Backdraft…

“What’re you reading?” Barnaby asked, pulling himself into the top bunk above mine.

“A book,” I answered honestly, but I was only half paying attention to what he’d asked. I was actually sucked in to this thing.

Back on Saturday, we’d walked over to the 10-13, met up with Dawnie getting out of a cab, and had lunch ‒ the five of us. We’d had a pretty good time. I didn’t get to hang much with Yale, and it’d been kind of nice to connect with that brother. Truthfully, the brothers I spent the most time around were Youngblood, Blaze, and Oz. The first, because he was my best friend; the second, because we ran into each other often enough while on the job, and he helped me work on my brownstone; and the third, because he came by the firehouse once a week to lift with us. A change of pace, he called it, from his regular gym routine, which in and of itself, had become a regular gym routine for him.

I’d given Lil a ride home after lunch, which had ended right around when dinner was supposed to get started. She’d pouted a bit and had said she wished she could, when I asked if I could take her for a ride, but she had work to get back to. I thought she maybe worked too much, but I couldn’t throw stones, living in a glass house. I was here four days a week and the other two I was retrofitting and renovating the busted-ass fixer-upper brownstone that I lived in.

Technically, I should be working the fire house on a much different schedule, but we were short, a hiring freeze was in place city-wide, and that made the department hard up enough that they were handing out mandatory overtime like fuckin’ candy. Still, it didn’t amount to much in the long run, though. Firefighters were paid shit.

“Huh, no shit? A book? Really.” Barnaby said and shook the whole damn bunk as he settled in.

“Yeah, as in none of your fuckin’ business, Barn. Now shut up, I’m trying to read this,” I shot back.

One of the other guys started cracking up across the room and clapping and I frowned, redoubling my efforts to read the print on the page. I was so into it, I couldn’t be bothered to turn on the fucking light in my bunk despite the increasing gloom.

After I’d dropped Lil off, I’d had to go to the grocery store for some TP for my place. I’d found myself back on the magazine aisle staring at the cover of her book. Aly’s reaction had been something else. Dawnie’s expression of awestruck wonder behind her hippie glasses had been priceless, too. That girl was a tough nut to crack, but Lil’s presence had done it. Aly’s blind best friend practically glowed and was as cracked wide open as I’d ever seen her.

Lil was the true superstar of the day, though. She’d been patient, kind, and free with her time to every person who had come to her with a pen and paper, or even a story idea of their own. She’d patiently coaxed out details and had encouraged every person that their book needed to be a thing, that the world needed their story.

We’d been stopped no less than five times between the market and the 10-13. Once she’d been made, iIt was like the super-fangirl set came out of the woodwork. Likely, someone had posted her last-known-location as the market because, no joke, when we’d ridden by it on our way to take her home, there were women and girls all over the park toting books under their arm and talking in excited clumps, all of them looking at their phones even though the tents had all come down and the food trucks had all started pulling away.

For me, though, it was Lil herself. Her selflessness and the fact the whole morning into the early afternoon had played out the way that it did… that’s what sold me on picking up the book for myself. I was super surprised to find that I was glad that I did. There was a whole lot more to her writing than a love story. There was intrigue and a little danger to it, too.

She knew how to tell a story and I was suddenly kind of ashamed of passing the whole genre off as a load of crap all this time. Of course, to be fair to myself, a stereotype became a stereotype for a reason. Usually because there was some truth to it. Unfortunately, it was how we tended to unfairly apply stereotypes that was the problem. Not necessarily the fact that they existed in the first place.

Damn this woman made me think. She challenged me, and I liked it. Count me grateful to have made a friend of her.

Her book got snatched out of my hand.

“What the fuck, Barn?”

“I wanna know what you’re reading!” he cried, laughing and I pounded a fist into the bunk above me, bouncing him on his mattress.

“Give it back, asshole!” Too late, Barnaby was fucking howling with laughter.

“You’re reading a fucking romance novel?” he mocked.

“It’s not like that,” I said and hated that it sounded defensive. I mean, what the fuck did I have to be defensive about? Other than their macho bullshit.

“Oh, then what is it like?” he demanded.

“None for your fucking busi – “ The alarm sounded, red lights flashing, the grating sound drowning all else out.

“Time to go to work!” Captain Walden shouted.

“Yeah, you two can finish your lovers’ spat later,” Ripley joked. I got out of my bunk and ripped my book out of Barnaby’s hands and dropped it on my rumpled blanket.

Barnaby’s eyes glittered with tears he was laughing so hard. I struggled not to pop him in the mouth. Arrogant prick.

We slid down the pole and suited up, half of us dragging our gear to finish suiting up in the truck on the way.

“What have we got?” Brody asked over the headset.

“Structure fire, no occupants that we know of. Looks like abandoned building.” Captain Walden briefed us.

“Squatters?” I asked.

“Could be, so look alive.”

When we reached the structure fire we realized it was at the old Indigo Moon Brewhouse which was derelict and given up for dead despite being on a prime chunk of real estate at the edge of the city. The old industrial area had been undergoing a gentrification and revival. Artists had pretty much taken over the neighborhood and it was full of the granola set. Galleries, artist’s lofts, vegan eateries, and coffee shops had taken over a lot of the smaller brick buildings and they were in a fight to the death with a historical society over what to do with the old brewery, which had a beautiful, original-brick façade.

The main consensus was to turn it into lofts and apartments, but the historical society wanted to preserve the building as much as possible to its original state. Negotiations took place, diplomacy was deployed, but eventually, the talks broke down and a volley of lawsuits were launched. The whole thing had been tied up for the better part of a year and in that time, a decent sized chunk of the city’s homeless had peeled back the construction fence and moved right on in.

Like most of the homeless population across the country, it was rife with people who had lost their way, homeless as a direct result of the opioid epidemic. I couldn’t tell you how many burned-up junkies we’d had to deal with as a result of them cooking up their poison and passing out in their drugged-out fugue with candles lit, touching off a blaze. It was especially difficult when they burned out several neighbors in the process, leaving hardworking but poor families with no place else to go but the streets, themselves.

This blaze could be either be a junkie fire or a campfire gone awry. With how gutted the building was, I somehow doubted it was an electrical fire. In any case, the only people likely to be left homeless were folks that’d started out that way, this time. Still didn’t keep it from being a damn shame.

We’d already responded here once, not for a fire, but for an overdose. That guy had been three or four days gone by the time we’d got here so we’d packed it in and left the coroner’s office to take over and do their job. It was sad. It was even sadder that this had become the new normal, but it was what it was. This was the job. Lately, we seemed to lose four for every one we saved, two of them easily to OD. It’d been a hard year across the damn board for emergency-service types and it was taking its toll by way of suicides. A lot of guys could only internalize so much pain and heartache before it chewed them up from the inside out.

“Shit, we got visible flames, she’s lit up like a fuckin’ Christmas tree.” Ripley said and I shook my head and crossed myself, shooting up the too-often-uttered prayer of: Please, no bodies tonight.

We pulled up, the sirens died on the smoke-choked air and all of us jumped out. I made sure my gauntlets were a good fit, flexing my hands before I opened the cabinet on the side of the truck and shrugged into the rest of my gear through the canvas straps and metal clasps. The tank was heavy, but I was used to it. I checked my pressure, got my mask on, and dropped my helmet on my head. Brody raised a fist and we knocked them together as Captain Walden snipped through the construction fence with bolt cutters, opening up a path for us to get to the boarded-up ground-level windows.

As a ladder company, it was our job to blaze a trail, open things up to vent so the engine company could get the water where it needed to go. We were a fire-fight’s toolbox, carrying axes and bolt-cutters, our trucks equipped with ladders and the Jaws of Life. I hefted down my fire-axe from its holder on the side of our rig and we trooped up the sidewalk to where the Captain held the fence aside for us.

“After you, gentleman! Watch your asses in there!” he yelled.

I shot him a salute and said over the radio from inside my mask, “Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Do it, Calder!” came over the headset and I hauled back with the axe and heaved it into the plywood in front of us. Handholds achieved, Brody got in there with me and we put our backs into it, ripping it out of the old wood window frames it’d been nailed into.

Most of the glass was already busted out, but Ripley got in there with a steel pry bar and busted out the rest. I ducked and stepped through. It was smoky down here, but not too bad, not yet.

“Get that ladder in the air! Start hosing it down from the top!” I didn’t recognize the voice over the radio but we weren’t worried about it.

“Yeah, it’s a little bit of smoke but it’s not too bad down here,” Ripley reported.

“Get to the second floor, but watch your asses.”

“You got more to worry about out there than we do in here,” I said. “Watch that brick façade.”

“You don’t need to say it, Calder,” Brody said unhappily. “We all know.”

“Yes, the fuck he does.” Captain Walden shut him down. He softened his hard-assed tone some by saying, “Safety first, boys. We learn from our mistakes.”

It was a bigger fight than expected and ended up being a first-alarm, all-hands-on-deck box assignment. Truthfully, I was surprised they didn’t rank it up higher than that. When all was said and done we’d found one DOA, but we couldn’t get him out. By the time we reached him, he was a crispy fucking critter and there had been drug paraphernalia surrounding the body.

I sat on the end of one of the trucks, one of our guys on safety duty pouring water over my head to cool me down. Angel stood nearby monitoring, portable oxygen in his hands if I needed it. I waved him off.

“Hell of a fight,” he said looking up at the smoking and steaming building.

“How long we been at it?” I asked.

“Something like nine hours,” he said. I shook my head.

“Felt like three.”

“Adrenaline,” he said casually.

“Yo, Backdraft! You good?” I looked over and jerked my head in a nod. Blaze raised a hand and gave me a wave. He went back to what he was doing, which was working hoses. He’d come in with engine number forty-nine.

“You boys did good,” Captain Walden said. “No injuries. Gotta like that.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Shit,” Ripley muttered.

“Must be a slow news day,” Barnaby said.

I looked over behind the line at the reporters trying to crowd it.

“How long do you think before you can get in there and retrieve the body?” someone asked, and thrust a microphone into a guy from Blaze’s team’s face.

“Fuck you,” he grated, and hefted a loop of hose over his shoulder and walked it forward.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Captain Walden griped under his breath.

“How the fuck they know about that shit already?” Barnaby asked, leaning back and taking a slug out of the half-empty bottle of brand-name water in his hand.

“Cops are here,” Angel said mildly.

“Better not be a leak on our end,” the Captain muttered and stalked off in that direction.

I shook my head. After what happened with Tony and Chrissy, there was absolutely no love for the press in this town. The cops blue-walled them into oblivion and the ripples had been so far-reaching, we red-lined them right along with them. ICPD and ICFD had a good relationship, unlike most cities who, for some reason, had major animosity going between the two departments. We liked to give each other a ration of shit, but there never was anything meant by it other than good-natured ribbing.

We had our boxing matches, basketball games, and hockey teams, and faced off for charity and shit, but whatever brawls came of it, that shit got left on the ice or in the ring. It never carried over. We didn’t understand why it’d kept up in other cities. It just didn’t make sense to us. We all played for the same team in the end.

We ended up staying longer, which was typical. Eventually, another ladder and engine came to swap us out. This was one of those blazes that was going to need watched and need a crew or two standing by to knock down hot spots and flare-ups.

“Come on, boys. Let’s get out of here.” Captain Walden sounded tired and annoyed. Welcome to dealing with the Indigo City press.

“I don’t know why they even bother trying to interview any of us,” Ripley said dryly. “They make up their own shit anyway.”

Some of us laughed in that unspoken ‘You’ve got that right’ way.

The ride back to the firehouse was a sober, quiet one, and thankfully Barnaby was either too tired or had forgotten completely about Lil’s book. When we got back, I made sure to shower up and get out of the locker room first. I hid the book, which was right where I’d left it on my bunk, and laid down. I pulled out my phone from the bracket we’d put on the wall for it and lit up the screen.

I was going to call her, I kind of wanted to hear her friendly voice and scrub the image of that burning corpse out of my mind but she’d already beat me to it. I had two missed calls from her. I smiled and hit the voicemail icon to play what she’d left.

The automated voice told me, “You have one new message. To play message, press one.”

“Hey, Backdraft, I saw you on the news this morning and I wanted to make sure you were okay. There was a paramedic standing near you with an oxygen tank and it made me worried. You didn’t get too much smoke, did you? Anyway, I’m up and I’ll be getting to work here soon. My day is mostly clear. Give me a text or a call back, okay? Talk to you later. Bye.”

I saved the message, I don’t know why, before I called her back. She picked up on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Angel was just there as a precaution.”

“Oh, good. I’m so relieved,” she said, laughing nervously.

“Thanks for checking up on me,” I said. “It’s kind of nice.”

“The news said somebody died in that fire,” she said softly. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Thanks,” I said quietly. “They were gone before we got there. Overdose.”

“Oh, my God. That’s so sad.”

“And common, unfortunately,” I said but I didn’t want to dwell on it. Dwelling on it is how this job got to you, how it ate at you until you drowned yourself in a bottle or worse. I flipped the script.

“I don’t want to dwell on it too hard, tell me about your day. What have you got planned?”

She sighed and it was a gusty, long suffering sound. I smiled, figuring it couldn’t be that bad.

“Well, I’ve been up since four-thirty. So far I’ve written a couple of thousand words, had something like three different calls with Veronica, she’s my personal assistant, and I have to say, I am ready to tear my hair out.” She sounded unhappy and I frowned.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m just frustrated. Typical flaky industry types changing things willy-nilly and every time I try to write, my phone is ringing again with another change or a ‘Oh and one more thing’ and I’m totally being a diva right now, aren’t I?”

I laughed, “I don’t know,” I said. “Is consistency really too much to ask for?”

“Oh my god, right?”

“So what do they keep changing on you?” I asked.

“Transportation to New York. First they want me to take a commercial flight, then they want to charter one, then they want me to charter one. I have to be there Thursday, no, Friday, but no later than Friday morning! The only thing that hasn’t changed is the hotel.”

“It’s in NYC?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged, “So how about fuck ‘em all? Take a ride with me. I have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off and I’ve got no plans. We can take the bike, it’s supposed to be nice. You can do your thing and I can find something to do.”

“Would you be interested in attending a movie premier?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a romance movie, obviously, but at the same time, you could check that whole experience off your bucket list.”

“For real?”

“I wrote the book,” she said, laughing. “I get a plus-one.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I’m down.”

“Want to know the stupid part?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“It’s not even this weekend, it’s next.”

“Wait, so how many times are they planning on changing things between this week and next, then?”

“Well, they’re not, now. You’re really sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah. You really sure you’re up for a ride that long?”

“Yeah,” she said and giggled a bit, which went straight to my dick. I told it Down boy! and smiled.

“Look, I hate to cut this short, but I’m beat and need to grab some sleep. I meant it, though; thanks for checking up on me. It was sweet.”

“No problem, seriously. You, um, maybe up for doing something this weekend, too?” she asked and it was almost shy, like she expected me to shoot her down or something. Considering she’d become the highlight of my week, that wasn’t happening.

“Yeah, I’d like that. I’ve got my Friday night, free. Want to do something then?”

“I could really use something low-key,” she said.

“Dinner and Netflix?” I suggested.

“As long as it’s the original slang definition of ‘chill’ and not the new one,” she said laughing at her own joke.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m pretty sure we’re like the definition of ‘old’, the fact that just made me roll my eyes.”

She laughed and said, “Kids these days, what will they come up with next?”

“Who the fuck knows, but just so you know, you’re safe with me.”

“Thanks,” she said softly and I yawned.

“Try to have a better rest of your day.”

“You, too. Get some sleep and sweet dreams.”

“Thanks.”

We ended the call and I dropped my phone on my chest and sighed. The guys started coming in to find their own bunks. Barnaby pulled himself up into the top one above mine, and thankfully, still didn’t say anything about the damn book. I wanted to read some more, but at the same time, I didn’t want a big deal made out of it.

Shit. If I was going to see this damn movie, I needed to finish the book. I put my phone back where it belonged and closed my eyes. I was so exhausted, I was out inside of a minute.