Page 78 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Exposures north side," Tater says beside me, already keyed up on the radio. "Get a line on that barn before the wind turns."

We drop off the engine into heat you can feel through turnout gear. My right leg takes the landing and holds. Ten days since Doc Osei signed my return-to-duty, shaking his head while he did it. Bone's bridged clean, he said. You heal like a man with somewhere to be. The hardware aches when the weather turns, and it's aching now, deep, like a tooth.

It holds. That's all I ask of it.

Chief Weyland's at the command board, mutual aid rolling in from two counties, and the night watchman's truck is parked by the loading dock.

Empty. Door hanging open.

"Merle Haskins," the chief says. "Nobody's seen him since ten. Could be he walked out. Could be—"

A woman screams from the crowd line.

Not a scared scream. A pointing scream. I follow her arm up, second floor, west end, and there's a light waving in a window. Small. Frantic. A phone flashlight.

"Kids," somebody yells. "There's kids in there!"

Two of them. We find out later they snuck in to take pictures of the old machinery for some ghost page online. Right now all I know is a light in a window and a building full of sixty years of reasons to stay outside.

Tater's already moving. "Peterson! With me!"

At the west door he looks down once. At the leg. "You good?"

"It holds."

That's the whole conversation. He nods and we mask up. Gloves, hood, seal check, the whole rhythm my hands have done ten thousand times.

And then I stop.

The doorway is black. Smoke pushing out the top of it in slow rolls, and inside there's a smoke alarm still screaming somewhere, one that hasn't melted yet, that high electric shriek.

Chicago comes up out of the ground.

The radio saying my own address. The third floor. Beck's arms across my chest. The chaplain's face

My boots won't move. The alarm shrieks. One second. Two.

I count them the way I counted the six on Maple Street. Three. Four. The girl's light is still waving up there. Five.

Tater's glove lands on my shoulder. Doesn't push. Doesn't pull. It sits there, heavy, and his voice comes through the mask.

"You and me, brother. Like the old days."

And I do the thing Doc and I have been circling for a month. I quit fighting her. I take Claire with me instead. Take both of them.

"Stay with me, Rosie-girl," I say into the mask, so low it's not even sound.

Six.

I go in.

***

Inside is a furnace with furniture. Heat pressing down from the ceiling like a hand. Visibility maybe three feet, my light a dirty cone in the black. We find the stairs by memory, because every kid who grew up in Willowbend snuck into this mill once, and my feet remember what my eyes can't see.

"Fire department! Call out!"

Nothing. The building groans over us. Long and low, wood under load.