Chapter 32
Sam
Structure fire. Commercial. All hands.
I was already moving before the address came over the box. Boots on. Turnout coat over my shoulders. Cap was three steps ahead of me down the stairs and Sean was two behind. Tyler was right on my heel and we were in the rig and rolling before the dispatcher finished the second transmission.
Savannah Highway.
I knew the address before Cap said it out loud.
Carolina Furniture Depot.
Something in my chest shifted a half-inch sideways and didn't come back.
I'd been in that building. I'd walked Jamie and Rosie through the maze of showroom additions a few months back looking for a couch.
I'd clocked the construction on the way in because I couldn't help myself—no sprinklers, a loading dock out back stacked to the rafters with foam, a roof that sat heavy on walls that weren't designed to hold what the owner had tacked onto them.
I held the grab handle and watched Havensworth slide past the window.
We could see the smoke from three blocks out.
Dense. Black. Pouring out of the loading dock at the back of the building and rising in a column the color of wet tar.
It wasn't the smoke of a kitchen fire or an electrical fire.
This was upholstery smoke. Foam smoke. The smoke of a building with forty-two thousand square feet of polyurethane inside it and a fire that had found the fuel it wanted.
Sean said Jesus under his breath.
Cap didn't say anything.
We pulled up in a line of engines. Ladder 5 was already on scene.
Engine 10 was rolling in behind us. A captain I didn't recognize was shouting at someone in a volunteer jacket about where to stage, and someone else was shouting at the same man to move his truck, and somewhere over the din a radio voice was calling for another alarm.
I got off the rig.
The heat hit me before I cleared the door. Ninety-something degrees of June humidity and a wall of radiant heat coming off the back of the building that made the air ripple. I pulled my hood up. Checked my pack. Seated the mask.
Cap was on his radio. Couldn't hear what he was saying. Couldn't hear what the other end was saying back.
Tyler came up beside me and I heard his breath inside his mask.
"You good?"
"I'm good."
I wasn't sure I was.
We pulled a line to the A side. The front of the store.
The big windows that ran the length of the showroom were still intact, but the smoke behind them was the color of the stuff coming out of the loading dock, and it was moving wrong.
Rolling. Churning. A fire was eating something above the ceiling and we couldn't see it.
Cap waved us forward.
I moved. Hose in my hands. Sean on the nozzle. Tyler behind me. The pack on my back was sixty-something pounds of weight but it had never felt as heavy before as it did now.
We laid the line. Sean opened the nozzle. The water hit the glass, hissed back into steam. The glass held but we kept working.
Somewhere inside the building, a team was already in.
I hadn't seen them go in. I hadn't heard the order.
The radio in my ear was half static and half someone else's channel bleeding through.
When I looked at Cap he was shouting something at a captain from another station who was shouting back, and I couldn't tell if the argument was about who was inside or what they were supposed to be doing.
Tyler's voice came through the mask.
"Is anybody in charge?"
I didn't answer him. Because I didn't know.
It got worse fast.
The smoke coming out of the showroom windows shifted from black to that angry brown-yellow that means you're minutes from flashover. Sean saw it the same time I did. He closed the nozzle down and looked at me. I looked back at him and neither of us said the word.
Cap came up the line at a run.
"New team going in. They're pulling the guys who were in first. We're support."
"Support for what?"
"Just stay on the line."
He was gone before I could ask again.
I looked at Tyler. He looked back.
Somebody had just sent a new team into a building that was about to flash.
The radios were failing.
I'd heard three calls in a row turn to static mid-sentence. Voices cutting off. Channels crossing. The inside crews were talking to each other on the same frequency as the staging officer and nobody stepped on anybody because the signal wasn't making it through the walls.
Sean was on the nozzle keeping water on the showroom windows, I was standing behind him with my hand on the hose. I could feel my heart inside the coat and I could hear my breathing inside the mask.
A window on the B side blew out. I heard it before I saw it. The pop of tempered glass giving up all at once, and then the sound of a fire getting the oxygen it had been waiting for.
Somebody screamed on the radio.
I couldn't make out the words.
The front windows went next.
All of them. In one breath.
I was thirty feet from the building. The heat that came out of those windows when they blew was like standing next to an open oven door and having somebody shove your face at it.
I staggered back a step. Sean staggered with me.
The nozzle went sideways and water arced up and away from where it was supposed to go.
A fireball rolled through the showroom.
I watched it move.
From the B side to the A side, one slow breath, like a tide coming in.
It moved through sofas, mattresses and displays.
Everything it touched went up. The light inside the building went from smoke-dark to orange-white.
I felt the heat on my face through my hood.
I took another step back before I'd told my feet to move.
The building groaned.
I'd never heard a building make that sound before. A long, low, structural moan. The sound of a roof deciding.
Then the roof came down.
The radio exploded.
Maydays. Five of them. Eight of them. I lost count. Voices on top of voices. Men calling for help from inside a building that had just folded in on them. I heard a voice I knew but couldn't place. Then the channel crossed and I heard another voice before it turned to static.
The PASS alarms started.
The high thin chirping that goes off when a firefighter stops moving for thirty seconds. You hear one and your head snaps toward it. You hear two and your body starts moving without asking you. You hear five and your mind stops being able to count them.
I moved toward the building.
Someone grabbed the back of my coat and hauled me backward.
"Reeves. Reeves."
Tyler. His voice was breaking.
"The structure's gone. You can't."
"There are men in there."
"I know."
"There are men—"
"I know, Sam."
He didn't let go of my coat.
I didn't fight him.
The voices on the radio changed.
They weren't maydays anymore. The men inside had figured out what the men outside were figuring out. Nobody was coming. Nobody could.
They started saying goodbye.
I can't write down what I heard. I heard fragments.
Broken transmissions. Wives. Kids. One man saying a name over and over.
Another man telling someone he was sorry.
Another man saying I love you into a radio that was crackling out and then coming back and then crackling out again, and on the third time it didn't come back.
The PASS alarms kept chirping.
One by one, they stopped.
I don't remember the next part right.
I remember Cap somewhere behind me with his hand on the back of my neck. I remember Tyler's hand still on my coat. I remember the smell—polyurethane and burnt wiring and the specific acrid that comes off foam when it cooks—I remember looking down at my gloves and not being able to feel them.
I remember the roll call.
Somebody I didn't know started reading names into a handheld. The names came one after another and the silence after each one got longer.
Nine names.
No answer.
Firefighters stood in the parking lot.
Some of them were crying. Some of them were on their knees with their helmets on the asphalt. Some of them were just standing there looking at the rubble like they were waiting for it to un-collapse.
I don't know how long I stood there.
At some point Cap found me. His face was gray. He looked at me for a long time without saying anything and then he said my name.
"Sam."
"Cap."
"You go home."
"Cap—"
"You go home to your girl and your little one. You go home right now."
His hand was on my shoulder. His voice was rough in a way I'd never heard it.
"That's an order, Reeves."
I nodded.
I couldn't speak.
He squeezed my shoulder once and walked back toward the rubble.
I stood there another minute before I remembered how to move.
I found my phone in the pocket of my jeans, which were folded on the bench where I'd left them when I'd geared up four hours ago. Four hours. It felt like a lifetime and also like twenty minutes.
I called Jamie.
She picked up on the first ring.
"Sam."
Her voice broke.
"I'm okay," I said. "I'm coming home."
I heard her crying on the other end.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you too."
I hung up.
I got in the truck. Sat with my hands on the wheel for a minute because I wasn't sure I could drive.
Jamie was on the porch when I pulled in.
She ran to the truck before I had the door open. She pulled me out of the driver's seat by the front of my shirt, put her arms around me and held on so tight I could feel her shaking.
"I'm okay," I said.
I kept saying it.
"I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay."
She wasn't letting go.
I wasn't letting go either.
We stood in the driveway until I'd said it enough times that one of us believed it.