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  In the front seats, one pilot pointed out the windshield at the front of the cockpit and motioned to the horizon. He spoke, and his microphone activated automatically from the vibration at his neck.

  “Are those storm clouds out there?” he asked. “Fifteen miles or so?”

  The pilot in the right seat responded, “Could be. It’s hard to tell with all of the smoke. Can’t be sure.”

  “It would be a miracle if they were,” said the first pilot. “A real miracle.”

  “You’re not kidding. Otherwise half of the state is going to burn.”

  Loretta slept and thankfully didn’t dream. It would have been a nightmare every bit as bad as the one she’d survived, and her husband had not.

  CHAPTER 17

  Friday, October 17, 2025

  Brentwood, California

  Squealing tires and a loud, crunching bang startled Ritz. He was sitting on a curb with Phyllis and Lardie, drinking the last of his juice box, when the noise made all three of them jump to their feet.

  They’d been sitting for less than two minutes, hydrating after having neglected themselves for much of the day. Lardie had been on the verge of passing out. Phyllis had a throbbing headache. Ritz was increasingly sore, his bruised ribs yanking at him every time he moved awkwardly or too quickly. All three had ignored the advice they’d given everyone else throughout the day until they couldn’t ignore their bodies any longer. The familiar sounds of a violent automobile crash ended their brief respite and had them on their feet, heading toward the nearest intersection.

  Responding to automobile collisions wasn’t uncommon. In fact, most of their calls during a given shift were medical calls, followed by multi-vehicle accidents, or MVAs. Despite the apocalyptic outbreak now burning, fires weren’t as common an occurrence as they’d been ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier. Better fire codes, advances in technology, and overall awareness had reduced fires significantly for urban and rural departments in California and across the country. Some government watchdogs thought there were too many firefighters and that their pensions were bankrupting cities all over the country. The exception was wildfires. They were increasing in frequency and in intensity. City fire departments typically didn’t respond to those unless they got too close. So, to keep busy, they rolled on every emergency call possible.

  What made this one different was that Ritz, Phyllis, and Lardie were rolling up to the wreck on foot. They had only the gear on their backs. No jaws of life or any other hydraulic rescue tools, no crow bars, no rescue units, defibrillators, or advanced life support. They were on their own.

  They reached the intersection of South Westgate and Sunset, three blocks from the closest burning fire, and directly stepped into a tableau of horrors. Ritz’s heart raced, and the adrenaline kicked into high gear. His body tensed, his mind focusing on the sobering task ahead. He was floored that they’d been resting so close to chaos, however briefly, and took an instant to process all of it.

  The fire was burning uncontrolled and devouring a Catholic school to their left. There were people with water hoses trying to hold it back. They weren’t.

  Straight ahead of them, and essentially in all directions, traffic was gridlocked. People weren’t waiting patiently in their cars. They were running up and down the street. Some were engaged in physical altercations, shoving and pushing each other in what Ritz imagined was fright and frustration. Others were carrying children on their hips, hustling away from the growing fire toward safety.

  Safety.

  Ritz had come to understand through the course of the day that safety was relative. Right now, in Brentwood, in Santa Monica, in Westwood, in the Hills, there was no true safe haven. And those were only the spots about which Ritz was aware. His intelligence was hours old. For all he knew, virtually everything from the valley to the ocean was on fire.

  People yelled and screamed, babies cried, and there was no sense that anybody knew what to do. Phyllis put her hands atop her helmet and puffed her cheeks.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

  “It’s like some disaster movie,” Lardie remarked.

  Ritz soaked it in, still searching for the collision. He scanned the craziness until he spotted it a block away to their right. Two cars were entangled, both crumpled against the side of a traffic signal pole, which now leaned precariously toward the street. What was worse than the wreck itself was the trail of bodies that led his eyes to the resting, smoking heaps that passed for the two cars.

  He now understood that those running in either direction weren’t only escaping the fire. Some had witnessed the accident, and others were moving to help the wounded. Ritz tried to count the bodies and reached seven before Lardie interrupted him.

  “We need to get to work,” he said. “This is too much.”

  The three of them took off running as fast as they could in their heavy turnout gear, their boots slapping against the concrete and asphalt. Their breathing loud and rhythmic, they reached the first of the wounded on the ground.

  “I got him,” Ritz said, kneeling. “You take the next ones.”

  Phyllis moved to a woman only five feet away. Lardie took the child next to her.

  The man lying in front of Ritz was breathing. He was conscious, somehow, though it was clear his legs were broken. There was a compound fracture at his right tibia. The bone was through the skin. His left ankle looked like it was hanging freely from his leg.

  The man was in shock, no doubt. He was pale, drenched in sweat, and cold. He kept mumbling, his hands at his sides twitching and trembling.

  “Can you hear me, sir?” Ritz said softly. “My name is Ritz. I’m a firefighter and a paramedic. I’m going to take care of you.”

  The man stopped blinking and rolled his head slowly toward Ritz. His lips had a bluish tint to them, and his pupils were dilated.

  “Ritz?” the man asked. “Like the cracker?”

  The question caught Ritz off guard. “Y-y-yeah. Can you tell me your name?”

  “Bill. I think my legs are broken. I can’t get up.”

  “You’re going to be okay,” said Ritz. “Don’t try to get up. You do have some injuries to your legs. I’m going to help you.”

  Bill’s eyes fluttered. “He came out of nowhere.”

  Ritz started unbuttoning Bill’s shirt to check for any other obvious signs of injury. He found dark purple bruising at his right shoulder. He took Bill’s clammy right hand and squeezed.

  “Can you feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Bill.

  “Good. I’m going to give you some water and something for your pain. Then I’m going to elevate your legs. It might hurt. Okay?”

  “I understand,” Bill whispered.

  Ritz removed a small pack from his back and fished out four green and brown tubes with purple caps. He stuffed three into his breast pocket, removed the cap from the fourth, and held the tube above Bill’s thigh.

  “Are you allergic to opiates?”

  Bill shook his head.

  “Any allergies?”

  “Uh…Bactrim. I get a rash.”

  “Okay,” said Ritz. “Good to know.”

  He slammed the tube into Bill’s left thigh, and Bill let out a grunt before whimpering.

  “Sorry,” said Ritz. “It’s going to help though. It’s morphine. It should kick in pretty soon.”

  Because of the shock, the morphine might not work as well. It could take some time. But Ritz didn’t have any other options at the moment.

  He took off his jacket and laid it across Bill’s chest. Then he took his pack, zipped it up, and slowly, methodically, pushed it underneath Bill’s legs. He held the broken ankle as still as possible while he maneuvered the pack inch by inch.

  Bill gritted his teeth and managed not to cry out in pain. Ritz took his pulse. He leaned over and listened to his chest. His lungs sounded clear. That was a bonus.

  “All right, Bill, I’m going to check on some others. I’ll be ba
ck.”

  Bill reached up groggily around the coat covering his body and loosely grabbed at Ritz’s forearm. Ritz paused and placed his hand atop Bill’s. The man’s fingers were cold, his nail beds the color of his lips.

  “Thank you,” he said. The words slurred into one another. Ritz hoped that was the morphine doing its job. “Come back. Please.”

  “Of course,” Ritz said. “Wish I could do more.”

  He adjusted the coat atop Bill and got to his feet. The smoke from the church school fire was drifting toward him. Unlike earlier in the day, there were no sirens blaring, no distant sounds of emergency crews rushing toward the flames. There weren’t enough of them, communications were down, and the roads were blocked.

  Blackest at the school’s entrance off Sunset, the smoke rolled in aggressive, boiling clouds out and up. He could smell it now, the familiar odor of burning things. It was something about which he’d long dreamt. The stench of fire and what it consumed was like the smell of death. Once you experienced it, you always recognized it at once for what it was.

  It went everywhere Ritz went. Even a good shower or occasional bath couldn’t rid him of it. He wondered if it wasn’t really there when he was clean, but that the olfactory memory of it created the illusion of the smell.

  It would never leave him.

  Not after a day like this.

  Not after the city burned one block at a time without end.

  Ritz gave Bill a final glance, convinced he’d done everything he could for now, and moved with purpose toward the next of the seven people on the ground. Past the path of bodies and toward the two still-smoldering wrecked cars, there were civilians, bystanders, who were helping there, trying to figure out a way into the crumpled mess of one of the cars. Nobody was at the other one. It was the worse of the two, having taken the brunt of the traffic pole and the other car.

  Ritz wanted to help, but he couldn’t walk past the four wounded people between him and the wreck. He sucked in a deep breath, tasting the smoke now. There was just too much to do, too many people to aid.

  He told himself to eat the elephant one bite at a time, assist one person at a time and not to take the scene in as a whole task. It was too overwhelming.

  His adrenaline spiking again, he reached the next body. He knelt to confirm what he could see from a few feet away. The man, in his fifties or sixties, was dead.

  His eyes were open and fixed with a distant, cloudy gaze. His jaw was agape.

  He seemed unhurt save one gruesome wound. His legs and arms were intact. He lay on the ground as if he were there in protest, conscious and aware of what he was doing. The growing pool of dark red blood that spread from the back of his head told the truth.

  Ritz listened for breathing and felt for a pulse. He found neither. He fingered the man’s eyes closed and gently lifted his jaw to close his mouth.

  When Ritz stood to check the next victim, a young, frantic woman approached. He’d seen her working on the car moments ago. Although she was breathing heavily in short, quick gulps of air that made it challenging to understand her, she appeared uninjured and lucid. She blocked Ritz’s path.

  “He got impatient,” the woman said. “Started yelling at people to get out of the way. He said he couldn’t sit anymore.”

  Ritz put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She flinched. “Who? Who couldn’t sit anymore?”

  “The driver,” she said, cursing, and pointing at the car nobody was helping. “That piece of—”

  “Okay,” said Ritz. “I got it. He was in traffic and then pulled out, trying to move around people?”

  “He didn’t try to move around anyone. When the cars in front of him wouldn’t move, because they couldn’t, he put the car in reverse and slammed it into the car behind him. Then he accelerated up onto the curb. He started mowing people down like they weren’t even there.”

  “Then he crashed?”

  “Then another driver, who was near the intersection, slammed into him to stop him,” she said. “That guy’s a hero. But he’s hurt. He didn’t have his seatbelt on. Can you help?”

  There were two more on the ground between him and the cars. He pointed at them. “I need to check on these two people first,” he said. “Then I’ll be there. How bad are the injuries?”

  The woman shook her head. “His head is bleeding. He was unconscious. He’s awake now.”

  “And the other driver?”

  “Dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “His head is sticking out of the windshield and he’s…he’s dead.”

  “All right. Keep him calm. Talk to him. Don’t move him yet.”

  The woman stood there for a moment, frozen. Her eyes searched Ritz’s, darting around like she was trying to figure out if he was going to change his mind. Then she nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “Hurry.”

  The woman ran back to the car, past the two wounded people on the sidewalk. It didn’t surprise him. Normal people tended to get tunnel vision in times of extreme stress.

  Ritz moved to the next victim, frustrated by how long it was taking to help people. He checked over his shoulder and saw the fire burning as it had moments earlier. The people with the hoses had stopped. The fire was going to burn itself out. Eventually.

  When Ritz reached the victim, a young woman in yoga pants and a sports bra, Phyllis ran up to him. She offered to help the woman, who was unconscious. She appeared to have a head injury and a broken arm. Without discussing it, he accepted her help and saw Lardie attend the final hit-and-run victim, another middle-aged man. He was sitting up and complaining of numbness in his legs.

  Ritz walked more quickly toward the car and pushed his way past the small crowd of would-be medics. The woman who’d summoned him was standing closest to the driver, who was awake and disoriented. An arcing indention ran across his forehead. Above and below the line was swelling and bruising. His eyes were bruised too, and his mouth was bleeding.

  The woman was about to give him water when Ritz stopped her, and she pulled the bottle back from the injured driver.

  “No water,” he said. “Could do more harm than good. He hit the steering wheel. That much is obvious. We don’t know what other internal injuries he might have.”

  Ritz wedged himself into the cramped opening between the damaged door and the car’s frame. He took the man’s wrist and checked his pulse. While he counted in his head, he glanced through the passenger window and spotted the other driver. It didn’t take a professional to know that other driver, the one who’d panicked and caused so much harm, was dead. It was gruesome, and despite his experience with gruesome, Ritz finished the count.

  “Sir, can you hear me?” he asked.

  The man nodded, drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. He tried licking it clean.

  “Can you speak?” asked Ritz. “Can you tell me your name?”

  The man mumbled out a series of garbled phrases punctuated by long pauses. His eye movement was jittery and not at all fluid.

  “Okay,” said Ritz. “Just respond to me by squeezing my hand.”

  Ritz took the man’s left hand and held it loose in his, making sure the man’s fingers were on the outside of the grip. He wiggled more into the tight gap and tried to face the driver directly.

  “Squeeze once for yes, twice for no. Understand?”

  The man squeezed once.

  “Can you see?”

  Two squeezes.

  “Is it black or just blurry?”

  The man didn’t respond. Ritz cursed himself for not asking a yes or no question.

  “Is it black?”

  Two squeezes.

  “Blurry.”

  One squeeze.

  “Is there a ringing in your ears?”

  One squeeze.

  “Can you—”

  The man lurched forward, convulsed, and vomited in his lap. Ritz never let go of his hand. People behind him were gagging at the sight and the instant odor of bile and whatever the man had
last ingested.

  “It’s okay,” Ritz said. “It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay. At the very least the man had a concussion. What really concerned him was the lack of swelling around the injury. There was a small amount, though it was hard to discern where the puffy bruising around the edges of the arced compression in the man’s forehead was actually swelling or just appeared to be because of the indention.

  Ritz checked his pupils again. Not good. One was dilated much larger than the other. Then he noticed that what he’d thought was drool at the corner of the man’s mouth wasn’t saliva. It was clear fluid draining from his nostrils that had pooled at the corners of his mouth. It was also now leaking from his ear too. His head injury was more than a concussion. It was traumatic and life-threatening.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The man squeezed, a much weaker grip. Ritz turned to the gathered crowd behind him. “Does anybody know this man’s name? Does anyone know who he is?”

  Nobody did. This man was going to die as a stranger to everyone around him, and there was virtually nothing Ritz could do to stop it from happening.

  Worse was the multiple survivors lying in the trail of carnage stuck on the ground in pain with virtually no hope of getting any real emergent care. Ritz considered his options, and the other injured victims, then remembered the injectors in his pocket. How could he have forgotten them? He fished one into his fist with his free hand, plucked off the cap with his teeth, held the injector above the man’s thigh for a moment, and then plunged it into the muscle without warning. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d told the patient what he was doing. Ritz was pretty certain the man wouldn’t have understood exactly what he was doing anyway. His hope was that the morphine might manage the increased cranial pressure in the victim’s head. Morphine or fentanyl were commonly used in treating head trauma. There was some controversy surrounding its use, however, and Ritz had prescribed the relatively new policy of not using the opioids as analgesics in head-trauma cases.

  As much as research had shown that morphine could reduce the cranial pressure, others had determined its use lowered blood pressure in a way that actually increased the pressure and worsened the eventual outcome.