Authors: Palladian
As they stood in front of the restaurant afterwards, Lex's chest weighed down by the things she wished she could say, she shocked them again by first hugging Mia and then Daisy. The hug with Mia was all awkward angles, but after her initial surprise, Daisy hung on briefly but fiercely. As she pulled away, Lex noted the stricken expression on Daisy's face, but forced herself to smile calmly in response.
She waved goodbye a moment later, which seemed to calm Daisy, and watched her sisters drive off before going back into the restaurant to call a cab and wait for it.
The worst part of being ready, once all of their preparations had been finalized, was the waiting. They'd agreed to execute their escape during their next job, hopefully the promised fire, but each day of being ready with nothing happening seemed to drag by interminably. Lex herself felt despair on some days, but reminded herself that it had been many weeks after she'd arrived before her first job. She did her best to be positive for the team and to do things to keep everyone's spirits up, like bringing Riss cookies and coffee from the kitchen when she knew the other woman would be hard at work, looking up new recipes to try for dinner and breaking early so that everything would be cooked by the time Casey arrived. She tried to focus on how well the team practice had been going, so well that she wished they'd instituted it sooner.
She felt worried, however. Though Lex felt certain that her imagination had taken on a life of its own, she sometimes felt her skin crawling and would stare at her hands and try to keep them exactly as she saw them, through sheer force of will. Undeniably, however, her headaches had continued to get worse. The majority of her end-of-day headaches had been mild to moderate; now they had changed to moderate to severe. She kept up with her voice exercises and meditated every day, feeling as if those things helped her somehow.
It was a Thursday night and by some means Casey and Lex had convinced Riss to stay after their weekly dinner to watch a movie. Lex had figured out that Riss had a soft spot for martial arts films, so they'd sat down to watch Lex's latest acquisition. They'd almost finished watching it when the alarm sounded. Suddenly an immense calm fell over Lex, and she looked up at Casey, then Riss. All three of them nodded and stood.
“Let's go,” Lex said, trying to hold back a triumphant grin and ignore the headache building behind her eyes.
Chapter 20: Escape
Lex pulled her jumpsuit on and then rummaged around in her purse for a few moments. She'd already given a few small things to Casey to be packed into her bag at Union Station, so the last couple she took with her had to be even smaller things whose absence wouldn't be readily noticed. Taking a couple of pictures of her brother and sisters out of her wallet, she folded them together with a big wad of twenties, palmed the whole thing and put it into a zip pocket of the jumpsuit. Next, she took out the thumb drive all her important files had been backed up to and found another zippered pocket to store it in. She changed the batteries on her flashlight and added a glow stick that she'd just bought into the same pocket. Finally, Lex brought out a little bottle of headache medicine and put it into an upper jumpsuit pocket, hoping despite the throbbing stab behind one eye that she wouldn't need to use it.
Hearing a knock on her door and shouting, “Come in,” Lex then walked to the door to meet Riss.
“Hey,” Lex said, gesturing to her closet. “Come over and have a look at this t-shirt before we go. I just got it and I really like it.”
They both poked their heads into the closet, exchanging a quick, intense look as Lex slipped a small bundle consisting of a new change of clothes into the open top of the bag Riss carried. As they came back out, Riss shook her head.
“I don't know,” she said, “your comic book t-shirts always look a little goofy to me.”
“They're not comic books, they're manga,” Lex said, trying to sound annoyed while she turned to give the room one last look before closing the door behind her.
The two of them knocked on Casey's door and then entered after hearing muffled permission. Lex stood for a moment, struggling to look bored despite the churning in her stomach, directly in the line of sight for the main camera in Casey's room. Meanwhile, Riss and Casey quickly wrestled a larger bundle of clothes into Riss' bag.
“So,” Riss asked a moment later, “is everyone ready to go?”
Lex and Casey nodded and followed her out into the hallway. The three headed for the briefing room together. When they reached it, they realized they'd arrived last. Joan had actually come for the briefing in person, and Serena greeted them with a raised eyebrow, to which Lex quickly looked away.
Clara didn't look pleased, but only Casey got an annoyed glare as Clara gestured for all of them to take a seat.
“You're going to be the lead response team for another burning-building rescue,” she explained. “For any of you that haven't heard before now, the fire that you helped with a while back was deliberately set, and the person who started it had intended for all of the people who lived there to die. Since we saved them, the arsonist has set another fire in hopes of being successful this time.”
A picture appeared on the big screen of a building spotlighted in the dark. No flames could be seen, just some smoke.
“The target,” Clara continued, “is another apartment building a few stories shorter than the last one. The situation is different this time, though.”
Lex listened intently, tapping her fingers on her thigh underneath the table, as Clara described the known situation. The building stood fourteen stories high with the most intense parts of the fire in the outside walls, but this time the stairs had been broken between the second and third floors first, then every two floors from there on up. On top of that, so much smoke had gathered in the stairwells that anyone trying to escape that way had difficulty getting out without an air supply. No one seemed sure why there was so much smoke, or its source.
Lex noticed Clara pointing out particulars on the building by gesturing to an electronic blueprint she'd brought up on the large screen. Lex raised her hand, clearing her throat so she could get her words out. Clara looked at her in surprise and then nodded.
“Is that the actual building blueprint?” she asked Clara. When the other woman nodded, Lex continued, “Can we get that loaded onto Riss' computers so that we can refer to it onsite? Also, this time, I want her to have access to the building cameras.” She met Clara's eyes when the other woman looked up at her. “Call whoever you need to and get permission. If the arsonist has set this up to be worse than last time, I have a feeling that we haven't had the last of the bad news.”
Clara nodded in return, her expression cautious. “All right, I'll do what I can. That's all the information we have right now. We're still getting reports in from the site, though, so the situation could change at any time. Did anyone else have any questions?”
Lex nodded. “Actually, I do have one more. Will any other teams be there?”
“The Alpha team will be.”
After considering for a moment, Lex spoke again. “Since we know they're down a few people, if we need anyone else, can we bring in someone from another team?”
Clara looked at her for a moment. “I guess we could, but we've never really done that before. I'll have to get permission.”
“OK, thanks. Please get it, if you can.”
“Anyone else?” Clara looked around the room, but no one else spoke up, so she nodded. “All right, let's get downstairs and get moving.”
Lex saw Riss disconnecting a thumb drive from a computer along the side in the situation room, and Lex, Casey, and Serena waited while she packed it into a zip pocket, then all three of them went downstairs to the van.
When they made it out to the site, they all got out and just studied the building for a moment. The van had parked on the street in front of the building and the team stood on a small lawn near a circular drive. As she heard a siren, Lex turned her head to see an ambulance departing from the plaza in front of the office building across the street, the place the medics appeared to have taken over.
As she turned her attention back to the building they'd come to evacuate, Lex couldn't help but note the contrast to the shorter brick office building to the left. The apartment building had been constructed from red and cream stone, and Lex felt her heart sink at the destruction as she looked through the smoke at the elaborately carved entrance. On the other side of the burning building stood the half-built skeleton of what, according to a sign on the lot, would one day be a high-rise office building. The air around them seemed permeated by an acrid, smoky smell and the muted crackle of a hidden fire.
Lex continued to look at the burning building, preoccupied by the thought that although it stood only fourteen stories this time, because of the lower break of stairs they still had a dozen floors to evacuate. She sighed as she stood with her teammates and turned hopefully to Serena to ask, “I don't suppose that—”
“No, sorry, I've never been into this building before,” Serena interrupted with a sigh. “Too bad, too; it looks like it was kind of nice before someone set it on fire.”
“OK,” Lex said, turning to the rest of the group, “I'm going to see if any of the fire fighters remember me from last time and will bring me up to speed. Can you stay nearby until I get back?”
Everyone shrugged or nodded so Lex headed over to the knot of firefighters and equipment situated next to the medics. Fortunately, Lex quickly found some people who remembered her from the last job and seemed glad to give her the latest information, and pointed her to the engineer assisting their efforts. After talking with all of them for a short while, Lex came back to meet with her own team.
Once everyone had been assembled again she told them, “The firefighters have been working on evacuating the lower two floors. They're mostly done, but it's been slow going because of all of the smoke in the stairwells. Also, more bad news. From what the fire fighters have been able to see, due to structural damage in parts of the building as it burned, the arsonist somehow banked the fire around the edges of the support beams. They seem to be heating up from the outside in, like the rest of the building but much more slowly. However, as they get hotter they'll change temper and the floors may begin to collapse in the process.
“The other thing they told me sounded a little odd. Basically they haven't been able to evacuate anyone by putting ladders on or near the windows. They found the heat to be too fierce in general and when they try to get a ladder close to any part of the wall, the fire seems to flare up there, almost as though it could see them coming.”
Everyone exchanged glances then, grim looks on all of their faces. Lex could almost hear her friends' thoughts, wondering if the arsonist had hidden nearby. “So, let's think about it,” Lex finally said. “Riss, can you bring up the blueprint of the building?”
They studied it quietly until Lex broke the silence by asking, “Let's say we had no lack of time and resources. What would you do to get the people out?”
“Rip the front and back of the building off and get a lot of ladders,” Casey said.
“I'd go into all the apartments and get everyone,” said Serena, “but I'd have to find a good way in first.”
Riss looked up just before she spoke. “I'd tell everyone to go to the roof and then have helicopters get them.”
“This is stupid. Why are we doing this?” the computerized voice from Joan's suit asked.
Lex sighed. “Because no one has any good ideas right now about how to get people out. Helicopters can't get close enough because of all of the heat thermals and jets of fire coming off of the building. The fire fighters are now too worried to get close to any of the outside walls with ladders, since many may be on the verge of crumbling, plus there's the other problem we talked about. The elevators don't work. The stairwells are broken or so filled with smoke that the firefighters are having trouble evacuating the two lowest floors. We need to think of some way to do this, and the key will be coming up with an idea no one's thought of yet.”
Unable to see the expression on Joan's face, Lex stared at her helmet for a moment, and then looked back at the rest of the team. “Any other ideas? Don't be afraid to throw out the weirdest thing you can think of; maybe it will spark an idea for someone else.”
As more ideas went back and forth, Lex found herself half listening and half looking at the blueprint of the building. Lex thought about Casey's idea and about fire fighters and how they made it to fires as she stared at the center of the building. Suddenly, she broke into the discussion.
“Does anyone know someone with the ability to create lasers or something to cut through things with? Someone who could cut through something substantial, like a wall.”
Serena shrugged. “I knew a guy on the New York team who could do stuff like that. I think he's even still there. He could probably cut through a wall, I guess. It's hard to say, though; he liked to brag a lot.”
“OK,” Lex said, “I think we should cut a hole all the way through the building here.” She pointed to an area near the center of the roof that fell in between the support beams. “Then, we should drive a pole through it and have everyone slide to the ground floor and come out the main entrance. What do you think?”
Everyone stared at the blueprint for a long moment, and then started looking at one another with some consideration. Casey glanced up and smiled at Lex.
“I think it might work.”
“This is crazy,” Joan's computerized voice sounded out. “How would we do all that?”
“Well,” Lex replied, “We could ask Serena to get the guy she knew on the team in New York—”
“One Roger, coming up,” said Serena, disappearing.
Lex sighed, and then called into her communicator. “Clara, are you there?”
“Yes, Lex, go ahead.”
“Can you get permission for us to, um, borrow someone named Roger from the team in New York? He can create lasers or something of the sort, but I don't really know any more about the guy other than that.”