It felt possible. Real.
The tones dropped at 11:47 AM, sharp and unforgiving.
"Engine 295, Ladder 118, respond to structure fire, 847 Crescent Avenue. Multiple calls reporting smoke and flames from the second floor."
I was in the rig before the dispatcher finished talking, gear half on, muscle memory already in control. Shane was beside me, Garrett across, the rest of the crew falling into position with the kind of efficiency that came from years of doing this together.
The building was a three-story walk-up, old brick, carved into apartments over decades. Smoke poured from a second-floor window, thick and black, oily enough that I knew exactly what we were dealing with before we made entry.
"Engine 295 on scene," Rodriguez called into the radio. "Heavy smoke showing, second floor. Initiating attack."
Shane and I took the interior, masks on, hauling the line up a narrow stairwell that reeked of cigarette smoke and old grease. The heat hit us on the landing—that wall of pressure that meant we were close.
The apartment door was already open, smoke billowing out. I dropped low, crawling forward, the hose heavy in my hands. Shane was right behind me, feeding line, watching my back the way he'd been watching my back for over a decade.
The kitchen was a furnace. The grease fire had jumped from the stove to the cabinets, rolling across the ceiling in a wave of orange. I could see the pot on the burner, still blazing, flames licking three feet high.
I didn't hit the pan. I knew better. Water on burning grease meant a fireball, a steam explosion that could take out half the room and everyone in it.
Instead, I opened the nozzle on a narrow fog pattern, sweeping the overhead to cool the superheated gases and knock the flames back. The water hit with a deafening hiss, steamrolling in as I worked from the doorway inward, keeping the fire from spreading.
Once the structure was dark, Shane stepped past me. The sharp pop of the dry-chem extinguisher cut through the lingering roar as he smothered the seat of the grease fire, coating the stove and the blackened pot in white powder.
"Fire's dark," I called into the radio. "Commencing primary search."
Shane moved past me into the rest of the apartment. I heard him calling out—"Fire department, anybody here?"—his voice muffled by the mask.
Then: "Brian! I've got someone!"
I found him in the back bedroom. An elderly woman was unconscious on the floor beside her bed. She must have tried to get up when she smelled smoke, but collapsed before she made it to the door.
I scooped her up. She weighed almost nothing, bird bones, papery skin. Something in my throat tightened as I lifted her. Shane cleared the path, and I carried her down the stairs, out into the daylight, where the paramedics were already waiting.
"Smoke inhalation," I told them, setting her on the stretcher. "Unconscious when we found her. Pulse is weak but present."
They went to work. I stepped back, pulled off my mask, and let the cool air hit my face.
She was alive. Because we got there in time. Because that's what we do.
The paramedics loaded her into the ambulance. Her hand twitched against the sheet. Still fighting.
I thought about Ava.
About the families she put back together in that ER, the lives she saved with steady hands and quick thinking.
This was why we did it. Both of us. The long shifts, the exhaustion, the weight of other people's worst days pressing down on us.
Sometimes you carried someone out of the smoke.
Sometimes you gave a family one more day together.
The ambulance pulled away, sirens cutting through the afternoon. Shane clapped me on the shoulder.
"Nice work, Torres."
"She's going to make it?"
"Looked stable. Paramedics seemed optimistic." He tilted his head, studying me. "You okay?"
