Homeless people crowded the engine at the scene outside the abandoned high school, open-mouthed and hollering walking dead. Matt got down from his seat and batted one guy away like a fly, made him slide on his ass on the wet pavement. The four-story building on West Fifty-Second was well past due to become overpriced apartments. It was already leaking curtains of black smoke from three windows in the front. Matt parked close in so they could access the upper floors with their smaller, mobile ladder until a ladder truck arrived. A guy with shoulder-length hair so greasy it was a solid mass tugged at Ben’s jacket as he started flipping open catches on the side of the truck.
“Yo, man, this is an insurance fire.” The guy pointed to the building. “It’s a setup. The owner’s been trying to get us all to move out for months, and—”
“Get off me. I’m trying to work here.” Ben pushed the guy aside, tried to keep his grip gentle. The guy staggered and kept coming.
“My bad. My bad. I’m just tellin’ you, if anybody gets hurt here today—”
“This is attempted murder!” A woman butted in between Grease Helmet and Ben. Her eyes were yellow with liver damage. “Mr. Sanders knew the building was full of people! He’s been threatening to burn it down since Christmas!”
“We don’t give a fuck who lit it,” Matt barked. He banged on the side of the truck with a gloved mitt like he was trying to scare off wild dogs. “Get out of the way so we can put it out.”
The woman wheeled on Matt. The socks pulled up to her knees were full of holes revealing scabbed red sores. “Hey! You can just pipe the fuck down, buddy! Somebody gotta know what’s happenin’ here!”
“What’s happenin’ is you’re just begging me to blast that rancid homeless stink off you with a fire hose.” Matt took a shuffle-step toward her. “Ben, get me the twenty bar.”
“Okay! Okay! I’m movin’!”
Jake jogged back from his loop around the building, shutting off power and gas. “Some of the locals are saying there’s kids on the top floor,” he said.
“How many?”
“Two.” Jake shriveled as Matt approached, like it was his fault, like they were his children. “Maybe. Can’t confirm. Some people are saying Child Protective Services took the kids last week but others are saying they’re still up there.”
“Where’s Mom?” Ben asked.
“MIA.”
“Has anyone seen the kids today?”
“Not sure.”
“Well, thanks for that pile of useless, hysterical, steaming bullshit, Jake.” Matt jammed three pieces of nicotine gum between his jaws. “Ben and Andy, you’re on the ladder. Get your asses up there and look for anything with a pulse. Jake and Engo, hit the first floor and work upward.”
Ben shouldered his Halligan bar and climbed up the back of the engine, put the ladder up against a window of the third floor of the old school. He could smell gasoline and human waste on the breeze. The black clouds of smoke on the first floor were billowing piss-yellow and brown as Jake and Engo began to force their way into the wall of flames. He was bending to grip the ladder when Andy snuck in front of him and went first.
A thought hit him from out of nowhere, so sudden and wild it almost flashed across his eyes: Andy popping the window at the end of the ladder to access the school building without checking it for backdraft. The flames bursting out, killing her instantly, toasting her like a marshmallow on a steel skewer. He felt a wave of guilt at the relief the vision gave him. Because there were no happy endings on the horizon, he knew. Either Luna had left him by choice, or she had been taken. If Andy died now, he might bask in the not-knowing for the rest of his life, lunatic-happy. But the nonsense fled him as his boots left the safe ground of the fire truck and met the rungs of the ladder. Andy had already busted out the window to the third floor, and he was tugging on his mask and climbing into the blackness with her.
The first room on the second floor was a smoke tank. Ben climbed in the window and followed the wall with a gloved hand, huffing rubber-flavored oxygen, swimming through depthless black and brown murk, nothing to focus on but tiny specks of ash floating past the mask. He kicked and shoved aside anything that came into his path—tables, chairs, cardboard boxes—feeling for the second window along the row. He could hear the distant pops of Andy smashing out windows along the east wall with her Halligan. All the while as he worked, he braced for the sickening sensation he’d experienced a hundred times before, of his boot landing on something that was just the wrong kind of soft and heavy. A body. He bashed out a window and kept going, his spirits lifting slowly as the smoke thinned. Sweat was rolling down his chest and belly, already wet in his hair under the helmet. Engo’s voice was on the radio, defiantly calm for what he was saying.
“Watch out for the central hallway, team. It’s about to go.”
Ben turned toward the sound, a deep crunching as the floor of the hall outside the classroom gave way. Gold light from the flames surging upward, hungry for air, sparks and cinders swirling. Lit for a second was a pathway he could take between the upturned tables, the outline of an old whiteboard, and Andy gripping her way along the back wall, knocking down posters and artworks pinned there.
“You got anything up there, Benji?”
“Entry room’s clear of civilians, Matt.”
Ben watched in amazement as Andy stepped back and took a run-up, launched herself across the flaming crevasse made by the collapsed hallway. She landed in the entrance of another classroom. Ben went to the door and was stopped by a wall of brown smoke, a billowing response to Engo or Jake down below trying to subdue the flames. He gripped the doorframe, stepped out on a beam he’d barely glimpsed that ran parallel to the wall, and used it to step carefully across the gap. Andy was nowhere. He felt a sucker punch of terror to his belly. No windows had been vented. The smoke was thinner here, but Ben couldn’t see Andy where she was supposed to be, outlined against the yellow looms he knew were windows leaking sunlight into the smoke sea. Something ran over his boots. A rat. Tiny taps on his steel-capped toes. He turned right, found a doorway to a storeroom connecting two classrooms. There he ran into her. She was ripping open lockers, shoving over boxes.
“Kids!” He heard her voice through her mask and his, even against the roar of the fire downstairs. “Kids! Are you here?”
“Jesus, Andy!” Ben grabbed her. He gripped the jaw of her mask so she was forced to look at his eyes. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Her eyes were huge. “I’m looking for the children!”
“We don’t know they’re here!” Ben barked. “It’s unconfirmed! We gotta vent! That’s our job!”
“But—”
“No buts!” He shoved her against the wall, trying to knock some sense into a senseless situation. “Fight the fire!”
He was furious and the anger made him clumsy. He went to the windows and smashed them out, all of them, so mad he almost threw his Halligan out of one and into the crowd below. Whoever the hell had trained Andy, they’d done a good job. She was convincing with the tools. Confident in the flames. But she didn’t understand the subtleties, the unwritten laws, the knowledge that came only from bitter experience. You don’t waste time trying to find victims you don’t know for sure are there. Ben had learned that one the hard way after being on the job for only a couple of years. He’d almost got himself crushed to death by a falling roof beam searching too long for a teenager in an apartment fire, only to learn the kid was half a city away at a friend’s place.
“Second room is clear,” Ben reported.
They went through the connecting art-supply storeroom, into another classroom, this one bare. There were things hanging from the ceiling here—papier-mâché sculptures of butterflies or birds long since split or moldy or vandalized by the homeless. They vented, but the smoke was getting thicker as the fire took a room on the east of the building that must have been full of accelerants.
“Ben and Andy, I’m gonna get you guys down with the ground team,” Matt said. “Approach from the rear west.”
Ben turned to make sure Andy was following him. She wasn’t. She was standing by the whiteboard, holding a teddy bear in her gloved hands.
“They’re here, Ben,” she said.
“We gotta go.”
“No. They’re here! I know they’re here!”
“Andy, it’s a fucking school! There’s probably—”
Then he watched as Andy did something that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
She took her mask off.
“Kids!” she screamed. “Kiiiiids! It’s Mommy! Mommy’s here!”
“Put your fucking mask back on!” Ben rushed her, grabbed the mask. She was already coughing, her eyes squeezed shut against the searing smoke. Three more breaths and she’d be out cold.
“Kids! It’s Mommy! It’s Mommy! It’s Mommy! Come to Mommy!”
Ben shoved her mask back on. She sucked oxygen, but she was basically blind now, her eyes filled with airborne ash. She wobbled, gripped him to steady herself. He was about to drag her out of the smoke-filled school when he saw a door at the end of the room pop open, the end opposite the storeroom. He hadn’t even known the cupboard was there. The door was so covered in student art it was completely camouflaged. A small dark shape was moving, bent double, through the smoke. He heard the choking voice trying to push out words against the suffocating clouds.
“Mommyyyyy?”
Ben ran and grabbed the child, threw it over his shoulder. With his other hand he shoved Andy toward the hidden storage cupboard, where she bent and felt around and came out of the swirling blackness with a sagging bundle in her arms. Her eyes were clearing, but it wasn’t enough. He’d have to guide her. Ben held the kid with one arm and Andy’s hand with the other and led her toward the back door of the classroom.
It turned out the child in his arms was a girl. Ben didn’t know that until he was handing her to an EMT and saw her filthy little Hello Kitty! T-shirt and her soot-coated face. Andy had a boy. He was unconscious. His legs were so bruised and swollen they made Ben think of drowning victims he’d pulled out of the Hudson. There was a woman at the edge of the crowd standing watching the children being loaded into the vans and Ben knew, just knew, she was the mother from the way she was rocking forward and then back on her heels. Like she wanted to go to her babies but she also didn’t want to spend the next twelve hours in a small room with an investigator trying to explain the condition those babies were in. Matt tried to grab Ben on his way to the woman but for once the big man’s strength was nothing against his fury, against a molten magma rage that had been boiling since he was the kid crying himself to sleep in a closet and hiding from the sound of sirens while his mother was Fuck-Knows-Where with Fuck-Knows-Who.
Ben grabbed the woman by her rail-thin, track-marked wrists right there in front of everyone, and a groan of protest went up from the homeless and the civilians who had gathered at the edge of the scene.
“Where the fuck were you?” Ben roared in her face. He shook her, resisted the urge to squeeze her skull with his gloved hands. Someone tried to haul him off. His helmet clattered on the cement. “Where the fuck were you, huh? Huh?”
Matt’s hand clamped down on the back of Ben’s turnout coat like a steel claw picking up a toy inside a skill-tester machine, just about lifting him off his feet. “Okay. You said your piece. Drop the drama and get back into line, Benji.”
The fire was out. Ben was swimming in sweat and fury inside his bunker gear. Fury at the woman. Fury at Andy. He couldn’t get his breathing under control. They all knew it. Were all staring at him. Jake’s mask was up on his head and his helmet was under his arm, face pink and wet, like a guy who’d just finished a grueling game of high school football. They were all ignoring Andy, who was bent double and rinsing her eyes and mouth and nose with a water bottle someone had handed her. Ben seemed to be the only person who wanted to go over and shake the shit out of her, too.
“What did you do?” he growled. “You took your goddamn mask off? Are you insane?”
“Ben,” Engo said. “Lay off.”
“Lay off?” he barked. “I had two kids and a blind firefighter up there!”
Andy spat water on the concrete. “You woulda had a sighted firefighter and two dead kids if I hadn’t taken my mask off.”
Ben bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood. It was weird to hear Matt chime in as the level head.
“I’m gonna reconfigure things a little,” Matt said. “Until our friend here gets his head screwed back on. Engo and Andy, you two go back up through the second floor and check for reignition sites and bodies. Jakey, sweep the first floor but stay visible.”
“Shouldn’t we shut down the scene?” Andy asked. “I thought I smelled gasoline in there.”
Matt balked at the question, shook his head. “Who the fuck you talking to, New Guy?”
“Sorry, boss.”
“Ben, you’re gonna stand here and get debrief practice.”
“Fuck off. I don’t need to be babysat,” Ben snapped. “I’m fine to go back in for cleanup.”
“Again, I don’t know who you assholes think you’re talking to, but this ain’t a committee.” Matt tugged on Ben’s shoulder strap when he tried to walk away. “Do what you’re fucking told. Ben, stand here. You guys, fuck off back inside.”
Ben relented, stopped beside his boss, and watched as the firefighters on his crew returned to the burned-out shell of a building while he stood there like a toddler in time-out. Engo turned back and winked at him, and there was something about it that gave Ben a sense of unease, almost heavy enough to smother out the anger in his chest.