Page 87 of Burn

My only answer as I catch Evan’s gaze across from me is, “I’m hot.”

I stare at Evan but we say nothing to one another.

The radio crackles. “Truck 10, what’s your location?”

Cap pulls the radio down to his face, speaking gruffly into it. “900 block of E Denny Way and Broadway.”

“There’s reports of smoke coming from Granada Apartments. Cross streets of Howell and Belmont Ave.”

Cap flips on the lights, and we all sit up a little straighter knowing it’s time to go back to work. “Truck 10 en route.”

When we get there, the apartment building is burning bright, wrapped in fire and bellowing smoke from the fourth floor upwards.

Once we’re off the truck and reaching for our irons, there’s a man in the street, barefoot and screaming. “My daughter is in there with her boyfriend.”

“What floor?” I ask, masking up as soon as we bail out of the truck. It’s right then I realize my tank’s out of air from the bathroom incident.

Running to the side of the truck, I drop in a new cylinder of air and turn to the helpless man before me.

“Sixth! Third door from the stairs,” the man tells me, grabbing at my shoulders. “I couldn’t get to her. I could only get Macy out. Tara’s in her room. It’s the back bedroom at the end of the hallway.”

We force our way through the open door of the lobby and up the stairs to the right. Once on the sixth floor, two by two, the guys search apartments while Owen and I make our way to the third on from the stairs.

We crawl through the kitchen to the back of the apartment where the bedroom is. Though it’s filled with smoke, I can make out the shape of a body on the floor near the door, a girl, choked unconscious.

I pull her out and carry her down the stairs. When I have her on the street, I work on her, pumping her chest and breathing hard into her mouth. It’s too late. She’s gone, but the paramedics take over as the father who’s screaming in front of the building goes to rush inside.

“I’m going to kill him!” the father screams, taking Finn’s crowbar from him and heads to the front doors.

Scrambling from the ground, I rush to him and grab the crowbar. “Let’s think about this for a minute.” I don’t know who he’s going to kill, but he’s certainly not doing it with Finn’s crowbar.

Angry tears roll down the man’s soot-covered face. “Her boyfriend! He started this fire, and now she’s dead.”

I glance around, making a quick sweep of the bystanders, the ones covered in blankets and the girl now covered with a sheet and next to her, a toddler, also dead, succumbed to the smoke.

Adrenaline jolts through me, my heart racing with the question, “What boyfriend?”

He makes a jab at the apartment. “I hope he burns alive.”

I’m not about to let that happen, and neither are the guys. Mostly because if he did start this fire, he’s not going to burn in it. He’ll burn in jail where he can relive this night over and over again.

While Corbin gets a line on the fire to the north side of the apartment complex, me, Evan, Owen, and Finn rush back inside.

We search the floors, calling out “Seattle Fire Department” as we go until we come to one apartment at the end of the hall on six. There’s a boy in there, who’s maybe sixteen, slumped against the wall like he can’t move. He can. He’s there because maybe he thinks he doesn’t deserve to get out. I don’t know and don’t care. I haul him to his feet and help him outside, all the while, he cries against me.

When he falls from my arms, I pick him up and carry him out. Undeterred by him begging for me to leave him, I want to get him out and all of us to safety. Believe it or not, firefighters don’t rescue people because we have some sort of death wish. Sure, we’re crazy motherfuckers but dying in the flames isn’t exactly our idea of fun.

Once outside, the boy slumps against a paramedic who reaches for him, crying into his hands when he sees his girlfriend, I assume.

The father lunges for the boy, grabbing him by his burned shirt. “You son of a bitch! You took my kids from me all because I forbid you to see Macy!”

I don’t know if there’s truth to anything he’s saying and it’s not my job to. What I do know by looking at the boy is, just like that father who ran the red light with his son in the car, his life is forever altered by one moment in time he will never be able to change.

Though it’s a devastating reality, it’s life, and it happens around us whether we want it to or not.

“Did they make it?” Evan asks, bumping my shoulder, his helmet now in his hand.

Twisting my head, I glance over at the girl and her younger sister, their father clinging to their lifeless bodies.

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