"Don't look down, Andy. Eyes on me, man!"

Andy tore his eyes from the raging inferno below to look at the face of the person standing between him and a gruesome death.

The guy's short blond hair was glued to his head, fat drops of sweat carving stripes of whiteness amongst the soot covered face. In that dark, confined space, lit only by the flames below, the guy's blue eyes had gained a laser-beam quality that seemed to burn brighter than the beast trying to kill them both.

Looking past the man's red with exertion face, Andy's gaze searched for the fine line tethering them to life. The fingers curled around the metal cable were white with the effort of supporting both of their weights, blood pouring freely from where the metal had already cut into skin. There was no way that grasp would hold for much longer.

-o-

Andrew Manner was what people tended to call a 'really lucky bastard'.

He'd never won the lottery and he wasn't exactly prone to find hundred-dollar bills stuck to his shoes. No, Andy's luck was more of the close-calls type.

Like that one time when the coffee shop where he usually got his coffee every morning got robbed five minutes after he left; or that time when his car died on him just as the traffic sign turned green and Andy's car was the only one not involved in a four car pile up in that intersection. Then there was the thing with the gas leak at work during his vacations, and flower vase that fell on the guy that was standing right next to him in the middle of the street, and the food poisoning incident at the cafeteria on the exact same day a couple of buddies of his had dragged him off work to lunch...

Andy should've realized that, with all that luck, the Universe was probably trying to tell him something.

So, when Andy found himself trapped in an elevator, inside a burning building, it would make sense that only other guy stuck in there with him would be a Chicago Fire Department firefighter.