Hands are on us immediately.
Firefighters are pulling Queenie away from me.
“We got her! We got her!”
“Careful with her.” I try to get up, but my body won’t cooperate. Everything hurts. My lungs feel like they’re filled with broken glass. “Her lungs, she wasn’t breathing right.”
“Sir, stay down. You need medical attention.”
I spot my brothers as I groan. “No!” I roll onto my side, coughing so hard I taste blood. Through watering eyes, I see them laying Queenie on a stretcher. A paramedic is already putting an oxygen mask over her face, checking her vitals.
She’s so still.
Please, please move. Open your eyes.
Something. God, Anything!
I try to get up again, and this time someone physically restrains me. “Sir, you need to stay still.”
“Get the fuck off me!” I shove at the hands holding me down. “That’s my grandmother. I need…”
“Brother.” Sin’s face appears in my line of sight, and the worry lines are clear through the soot on his cheeks. “Let them help her. Let them helpyou.”
“She’s not moving,” I choke out. “Sin, she’s not…”
“She’s breathing. Look.” He turns my head gently, forcing me to see the rise and fall of her chest under the oxygen mask.
It’s shallow, but it’s there.
“She’s breathing, Nitro. You got her out. You saved her.”
The adrenaline that’s been keeping me upright suddenly drains away all at once. My vision blurs, and I realize I’m crying. Full-on sobbing, my shoulders shaking with it.
“I couldn’t… if I lost her.”
“But you didn’t.” Sin’s grip on my shoulder is the only thing keeping me grounded. “You didn’t lose her. We thought you might have trouble finding a way back out the way you went in, so we got the firemen to set up the air cushion under Queenie’s window just in case.”
Letting out a relieved exhale, I slap his shoulder. “Thanks, brother… good thinking.”
Around us, the scene is chaos. More stretchers are loaded into ambulances. The fire is still roaring, turning Sunset Manor into a collapsing, burning skeleton. Firefighters shout over the inferno, hoses blasting arcs of water that instantly turn to steam.
And then I see the bodies.
Not firefighters.
Not survivors.
Bodies.
White sheets lined in a row, fluttering faintly in the smoke-thick breeze like ghosts trying to rise.
Mrs. Henderson, the butterscotch queen.
Harold, who never once got bored with asking about bikes.
Mr. Patterson, ninety-five and smarter than all of us with his pen-and-ink puzzles.
And countless others…
