There he sat with a newborn baby boy in his arms and the infant's dead mother in front of him on the floor.

Alan Tracy swallowed hard as the baby wriggled in his hands...he was so tiny...and opened his mouth, letting out a cry that sounded more like a distressed kitten than a human being.

The mother had been bleeding internally from the debris she'd been trapped under when a fifteen-story apartment building had collapsed in on itself. Alan had managed to squeeze into the remnants of her first-floor apartment when he'd heard her faint cries for help as he'd passed by on his way to join his brothers near the western end of the crumbled structure.

"I'm checking it out," he'd advised via wristcom.

"I'll come spot you," Gordon had replied.

But Alan, impetuous, impatient and impossibly certain of his own indestructibility, had started pulling large chunks of concrete away as fast as he could, gotten into the two-by-three-foot space, and had promptly been cut off from the outside world when the fallen floors had shifted. He'd found himself trapped with a very pregnant and half-crushed woman in the throes of labor.

He'd had to move a slab of wood from her shattered shins to get her legs parted. She'd screamed...screamed at him to do whatever it took to get her baby out alive.

Every one of her inhalations had been laced with the gurgling sound of blood in her lungs. Every push had sent blood shooting from her nose and mouth. But three pushes later, the little boy had come into the world, quickly taking his first breath even as his mother took her last.

The child was very nearly bald until you looked closer to find a peach-fuzz of almost white hair covering his little head. When the baby's right arm started flailing, Alan held his hand out palm-up to catch it so it wouldn't bend back too far. As soon as the back of the infant's hand touched his the boy stilled, Alan cupping the tiny hand protectively.

"I've got a baby in here, go carefully when you remove debris!" he announced, knowing his watch was still transmitting.

"FAB, we'll be with you in about five minutes," Scott replied.

Alan unzipped his flight suit and pulled the infant to his chest, cradling his head and zipping the suit back up to the baby's neck to keep him warm.

He had known the mother wouldn't make it...the pool of blood she was lying in, the massive amounts of it coming from her mouth and nose...but it wasn't until he'd looked back up to ask her if she had a name for the child that the finality of it all hit him.

Her eyes were wide open. Her jaw was wide open. Her chest wasn't moving. She'd lasted just long enough for the boy to be born, and not a second longer.

The infant squirmed against Alan's chest as the scenario brought to mind all the times Scott had told him the story of his own birth. In the aftermath of the car accident that had killed their mother, Lucille Tracy had gone into labor leaving nine-year old Scott to deliver the newborn even as his mom slowly died right before his eyes.

Just like Alan had delivered this little man as his mother had been dying.

He closed his eyes, one large hand covering the infant's back through the fabric of his flight suit. He heard the scraping and digging sounds that told him his brothers were nearly there, at which point the newborn would be whisked away to an ambulance, and Alan would never see him again.

The baby settled, his cheek against the neckline of Alan's white tee shirt. Bending his head forward, Alan placed a soft kiss atop the little head. "Don't worry," he whispered. "You never knew her...so you won't miss her."

A large chunk of concrete was loudly pulled away from the hole Alan had initially come through. He turned to look, and there was Scott's face. "You all right?"

Alan nodded as Scott wiggled through the hole and landed on the floor next to him.

His big brother looked at him. Looked at the baby. Looked down at the mother. Looked back up at Alan. They held each other's eyes for seconds that seemed like hours, then Scott stepped back and gestured toward the hole, where Virgil was waiting. "You take him," Scott said quietly. "He's your delivery."

"Thanks," Alan replied. He rested his lips against the baby's head for half a second, then whispered, "It's gonna be okay now, little guy."

Alan didn't see, as the mobile winch eased him and his precious cargo up and out of the hole, the look of sheer pride on the face of the man who had brought him into the world.