23. All Personnel Accounted For
Chapter twenty-three
All Personnel Accounted For
OWEN
Nine forty p.m. The mill is already lost when we round the bend on River Road
Fire owns the whole east wall. Windows glowing top to bottom, smoke rolling black and greasy off the roofline, and under all of it that sound. A low roar, steady, like the building is breathing through its teeth.
Sixty years of grain dust in there. Every rafter, every crack in the floor. That place quit being a building the second fire got inside. Now it's a bomb with a lit fuse, and nobody on this road knows how long the fuse is.
"Exposures north side," Tater says beside me, already keyed up on the radio. "Get a line on that barn before the wind turns."
We drop off the engine into heat you can feel through turnout gear.
My right leg takes the landing and holds.
Ten days since Doc Osei signed my return-to-duty, shaking his head while he did it.
Bone's bridged clean, he said. You heal like a man with somewhere to be.
The hardware aches when the weather turns, and it's aching now, deep, like a tooth.
It holds. That's all I ask of it.
Chief Weyland's at the command board, mutual aid rolling in from two counties, and the night watchman's truck is parked by the loading dock.
Empty. Door hanging open.
"Merle Haskins," the chief says. "Nobody's seen him since ten. Could be he walked out. Could be—"
A woman screams from the crowd line.
Not a scared scream. A pointing scream. I follow her arm up, second floor, west end, and there's a light waving in a window. Small. Frantic. A phone flashlight.
"Kids," somebody yells. "There's kids in there!"
Two of them. We find out later they snuck in to take pictures of the old machinery for some ghost page online. Right now all I know is a light in a window and a building full of sixty years of reasons to stay outside.
Tater's already moving. "Peterson! With me!"
At the west door he looks down once. At the leg. "You good?"
"It holds."
That's the whole conversation. He nods and we mask up. Gloves, hood, seal check, the whole rhythm my hands have done ten thousand times.
And then I stop.
The doorway is black. Smoke pushing out the top of it in slow rolls, and inside there's a smoke alarm still screaming somewhere, one that hasn't melted yet, that high electric shriek.
Chicago comes up out of the ground.
The radio saying my own address. The third floor. Beck's arms across my chest. The chaplain's face
My boots won't move. The alarm shrieks. One second. Two.
I count them the way I counted the six on Maple Street. Three. Four. The girl's light is still waving up there. Five.
Tater's glove lands on my shoulder. Doesn't push. Doesn't pull. It sits there, heavy, and his voice comes through the mask.
"You and me, brother. Like the old days."
And I do the thing Doc and I have been circling for a month. I quit fighting her. I take Claire with me instead. Take both of them.
"Stay with me, Rosie-girl," I say into the mask, so low it's not even sound.
Six.
I go in.
***
Inside is a furnace with furniture. Heat pressing down from the ceiling like a hand. Visibility maybe three feet, my light a dirty cone in the black. We find the stairs by memory, because every kid who grew up in Willowbend snuck into this mill once, and my feet remember what my eyes can't see.
"Fire department! Call out!"
Nothing. The building groans over us. Long and low, wood under load.
Second floor. Hotter. We move left hand on the wall, quick sweep, and Tater's counting the windows out loud on the radio so the ladder crew tracks us from outside.
"Call out!"
A voice. Small, ragged, coughing. "Here! We're here, please, we're—"
I drop to my knees where the heat lets me and sweep the floor ahead of me, wide arcs, glove scraping boards.
Fingers close around my wrist.
Small fingers. A girl, sixteen maybe, flat on the floor where the air is. The one smart thing anybody did tonight. Her friend's beside her. A boy. Not moving much.
"I've got you." I get her wrist. "Anybody else?"
"No. It's—" Coughing tears through her. "It's us. Only us. Is Bodie—"
"Bodie's coming too."
Tater hauls the boy up across his shoulders like a sack of feed. I keep the girl's wrist locked in my fist and we move for the west windows, the ones the ladder crew is counting toward, and behind us something upstairs lets go with a crash that shakes the floor.
The window. Glass already gone from heat. Ladder tips rising into view outside, hands reaching, and I feed the girl through into daylight that isn't daylight, it's scene lights, and she's crying and grabbing at the ladder man and gone. The boy goes next, limp, passed hand to hand.
Tater turns for the window.
I don't.
"Haskins," I say.
Tater looks at the window. Looks at me. The ceiling groans again, longer this time, and every rule in the book says out, out now, the building is telling you.
"Office is by the east dock," he says. "Ninety seconds. Then I'm dragging you out by your ears."
We go.
The east end is worse. Fire showing through the floorboards in orange seams, smoke banked to my knees. I'm not thinking about Chicago. That's the strange part I'll turn over later. There's no room in me for two fires at once, and this one is winning.
The office door is shut. Shut door, cooler room.
Merle Haskins is on the floor behind his desk with his thermos spilled beside him, and when my light hits his face his eyes open.
Alive.
"Took y'all long enough," he croaks.
Tater laughs inside his mask, this wild bark of a sound, and we get Merle between us, one arm each, and his legs barely hold but they hold, and we move.
The building starts talking faster. Pops. Cracks. A sound overhead like a giant walking toward us across the roof.
"Go, go, go—"
Short sentences. Short breaths. The door. The seam of gray that means outside. Merle's boots dragging. Tater shouting the exit on the radio.
We come out the east dock door into hands, so many hands, medics and mutual aid pulling Merle off us, and Tater and I clear the collapse zone at a dead run.
The roof goes in behind us.
Not a crash. A whump, deep in the chest, and a column of sparks goes up two hundred feet into the black like the mill is letting out everything it ever held. Heat rolls across the lot. Men duck behind the engines.
And that's where my legs quit.
I go down on my knees in the gravel, mask off, helmet off, and the night air hits my face cold as creek water.
Off to my left the girl is wrapped in a blanket sobbing into her mama's neck.
The boy's sitting up on a cot with a mask on his face, giving somebody a shaky thumbs up.
Merle Haskins is cussing a medic for cutting his shirt.
Everybody. Every single one.
Something breaks open behind my ribs and comes out of me half laugh, half sob, ugly and loud, and I don't care who hears it. Tater drops down next to me, arm around my neck, forehead against my helmet's dented crown.
"You went in," he says.
"I went in."
"You went in."
Two years I've carried a fire on my back. Tonight, I carried people out of one instead. That's what my hands are for. That's what they were always for.
I got there in time.
I tip my head back and the smoke column is thinning against the stars, and I say it to the sky where I hope she can hear it.
"We got there, Claire. Every one of them."
***
Dawn comes up gray and pink over the wreck of the mill, steam rising off the hot spots while the overhaul crews pick through. I'm sitting on the tailgate of Rescue 2, soot to my elbows, drinking the worst coffee in Texas, and I have never felt lighter in my whole life.
Because here's what tonight taught me. I ran into the thing that took everything from me, and I came out the other side. So whatever Nellie's scared of, whatever wall she's built, I can stand in front of it and not flinch. I'm done being careful.
She's at the hospital. Has to be. Every nurse in the county worked smoke cases all night, and Nellie Greer doesn't sit out a bad night. So, the plan is simple. Overhaul wraps, I hand off my gear, and I walk into that ER smelling like a burn pile and I say everything. Today. This morning.
I'm sliding off the tailgate when I see Debbie Sue.
She's standing past the tape, and she has no business being here. Not at a fire scene at dawn. Not when her whole floor is drowning in patients. And she hasn't slept, I can see that from here. Still in yesterday's clothes. Arms wrapped around herself like she's holding something in.
My gut knows before I do.
"Debbie." I'm grinning anyway, because I can't stop it yet. "Everybody made it. Even old Merle. What are you doing out here? Isn't Nellie still at the—"
"Owen."
One word. That's all it takes. Her face is wrong. Her face is the chaplain's face, and my whole body goes cold inside forty pounds of gear.
"Debbie. Where is she."
"She's gone." Her voice cracks down the middle. "She couldn't watch, Owen. She packed last night while you were in there. She didn't leave Saturday, she—" She presses her hand over her mouth, and what comes out from behind it comes out broken. "She left town at four this morning."
The mill smokes behind me. The road out of Willowbend runs empty and pale in front of me, all the way to the horizon.
I look at Debbie, at her wrecked eyes, at her hand still pressed to her mouth like there's more behind it. Like there's something bigger than leaving fighting to get out of her.
"Debbie." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "What aren't you telling me?"
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
This is a woman who talked through her own C-section. Who narrates other people's weddings from the third pew. And she stands at the tape line with her hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes streaming, and she shakes her head. Once. Slow. Like whatever it is won't fit through the door.
Then she turns and walks to her car. Doesn't run. Walks, arms wrapped around herself, and that's worse.
Whatever Debbie couldn't say, it isn't at the hospital and it isn't in that car.
I know where it's been living all summer.
The cottage.