42. Leah
LEAH
Ifound Sarge before I'd fully processed what I was running toward, his name coming out of me in a voice I didn't recognize as my own, thin and cracked under the weight of everything happening behind me.
He was already moving before I finished the sentence, shouting names into his radio, and something about the speed of his reaction told me more clearly than anything else could have exactly how serious this had become.
The square behind me had turned into something out of a nightmare, worse than anything I'd imagined even during the worst of the festival planning.
Sirens threaded through the crowd noise, red and blue light strobing off the underside of smoke that hung thick and low over half the vendor row.
I made myself stop looking at it and start moving instead, because looking at it wasn't going to help anyone still caught inside that crowd.
After that there wasn't time to think about anything except the next person in front of me.
The assembly point sat at the far edge of the parking apron, cones and caution tape strung in a wide arc that this town's disaster plan, the one I'd helped build without ever expecting to use it, had mapped out months ago.
I found myself standing at the mouth of it almost by instinct, waving both arms over my head, my voice raw before I'd said more than a dozen words.
"This way! Everyone, this way, keep moving, you're doing great, just keep moving!"
Faces streamed past me, lit strange and orange by the emergency lights strobing off every parked car in the lot.
Kids clutched against hips. An old man leaned hard on a cane while his daughter half carried him.
A teenager cried into her own hands while her friends steered her forward.
Nobody looked at me directly. Nobody had time to.
I was just a voice pointing them somewhere safer, and that turned out to be enough.
A woman stumbled two feet from me, ankle rolling on the uneven ground, and I grabbed her arm before she went all the way down, hauling her upright with strength I didn't know I still had in me after a night that had already asked so much of my body.
"I'm okay," she gasped, "my son, I can't find my son..."
"What does he look like?"
"Blue jacket, he's eight, he was right next to me..."
"Go to the assembly point. Tell them his name at the check-in table. They're tracking everyone as they come through." I said it fast, certain, because certainty was the only thing I had to give her that might actually help. "You'll find him faster there than out here searching blind."
She nodded, moving again, pulled back into the current of bodies streaming past, and I turned toward the fire lane just in time to see a man wrestling a stroller through a gap in the caution tape that was clearly too narrow for it, the wheel catching, his whole body straining forward while the stroller stayed stubbornly stuck behind him.
I didn't think. I crossed the distance at a dead run, got both hands on the frame, and lifted the whole front end clear of the tape stake it had snagged on.
"Go! I've got it, go!"
He went, stroller rolling free the second the obstruction cleared, and I stood there for one gasping second in the strobing light, chest heaving, before I turned back toward the square to find the next person who needed pulling somewhere safer.
Judy appeared out of the crush at one point, clipboard abandoned somewhere, mascara streaked halfway down one cheek, herding a cluster of teenagers toward the assembly point with a voice I'd never once heard her use in six months of festival meetings, sharp and commanding instead of bright and performative.
"Go, go, keep going, don't stop for your coats.
" She caught my eye for exactly one second, something raw and frightened passing between us that neither of us had time to name, and then she was gone again, pulled back into the crowd she refused to let panic.
That was when I saw him.
Derek stood at the edge of the smoke, backlit by flame still rolling orange somewhere behind the collapsed dessert tent, and for one endless second he didn't move at all, just stood there like a man deciding something that had already been decided the moment he stopped walking.
Sarge was beside him, one hand fisted in the sleeve of his coat, shouting something I couldn't hear over the noise of four hundred people and a fire and my own heart slamming against my ribs.
Derek pulled free.
He walked into the smoke like it was an ordinary doorway, and the black rolled over him in one clean, silent motion. It took every part of him with it, boots and shoulders and the specific, stubborn set of his jaw I'd know anywhere. Gone.
"Derek!"
My own voice tore out of me before I'd decided to use it, and it did exactly nothing, lost in the same wall of noise that had swallowed his name a dozen times already tonight.
Sarge didn't go in after him. I understood, distantly, underneath the terror climbing up my throat, that Sarge couldn't go in.
Somebody had to stay out here directing the fight from outside it.
That was the job, the actual shape of it neither of them had ever fully explained to me until right now.
I stayed frozen for exactly as long as I could afford, which turned out to be about two seconds, and then I forced myself to move, because staring into smoke wasn't going to bring him back out of it any faster.
This is what Rachel must have felt.
The thought cut through the panic fast and cold, gone almost as soon as it landed.
I didn't have time to sit with it, not with smoke stinging my eyes and his name still echoing uselessly in my own ears, but it landed anyway, hard enough to leave a mark.
She'd loved a man who ran into fire instead of away from it, and eventually the choosing had cost her more than she could keep paying.
I wasn't going anywhere. Not tonight, not after tonight, whatever it cost me. I'd already chosen, weeks ago, the night I told Diane I was staying. I was only now understanding exactly what that choice actually meant.
"Leah!" Maddie's voice, somewhere behind me, sharp with her own fear. "Leah, we need hands at the check-in table, they're overwhelmed..."
"Coming!"
I went, because going was the only thing I could actually do with my body while the rest of me stayed rooted fifty yards back, watching a wall of smoke that had closed over the man I loved whole.
The next several minutes blurred into motion I only half remembered afterward.
Names called out and matched against faces.
A little girl reunited with her mother in a moment so raw with relief I had to look away.
A man with a burn on his forearm who insisted he was fine until Maddie physically sat him down and made him wait for a paramedic.
Somebody had hauled a folding table out from one of the vendor tents and turned it into a makeshift check-in station, a stack of blank paper and two pens the only tools anyone had thought to grab on the way out.
I did the job in front of me because it was the only thing keeping my hands from shaking too badly to be useful, checking names, pointing people toward water, toward blankets somebody had produced from somewhere, toward whatever small comfort this chaos could still offer anyone standing in it.
My own voice had gone hoarse from shouting directions, and I kept going anyway, because a hoarse voice still worked and that was the only requirement the moment was asking of me.
I checked the smoke every few seconds. I couldn't help it. Every few seconds my eyes went back to the smoke rolling low and black across the collapsed tent, searching for a shape that hadn't come back out of it yet, and every few seconds it gave me nothing back at all.
"Anything?" I asked Sarge, the third time I circled back near the fire line, unable to stay away any longer than the check-in table absolutely required of me, my whole body already turned toward the smoke before I'd finished the question.
"Not yet." His jaw was tight, his eyes never leaving the smoke either, and for the first time since I'd met him I saw real fear on his face instead of the easy, teasing confidence he usually wore like a second uniform. "He knows what he's doing."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
Maddie found us there a minute later, breathless, a blanket still draped over one arm from the check-in table, and didn't say anything at all, just stood on my other side and took my hand, her grip cold and shaking and holding on anyway, the three of us forming a small, silent line at the edge of a fire none of us could do anything else about.
I stood beside him then, not moving, not pretending I had anywhere else more urgent to be, and together we watched a wall of black smoke that refused to give either of us what we needed from it.
Then, finally, I saw movement.
A shape came out of the smoke low and staggering, Derek's silhouette unmistakable even blackened and bent nearly double, Doris cradled against his chest with both arms locked tight around her.
Both of them were coughing, deep and wracking, and the sound of it was the single best thing I had ever heard in my entire life.
"There!" I screamed it, pointing, and Sarge was already moving before the word finished leaving my mouth, both of us running toward him across ground that felt like it was tilting under my own feet.
A paramedic reached him first, two more right behind her, and Derek lowered Doris into their waiting hands with a gentleness that looked almost impossible coming from a man who could barely stand upright himself, his whole body shaking with the effort of that last careful motion.
"We've got Hutchins, conscious, smoke inhalation..." The paramedic's voice cut through the chaos, flat and professional, already radioing ahead to whoever was waiting to receive her. "Vitals stable. Transporting now."
Derek straightened, or tried to, and that was when his knees buckled.
He went down hard on the pavement, one hand catching against the asphalt just in time to keep his face from following it, and I was running before I'd fully registered what I was seeing, before Sarge's shout of his name had even finished leaving his mouth beside me.
"Derek!"
I reached him at the exact moment Sarge did, both of us dropping to the ground on either side of him, and up close the damage was so much worse than it had looked from fifty yards away, soot streaked black across his whole face, one eyebrow singed pale at the edge, his hands scraped raw where he'd caught himself against the ground.
His eyes were open. That was the part I held onto, kneeling there with both hands hovering uselessly over him, afraid to touch him wrong, afraid not to touch him at all.
His eyes were open, but they weren't focused on anything, not on me, not on Sarge, not on the paramedics already converging from every direction with equipment and shouted questions neither of us could answer for him.
He didn't say a single word.
The paramedics moved fast once they reached him, calling out numbers I didn't understand, cutting away the sleeve of his coat to get at the burn underneath.
I stayed close, one hand on his shoulder even after they told me to step back, because I couldn't make myself let go of him yet, not until somebody told me he was actually going to be all right.