Page 79 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

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.