Page 96 of Keeping Penny

Pyro glanced around. His friend wasn’t wrong. There was literally blood on almost every surface. The floor, the ceiling, the walls.

He swayed on his feet, and the blackness he’d been fighting returned with a vengeance.

“Shit, he’s going down,” Casper said.

But Pyro didn’t collapse. Casper caught him, with Chaos and Buck rushing over to help him ease Pyro to the floor.

“Bowie?” he asked desperately. “She’s out there! I sent her away.”

“Shhhh, she’s safe.”

“Safe?” he asked, almost afraid to believe what Casper was saying. He had a metric ton of guilt for what he’d done. For sending a blind six-year-old into an extremely dangerous situation. But then again, this basement hadn’t exactly been safe. Not even close.

“Yeah. She walked along the shore until she came across two men fishing. They let her use their phone to call Penny, and she told them what this house looked like. And here we are.”

Satisfaction made Pyro close his eyes in relief. He had no idea if she would suffer mentally from what he’d done, but the important thing right now was that she was physically unharmed.

“Shit, don’t close your eyes, Pyro. Look at me!”

Pyro had no idea why his team leader sounded so frantic.

“Hole in his thigh,” Buck said, as he probed his leg.

“Fuck!” Pyro swore, his eyes flying open when his friend touched his shin.

“And something’s wrong with his lower leg.”

“Yeah, that happens when some asshole hits it with a baseball bat. And before you go playing doctor, my knee’s fucked too,” Pyro said, sounding pissy even to himself.

Casper was already working to put a tourniquet on his upper leg, to staunch the flow of blood from the stab wound. It was much like a tornado alarm sounding after the tornado had already blown through a community, but Pyro wasn’t going to complain.

The sound of the elevator once more coming to life had Pyro swearing.

“Easy. We left Obi-Wan upstairs. He wouldn’t let anyone slip by him.”

But to be on the safe side, Buck and Chaos stood between Casper, Pyro, and the elevator, pointing their weapons at anyone who might appear.

Time seemed to stop as the four men waited to see who would exit the door. But Pyro once more shut his eyes. He was at the end of his rope. Tired. So damn tired. He’d done what he’d vowed to do when this nightmare started…protected Bowie to the best of his ability.

“Police, drop it!”

“Put down the weapons!”

Pyro sensed the tension around him, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Bowie was safe. Nothing else mattered.

“They’re down.”

“Don’t shoot, we’re the frickin’ good guys!”

His teammates’ voices seemed as if they were coming from far away.

“Pyro, open your damn eyes!”

Shit, his team leader was annoying. But Pyro did what Casper told him to anyway.

“You have to stay awake, bro. That’s an order, you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Pyro said, his voice slurring.