Page 16 of Fighting For You

I masked up and went through the front door with Greene behind me.

The first floor was gone. Fire rolling across the ceiling on both sides of the hallway, the walls glowing behind the drywall. We stayed low and moved fast. I found the stairs by the railing and started up.

Second floor. Smoke banked solid from the ceiling to my knees. I couldn't see Greene two feet behind me. I could hear him calling conditions into his radio.

We moved down the hallway together. I swept one room. Empty. Greene took the one across from it. Then the ceiling ahead shifted. A section of drywall dropped, spilling debris across the hall, and the heat pushed back hard.

Greene pulled up. "I can't get through. Knox, we need to regroup."

There was a woman on the other side of that hallway. The neighbor had said second floor. She was home.

I went through.

Greene called after me. Thompson came on the radio. "Sullivan, report your position." I didn't answer, because answering meant stopping.

"Fire department! Call out!"

"Up here!" A voice, raw and distant. "Bedroom, end of the hall!"

I found the door. The room was hazy but better than the hallway.

I crossed the room and lifted her off the floor. She was barefoot, coughing, her arms around my neck before I told her to hold on.

"I've got you. Keep your head down."

I carried her low through the door, back down the hallway, past the debris I'd come through alone. The stairs were hot through my boots. At the bottom I shifted her weight, pushed through the front door, and kept moving until we hit grass.

The daylight hit hard after the smoke.

I knelt and set her down. She was on her back, coughing, pulling at clean air, her face covered in soot. I pulled my mask off, put my hand behind her head, and leaned down to check her breathing.

I saw her face.

For two years, I'd checked every ER corridor, every gas station, every woman in scrubs. I'd been carrying this face since a parking lot in October when I was lying on the pavement and she was the only thing between me and bleeding out in the dark.

Her eyes focused on me. Her hand came up, reaching for something she couldn't quite place, and her fingers found my neck, right where the scar ran from below my ear to my collarbone. She pressed into the ridge of tissue with the same pressure, the same hands that held me together while we waited for the helicopter.

"I've been trying to find you for the last two years."

She couldn't speak. Her eyes were streaming, her hand still on my neck. The fire roared behind me, the crew working, the medics running across the grass with the gurney. Everything I knew how to do was right there waiting for me, and I couldn't move.

The medics reached us. I stepped back. They put a mask on her, checked her vitals. She watched me over the oxygen mask as they lifted her onto the stretcher. I stood on the grass with my helmet in my hand, watching them load her into the ambulance. I didn't move until the doors closed.

Back at the station, the crew went through the post-fire routine. Air bottles off the packs, masks pulled for cleaning. Travis and Greene reloaded the crosslay. Carl ran the pump to refill the tank.

I was stripping my coat off the rack when Thompson caught my eye from the office doorway.

"Sullivan."

I followed him in. He closed the door.

"We talked about this. Last shift. In this room." He crossed his arms. "Greene called for a regroup. You went through alone. I called you twice on the radio and got nothing."

"There was a woman on the second floor."

"And you got her out. But if that ceiling had come down six inches to the left, we'd be having a different conversation right now." He let that sit. "This is the second time, Knox. I'm not going to be able to keep looking past it."

"Yes, sir."