I am not sorry.
The fire finds the door.
I hear the hinges give.
I close my eyes.
3
MAX
My feet start running. My head hasn't caught up and my feet are running.
I sprint for the truck. Not the house. I know the house and I know fire and going through the front door in a henley and jeans isn't a rescue, it's just another body for Kessler to sign off on. I cover the quarter mile up the service drive in under two minutes. The truck is where I left it, black under the pines, the tailgate cool under my hands. I yank the duffel out. I pull on turnout pants over my jeans, my fire boots, turnout coat over the henley, fire hood on. Mask off the peg. SCBA tank off the side clip, twenty minutes of bottled air if I don't waste it. Halligan. Flashlight. Helmet. Radio in my coat pocket, off, because I do not want this call logged.
The gear goes on the way it's gone on a thousand times. I move faster than I've ever moved. My hands know the straps. My head is somewhere behind my hands.
Fuck you, Val.
I run.
Back down the service drive. The house is fully lit up now, orange through the trees, and the draft has found it. I can hear the roar and feel the heat from fifty yards out. The east wing is venting through the roof, flame rolling up in a column as tall as a building. The west wing is still dark outside, only smoke at the seams of the windows, but the guest room where I saw her is on the second floor and the fire has been working on the stairwell for six minutes and I know what six minutes looks like. I know exactly what six minutes looks like.
I might be too late.
I turn my air on and pull my face mask on. A deep breath full of clean air. Delicious. I go to work.
I hit the front door and it's still cool at the top. The fire hasn't come forward yet. The fire is eating the east wing and climbing. I try the handle. Locked. I swing the halligan into the strike plate twice and the door splits.
Heat comes out at me but it's bearable. The foyer is standing. The east wing is roaring past an archway to my right, orange down the length of that hallway, beams down in it already. The west stairs are to my left. I go left.
I go up.
Smoke is down to my shoulders at the top of the stairs. I drop to a crouch. Mask on, I breathe my own air and it tastes like steel. The west hallway is still intact. Three doors on the right, two on the left, a hall table with a broken lamp on it, a runner on fire at the far end where it meets the east cross-corridor. I go door to door. First door, open, ensuite, empty. Second door, open, sitting room, empty. Third door.
Third door. Closed. Warm but not hot. I feel the frame with the back of my glove the way I was taught at nineteen in a concrete tower in the valley, and the frame gives a tolerable read, and I turn the knob.
She's under the window.
She's on the floor under the window in a white silk nightgown with a wet towel across her face and a wool throw around her shoulders and her eyes are closed. Her left hand is bleeding. There is blood on the silk of her nightgown in a thin line from wrist to knee. She doesn't move when I come in and the animal in me makes a sound I don't know I'm making until I hear it come back off the walls.
I cross the room in three strides and I go to my knees beside her and I press two fingers to her throat. Pulse. Fast and thready, but a pulse. She's breathing. Shallow. Smoke inhalation bad, dying no, not yet. I pull the wet towel off her face.
The cotton comes off and her face is under it, streaked with soot, wet where the towel sat against her skin. Her eyes don't open. Her mouth is open a quarter inch. A vein in her temple moves. She is alive the way a candle is alive when the flame has gone to a thread. One breath wrong and she's out.
I take my mask and put it over her mouth and nose. I took a deep breath off my own tank before sharing it, the kind of breath you learn not to waste. Ten seconds of clean air into her lungs. Fifteen. My own chest starts to burn before I take the mask back and let myself breathe again.
"Mrs. Clark." My voice is muffled through the mask. I say it anyway. "Mrs. Clark, I've got you."
She doesn't answer. Her eyelids flutter. She is thirty-six years old and she weighs nothing. I get one arm under her knees and one under her shoulders and I lift her and the wool throw comes with her, draped over my forearm. The nightgown is cold-wet where the towel leaked onto her collarbone. Her head falls against my chest, her pale hair against the turnout coat. Smoke. Under it, faint, a shampoo I have no business knowing. I have a thought I do not have time for.
Mine.
The thought comes whole. I shove it down a hole with the other thing I don't have time for. I turn and I go.
The hallway is worse in the thirty seconds I was in the room. The runner has climbed the wall at the east end and the cross-corridor is a solid wall of light. The stairs are still holding. I take them two at a time with her in my arms and her face against my neck and the mask back on her mouth, and my radio is banging against my ribs off, off, off, and I think about the many houses I've cleared with this same halligan and how usually I walk out alone.
The foyer is hotter than it was two minutes ago. The east archway is down to the header. I kick through the split front door without slowing and the night hits us, cold autumn dark, the smell of pine and smoke and wet leaves. I carry her fifty yards across the gravel drive before I let myself stop. I go to a knee under an oak at the edge of the lawn. I set her down on the wool throw. I check her pulse again. I check her breathing. I count her respirations with my glove off against her sternum. Twelve per minute. Low. Survivable. I look at the cut on her palm and it's shallow. I put her head on my knee so her airway stays open and I put the mask on her properly and I keep the tank seated between us.
