a shout that captured his
attention. He watched and fumed as they began to
dig out Alex.
"Is she alive," asked James desperately when a
space had been created for a paramedic and Alex's
still body.
"Barely," he responded, "She's in bad shape. We
need to get her outta here."
The assembly cleared some more scrap and another
paramedic climbed into the crevice to secure Alex's
neck and wrap her wounds in field dressings until
they could get her into the ambulance.
The
paramedics called for a scoop and each of them
placed half of a curved metal brace underneath