Prologue #2
A cough, weak and dry in the roar from the flames, came from upstairs.
Caleb dropped to a crouch and moved forward, the wet blanket pulled up over his nose and mouth.
His eyes streamed, the smoke searing his lungs with every breath.
The stairs appeared through the haze, and he took them two at a time, his injured shoulder screaming in protest as he used his right arm to haul himself up by the bannister.
The second floor was worse. The smoke was thicker here, black and toxic, the kind that killed in minutes. His visibility dropped to inches. He stayed on his hands and knees now, sweeping his arms in wide arcs, feeling for bodies.
His hand hit something soft.
A child.
His fingers found small shoulders, a tangle of blonde curls. The little girl wasn’t moving. He scooped her up with his left arm, she couldn’t weigh more than forty pounds, and kept searching. Three feet away, he found the boy, older, maybe nine, curled in a ball and coughing weakly.
“I’ve got you,” Caleb rasped. “Hold onto me.”
The boy’s arms wrapped around his neck, surprisingly strong.
Caleb stood, the girl cradled against his chest, the boy on his back, and turned back toward the stairs.
The heat was unbearable now. The wet blanket on his shoulders was starting to dry, to steam.
He could feel his skin blistering where it was exposed.
The stairs groaned under their combined weight. Caleb half-ran, half-fell down them, his shoulder joint grinding with every jarring step. The living room was fully involved now, flames spreading to the left side of the house, cutting off his exit through the front door.
He pivoted toward the back of the house, toward what he hoped was a kitchen, a rear exit, anything. His boot punched through weakened floorboards. He caught himself, his knee slamming into the edge of the hole, pain exploding up his thigh. He kept moving.
The kitchen appeared through the smoke, and blessed relief, a door.
Caleb kicked it open and stumbled out into the frigid evening air.
The cold hit him like a physical blow after the inferno.
He carried the children twenty feet from the house before his legs gave out and he fell to his knees in the winter-dead grass as an ambulance skidded to a stop in the gravel drive, doors flying open as its sirens were abruptly cut off.
Two paramedics jumped out, a woman with dark hair and a tall man, both moving fast toward them.
The little girl stirred in his arms, coughing. The boy slid off his back, gasping, his face streaked with soot and tears.
“Mom,” the boy wheezed. “Mom’s still inside.”
Caleb’s heart dropped into his boots.
He looked back at the house. The entire structure was engulfed now, flames punching through the roof, the support beams groaning like a dying animal.
Through the kitchen door he’d just exited, he could see the glow intensifying, spreading.
He had seconds, maybe a minute before the whole thing came down.
Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder.
“Where?” Caleb heard himself ask, not quite sure why.
“Upstairs,” the boy sobbed. “Her bedroom. She tried to get us out but she fell.”
“We’ve got them!” the woman shouted, running toward the children. “Sir, stay down! We’ve got them!”
But Caleb was already standing up.
You’ve done enough. Help is here. Let them handle it. You’re hurt. You’re not even a firefighter anymore.
“Sir!” The male paramedic reached for him. “You need medical attention?—”
Caleb shook him off. “Woman upstairs. Still inside.”
“Fire department’s two minutes out?—”
“She doesn’t have two minutes.”
This is insane. You’re going to get yourself killed. For what? To prove something? To who?
But his feet were already moving. Because two minutes might as well be two hours when someone’s dying. Because he’d heard that same argument before, wait for backup, wait for the right moment, and Jamie Rodriguez had died while they waited.
The wet blanket was nearly dry now, scorched in places, falling apart. He dunked it in the stock tank’s ice water and wrapped it around himself again. His shoulder was on fire, his knee screaming, his lungs felt like someone had scoured them with steel wool.
“Sir, you can’t—” the paramedic started.
Caleb ran back into the burning house.
The heat was apocalyptic. The kitchen floor was buckling, flames eating through from below. He couldn’t go back through the living room, it was fully involved, the stairs probably gone by now. He’d have to find another way up.
A back staircase. There had to be a back staircase. These old farmhouses always had them, servant stairs, narrow and steep.
He found it behind a door that was already starting to char. The stairs were intact but smoking, the wood groaning under his weight. He climbed, every step an act of will, his body screaming at him to turn around, to get out, to save himself.
He reached the second floor landing, and the smoke hit him like a wall. Zero visibility. He dropped to his belly and crawled, sweeping his arms, calling out. “Fire department! Call out if you can hear me!”
Nothing.
He crawled forward, his hands finding a doorframe. The bedroom. He swept the floor in expanding circles, his lungs burning, his vision starting to tunnel. His hand hit fabric, then skin.
She was unconscious, lying on her side near the bed. Caleb grabbed her wrist, felt a pulse, thready but there, and tried to lift her. His shoulder gave out, the joint grinding sickeningly, his arm going numb. He fell, her dead weight landing on top of him.
Get up. Get up. GET UP.
He rolled, got his good arm under her, and hauled her into a fireman’s carry across his shoulders. The pain was blinding, white-hot, radiating from his shoulder down his entire right side. He staggered to his feet and turned back toward the stairs.
They were gone.
Where the back staircase had been, there was now only flames and collapsing timber. The fire had burned through the supports. He was trapped on the second floor of a burning building with an unconscious woman and no way down.
The world tilted. Caleb stumbled, his vision graying at the edges.
Smoke inhalation. He had maybe thirty seconds of consciousness left, maybe less.
His training screamed at him to find another way out.
Window, different stairwell, anything, but his body wouldn’t respond.
His legs felt like rubber, his arms numb, his lungs refusing to draw breath.
This is it. This is how it ends. Trapped in a fire, just like you always knew it would be.
A small, bitter part of him thought: At least I went out doing something that mattered. At least these kids won’t have to grow up knowing their mother died while some coward loitered outside.
He’d imagined his death before. In the dark hours of the night, parked in some roadside rest stop, he’d wondered how it would come.
Would he drive off a cliff, his attention wandering at the wrong moment?
Would his heart just give out, worn down by grief and guilt?
Would he simply fade away, another nameless drifter found in a cheap motel room?
Since leaving his Boston fire station behind, he’d not imagined it would be like this.
Fire and smoke, his shoulder screaming, a woman’s life weighing on him in every sense of the word.
It was almost poetic, in a dark way. The firefighter who couldn’t save his rookie, dying in the same flames that had defined his entire adult life.
Maybe this is what you deserve, that cruel voice whispered. Maybe this is justice.
He thought of his ex-wife, Katherine. Beautiful Katherine with her dark hair and her cold eyes, the way she’d looked at him after the surgery, after the funeral, after everything fell apart. “You’re not the man I married anymore, Caleb. You’re just ... empty. There’s nothing left.”
She’d been right, hadn’t she? Whatever had been inside him before, whatever spark of purpose or joy or simple human warmth, had died in that warehouse with Jamie Rodriguez.
All that was left was this hollow shell, this …
thing that couldn’t stop running toward fire even when it had no business being there.
He sank to his knees, the woman still draped across his shoulders. The heat was crushing now, the smoke so thick he couldn’t see his own hands. His lungs seized, refusing to draw another breath of superheated poison.
I’m sorry, Jamie. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry I couldn’t save anyone. I’m sorry I became this … can’t even die right.
The rookie’s face flashed through his mind with perfect clarity. Young, eager, that stupid grin he always wore. “I’m with you, Lieutenant. Whatever you need.”
The trust in those eyes. The absolute, unshakeable faith that Caleb knew what he was doing, that following him was safe.
And then the floor giving way. The scream. The silence.
I’m sorry.
Caleb’s eyes closed.
And then … light.
Not the orange glow of flames, but something different. White. Pure. Cool.
He thought, distantly, that this must be what dying felt like.
The sensation of falling, of weight being lifted from his shoulders. Of arms, impossibly strong, pulling him up when he should be going down. Of air, clean and cold, filling his burning lungs.
Caleb’s eyes fluttered open.
He was outside.
He was lying in the grass twenty feet from the burning house, the woman beside him, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. And standing over him, silhouetted against the flames, was a man.