Page 54 of Run Wild Omega

I look at the double doors leading to the OR. “Yeah. I’ll call you when she wakes up.”

I hang up and drop the phone onto the table.

The room is quiet, save for the hum of the vending machines in the corner. Maggie had the foresight to shove us into a private consult room instead of the main ER lobby. It’s small, barely big enough for three chairs and a desk, but the door locks. It’s a sanctuary.

Outside those walls, the hospital is a war zone. The storm tore through the whole valley. Car accidents, heart attacks from shoveling snow, roof collapses. Maggie is running on fumes and pure grit, coordinating a disaster response that would make a general blush.

I lean back, the plastic chair creaking under my weight.

I look at the clock on the wall. We’ve been here for three hours. It feels like three days.

I’ve saved a lot of people. I’ve cut them out of crushed cars, pulled them from raging rivers, plucked them off cliffs. But today… today was different. I’ve never gone in during an active slide. I’ve never felt the mountain move under my feet like that. The sheer violence of it, the indifference of the snow—it changes you.

I look over at Dylan and Miles.

Dylan is sprawled in the corner chair, head tipped back, snoring softly. He’s still wearing his turnout pants, the reflective striping torn and stained with mud. Miles is sitting upright, typing on his tablet with one hand while holding an ice pack to his temple with the other. He hasn’t slept yet. His brain probably won’t let him.

We look like hell. But looking at them, I feel that strange, solid click in my chest. The bond.

It took a long time to get here.

I remember the first time I met Dylan. He was attached to a hotshot crew out of Oregon, brought in to assist with a massive blaze in the San Juans. I was running field medical for our team.

We hated each other on sight.

I was military, medic, by the book. Every protocol existed for a reason. Dylan was… chaotic. He ran toward the fire while everyone else was running away. He improvised. He took risks that made my blood pressure spike.

We argued over a command tent map for twenty minutes about evacuation routes.

“You’re being too cautious, Callahan!” he’d shouted, soot smudged across his nose. “That ridge is going to collapse in ten minutes, we need to move those people now!”

“If we move them without a cleared path, they get trapped in the draw!” I’d shouted back.

An hour later, a hiker got cut off by a spot fire. Dylan didn’t wait for orders. He just grabbed a Pulaski and sprinted up the slope. I had no choice but to follow. We dug a fireline in ninety-degree heat, shoulder to shoulder, sweating through our gear, until we created a black zone to shield the kid.

We collapsed on the ash, hacking up smoke, and looked at each other.

In that silence, covered in soot and exhaustion, the animosity just… evaporated. I saw his courage. He saw my discipline. It clicked.

Then came Miles.

He was a civilian contractor, an avalanche forecaster embedded with our unit during a high-risk recovery operation. We were looking for a group of missing skiers on the north face of a peak in the next county over.

The snowpack was garbage. I wanted to go in. Dylan wanted to go in. We were suited up, ready to hike, when Miles stepped in front of the command tent flap.

He was slighter than us, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a parka that looked too big. He held up a tablet, pointing to a graph line.

“No,” he said. His voice was quiet, but it carried. Absolute certainty.

“Excuse me?” I’d bristled. “We have a thermal signature.”

“And you have a persistent weak layer thirty centimeters down,” Miles said, not blinking. “The slope is forty degrees. The wind loading is critical. If you step onto that face, you trigger a slab that will bury the recovery team and the victims. You stand down.”

“This isn’t a classroom,” I’d growled. “Those are people.”

“And if you go, you die. I guarantee it.” He tapped the screen. “Secondary collapse is imminent. Watch.”

Two minutes later, the mountain groaned. A massive slab released, exactly where we were planning to hike. It took out an entire acre of forest. If we’d been there, we’d be dead.