Into the Flames

by Multi-Author

  I stared at it until I finished half of the second bottle, then hit send. “Fuck it,” I muttered. “Fuck. It.” I yelled, over and over. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” I was screaming now, probably scaring the neighbors. But I no longer cared. I had nothing left—no job, no income, no George. And that was, indeed, all my fault.

  I dropped onto my back, holding my phone and pondering someone to call to come over and keep me company when the room slipped into darkness.

  * * *

  I woke with a jolt, my face pressed against something very cold and hard. I eased off the tile in front of the never-used gas fireplace, groaning at the pain in my head. I must have gotten up and tripped over the damn dress I’d shucked to the floor.

  “Jesus H.,” I mumbled, getting slowly to my feet and realizing something else was really badly wrong. I’d either clonked myself so hard my vision was going blurry or… “Shit!”

  I waved my hands in front of my face and tried to draw a breath, but it ended in a coughing fit. Clapping a hand over my nose and mouth, I dropped to all fours, recalling some long-ago lesson about getting underneath the smoke. It had a scary, almost rancid odor to it, but I saw that thankfully neither of my candles had toppled over during my drunken trip and fall. It wasn’t coming from my place, I thought as I crawled into the kitchen, eyes streaming and trying not to breathe too deep, hoping to get to the window for some fresh air. I flung it open and stuck my head out into the cold September night, mind reeling and trying to remember if I was safer playing Spiderman down the outside of the building from my fifth floor unit or using the hallway.

  I heard a scream from somewhere below. Right after that, heat seemed to billow up from my kitchen floor, sending me scurrying back to the living room on all fours again. I touched my doorknob, which wasn’t warm. Casting around for something to save, I grabbed my phone and computer, wrenched the door open, and stepped out into the hall. Before I could take another step, something whooshed by my face from above, something very hot. I jumped back inside my condo, watching a burning timber fall down the central open space and break apart into glowing cinders on the restored hexagonal tile floor of the lobby.

  Shaking all over, I headed for the stairs, repeating the ‘outside, get outside now’ mantra in my head. As I hit the fourth floor where a young woman lived with her toddler kid—I was really not home that much I realized, apropos of nothing at that moment—I heard the scream again, coming from inside their unit. The smoke seemed a lot less intense out here, likely dissipated by the open area from my top floor entry to the lobby.

  Feeling foolish, I knocked and tried the handle, which was so hot I yelped and jumped back, nearly toppling down the steps. A kid’s unintelligible voice rose, before it devolved into loud crying. “Hey, uh…” I tried to remember their names. “You all right in there?”

  Dumb. It was apparent they were not. The baby’s crying ratcheted up to loud painful screams. With only a moment’s hesitation, I tossed my computer and phone to the floor. Using my shirttail to turn the doorknob, I shouldered my way into the smoke-filled unit. I dropped to my hands and knees, following the sound of the little kid’s crying, which was quickly becoming more cough and less cry. Terrified but somehow calm, thinking this whole thing to be a strange nightmare I’d wake from—still alone, my lungs not clogged with acrid poison—I kept going deeper into the condo. Knowing each of them were identical, more or less, with the exception of the empty one on the first floor that the owner wanted way too much money for.

  “Hey,” I called out, hoping to locate an adult somewhere. I coughed, which was a mistake because it forced me to inhale. I could picture my lungs, like in some sort of cartoon video, filling up with gray fog. They were half full now, at least. I wiped my eyes, noting my hand came away covered in grit. The chemical smell was worse in here. “Hey, where are you?”

  The kid had stopped crying, which didn’t bode well. I kept crawling, cursing when I ran into random pieces of furniture. The back room where I kept my little office/extra space was somewhat less smoky, but the heat was getting to be unbearable. “Ma…” I heard a tiny voice cry out then dissolve into coughing. I followed it, crawling fast, impaling my hands and knees on what felt like knives but turned out to be toys. The little girl was curled in the corner, clutching a ratty blanket. Her pale face split into a scream when I loomed up out of the smoke.

  “No, no, sweetie.” I found a blanket or a towel and held it over my mouth and nose, which made me a whole lot scarier I’m sure. The girl ran past me, but I snagged the edge of her shirt and pulled her back, trying not to cough but unable to stop now.

  “Ma! Ma!” she hollered in my ear as I hauled her small body into my arms and half crawled, half knee-walked back out into the worst of the smoke.

  “Sh…,” I tried to whisper, but I could picture those cartoon lungs again, now over three quarters full. Finally, figuring speed was better than caution I got up and ran for the still open door and into the hall, worried about the kid’s mother but unable to stay in the place another minute. The only other occupied unit was just below this one, so I banged on that door a few times, holding the now limp body of the girl against my shoulder.

  The older lady who lived there opened it, wearing an oxygen mask.

  Oh hell. She has tanks in there. I saw the delivery truck just yesterday.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling her out. I couldn’t even hear her protests. My ears were full of one thing—a scary, roaring sound that seemed to be coming from the very walls themselves. “Let’s go, please,” I pleaded with her.

  She held up her phone. I squinted through the worsening smoke and saw she’d called 911. Nodding my acknowledgement and praying she didn’t have a cat or yappy little dog to save, I pulled her toward the stairs. The roaring had ramped up, and the heat emanating from the walls was worse than anything I’d ever experienced, even on an asphalt parking lot in the middle of August in Las Vegas.

  Tears streaming, coughing and cursing at the poor woman’s slowness, I took the stairs one at a time, but my urgency to bolt down and out into the night air where I could at least get a damn breath was so extreme it set up a pounding in my head. Realizing this could be because my lungs were now officially full of smoke, I pulled harder, dragging the old lady now but unable to stop. The flight instinct was too strong. At the top of the last flight down to the lobby, we were stopped in our tracks when a huge plume of smoke followed quickly by flames burst from a wall, filling the corridor and singeing my face and arms. With a scream of terror, I hauled the old woman back hard.

  We had to get out before that damn fire got to her place or we were all fucked. We had to get out, now. I glanced around, seeking nonexistent exit routes. A flashing red light hit my eyes. Thank Christ. The fire department.

  “Mama!” The kid in my arms screeched in my already near-deafened ear. “Mama! Mama!” She was struggling now, but I couldn’t put her down. The floor was hot and flames were licking their hungry way along the banister toward us, trapped like rats at the top of the steps. In the next second, I was doused from behind with what I thought was water but turned out to be way too cold for that. My exposed skin felt as if it had been frozen like a hot dog dipped in dry ice in a late-night infomercial.

  I yelled for the little girl not to wiggle so hard, but when I saw a white colored foam hit the flames in front of us, I turned. The woman, the kid’s mother from the condo below me, face covered in a bandana, was spraying her kitchen fire extinguisher straight at me. I dropped to my knees so she could get a better shot at the flames. She tossed the container down, snagged her kid and said, “Hurry! It’s in the walls. I think it’s coming from the basement and up the garbage chute! Come on!”

  Nodding, I glanced over to see the old lady topple slowly over. “Go!” I motioned for the woman to take her kid and get out while I tried to revive my elderly neighbor. The heat shimmered, baking the air all around me. I heard a crash of breaking glass and shouts that sounded too far a
way to be of any use at all. I tried to focus but my eyes were streaming again and the noxious smoke was filling the middle hallway. Choking and spluttering, I dragged the woman to the top of the stairs. I yelled, desperate to get someone’s attention now, my throat shredded and useless.

  I hauled the woman into my lap and tried to cradle her between my arms but then I remembered the over-the-shoulder thing and did that, staggering some and trying not to touch the smoky, sizzling banister. “Get out,” my brain was screaming at me. “Drop her and get the hell out!”

  A blast of heat ballooned behind me, shoving me forward like a huge, warm fist. I reached out on reflex, wrapping my palm around the wooden railing, screaming when the hot wood seared my flesh. Whimpering but still tripping downward with the woman bouncing against my back that felt as if it’d caught fire too, I swiped at my eyes, trying like hell to just find a tiny hole of air. My chest constricted and I lurched toward a shadow wearing a hat.

  “Help,” I croaked out, pulling the woman around to my front and trying to hand her over. Once she disappeared from my arms, I dropped to my knees onto a mess of what looked like giant snakes making their way through the lobby and up the stairs.

  “Here,” a deep voice said. “I’ve got her. Can you get yourself outside?”

  “It’s hot,” I mumbled, dropping onto my butt, staring at my rapidly blistering palm. “So…hot.”

  “Hey! Where is she, God damn it!” A familiar loud voice called through the chaos.

  The firefighter I’d seen answered back, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “It’s coming from the basement, the garbage chute. It’s trapped in the fucking walls. Get out before the whole place collapses. Now! Move! Pull your men back, I mean it!” George’s voice made me smile, which sent yet more agony from my cracked lips to my shutting-down brain.

  I rolled onto my back and observed the smoke dancing overhead, listening to George bossing the firemen around as if he were still one of them. I held up a hand and tried to make a noise to let him know I was there, but my voice was gone. My throat had closed up completely.

  Survive.

  The word flashed across my vision like a television news crawl.

  Get up. Get out. Save yourself, Jane. Save yourself.

  With a groan of pain, I rolled over and stood up into the worst of the smoke. I could hear George hollering in the distance, calling my name over and over again. He’d gone upstairs even after ordering the men out. He’d kept going, on a mission to save someone un-savable.

  Holy shit.

  “George!” I tried to scream but it was a weak whimper. “Help! Down here! George!”

  The firemen were pulling back, tugging their hoses and dousing everything in sight, including me, making me shiver even more violently. I glanced up the steps. But when I headed back up, going against everything in me urging me out to the fresh air, to safety, a gigantic flame shot out from the wall, forcing me back, coughing and grabbing at my hair, terrified I’d turned into a human candle.

  I turned and ran out the shattered glass front door, grabbing the first guy in a uniform I saw. “Help! He’s in there. He’s trying to find me…oh Jesus, please get in there and pull him out!”

  The guy tried to calm me down. Wrapping me in a blanket, he led me over to the EMTs dealing with my three building-mates. “No!” I threw him off and grabbed an axe from the truck, not even thinking just moving forward, doing what had to be done. Two firemen intercepted me. “It’s George Lattimer, you assholes.” I swiped at my still watery eyes and bent double with a rough, throat-shredding cough.

  “I’ll get him,” one of the guys said, taking the axe from me and running double quick back into the inferno.

  “Shit,” the other one said. He had my arm in a death grip to keep me from following his colleague. “Chief! The fucking proby went back in.”

  An older guy ran over to us. “Ma’am,” he said, addressing me. “Ma’am, I thought the building was empty. The lady over there said you were the last one.”

  “I was,” I managed before my lungs went AWOL on me, and I felt the world graying from the outside in. “It’s George. Get him. He thinks I’m still in there.”

  “George? George who?” He glared at the younger man who was motioning for the EMTs.

  “Trey, sir. Trey Lattimer.”

  “Holy mother of…”

  “I found him!” A loud voice coming from the building, now more or less completely engulfed in flames, made us all startle. “Give me a hand!”

  I threw off the tech trying to get my pulse and heartbeat and strap an oxygen mask over my face. Running over to where the young guy had dumped a body onto the sidewalk, I stumbled over something, landing on my hands and knees, sending a white-hot bolt of agony up my arm from my no doubt third-degree burned palm. “Oh no, oh Christ, oh…please no. George!”

  I sat back as the EMTs rushed over to him and went to work with quick efficiency. The new guy got up and immediately dropped to his knees.

  “Over here!” the technician called to his colleague. “Take him.” He motioned to the young man now puking onto the sidewalk.

  “Fucking proby,” I heard a familiar voice growl. “Get off me.” The tech straddling George’s body doing chest compressions stood. The other one strapped an oxygen mask over George’s mouth and nose. That triggered something…a memory of…

  “Move!” I hollered, grabbing the puking rookie and hauling him away from the building. “Get him away from there!” I glanced to the left of my building, basically an empty lot waiting for someone with money to rebuild. It had nothing but sidewalk on the right. “Oxygen! The old lady has it in her—”

  There was a weird, ear-splitting, scrunching noise, not what I would ever imagine as an explosion. I heard it first and then felt something huge and heavy, like a couch or maybe a VW Bug, push me before landing on my back. Then nothing.

  The sound of my name coming from miles away, floated across a soft pillowy cloud cover. I blinked, confused by the sights and sounds that met my senses. “George,” I whispered, wincing as my throat opened to accept the oxygen flowing into my lungs. “Where is he? Is he dead? Please, someone just tell me.”

  “I’m right here, Harriet.” A hand touched my forehead, brushing my hair back. I blinked up at him and tried to sit. “Be still a second. They need to evaluate you for a fracture. You took a windowsill to your back.”

  He pressed his lips to my cheek. “So, who’s the hero now,” I croaked out, hot tears burning tracks down my face. Everything about me felt scorched.

  “You are, my love.” He glanced up when someone approached us. “I’m going with her,” he said, standing up.

  “You need to be treated too, sir.”

  “I’m fine.” He waved a hand. “But that fucking proby that came after me needs to be disciplined. That was the most irresponsible bullshit—”

  I reached out a hand and made a noise approximating “Hey, shut up.” George grabbed it and walked alongside as they rolled me over to the ambulance. During the loud, fast ride to the medical center, George leaned over me, gripping my hand, his sooty nose close to mine. “How do you feel about Kentucky, Wonder Woman? Good I hope because I’m not going anywhere without you.” He coughed so hard it made him bend over double.

  I tried to smile but it hurt my lips too much. Once he’d gotten control of the cough, he put his face against my shoulder, muttering something into my shredded sweatshirt. I tried to touch his hair, feeling myself slide into a dopey unconsciousness until the palm of my left hand made contact with something, making me jerk upright and scream in pain.

  He held onto me the rest of the way. As they wheeled me behind a curtain, he held my good hand. “What about…her?” I croaked out. “The New York blonde who gets you?”

  He put his lips to my cheek. “I love you, Harriet. I have since the second I met you,” he said, before an alarming coughing fit made him have to back away. I heard a crash then someone
calling “Code Blue! Hallway!”

  I tried to throw off the cabal of medical types surrounding me. “No, stop! George! Let me see him! God damn it.” I jumped off the gurney and threw open the curtain to find him on the floor, surrounded by doctors. “Oh…please no.” My whisper was the last thing I remembered for a while.

  Epilogue

  Five years later

  As he slogged through the mud and muck, following the experts in their trek on the latest rescue, George couldn’t help but ponder how his life might never have made this drastic turn for the better had it not been for the flip of a coin—literally. After opening the second FireBrew location in D.C., he’d been at serious loose ends, unable to choose between the cities he wanted to visit and his need to settle down, to reestablish roots somewhere.

  He’d really liked Washington. Its fast-paced vibe suited him and the old firehouse he’d bought, with Eve’s carefully re-invested nest egg and insurance payout, had been on the lower level of a building he’d also restored with an eye toward moving into the top floor loft. It had been a shitty neighborhood. But thanks to the cumulative publicity and the solid quality of the beers they crafted, FireBrew had lead a minor flurry of purchases in the block and he’d been pleased to note the improvements as he took his long night walks in sleep avoidance mode.

  He’d hired his friend’s widow, Laura, to manage the opening in D.C., half thinking he’d end his bizarre self-imposed celibacy with her help. That had not happened. Not for lack of trying on her part. He simply hadn’t ever been able to close the deal, so to speak, with her. So, when she’d found him wide-awake and staring out the window of his loft after another night full of pleasure for her and frustration for him, she’d turned him around, kissed him, and told him he had to leave.

  “Um, this is my place last I checked,” he’d said, resting his chin on the top of her head like he’d once done with his late wife.