Page 130 of Never Forget
Cap was on his radio. Couldn't hear what he was saying. Couldn't hear what the other end was saying back.
Tyler came up beside me and I heard his breath inside his mask.
"You good?"
"I'm good."
I wasn't sure I was.
We pulled a line to the A side. The front of the store. The big windows that ran the length of the showroom were still intact, but the smoke behind them was the color of the stuff coming out of the loading dock, and it was moving wrong. Rolling. Churning. A fire was eating something above the ceiling and we couldn't see it.
Cap waved us forward.
I moved. Hose in my hands. Sean on the nozzle. Tyler behind me. The pack on my back was sixty-something pounds of weight but it had never felt as heavy before as it did now.
We laid the line. Sean opened the nozzle. The water hit the glass, hissed back into steam. The glass held but we kept working.
Somewhere inside the building, a team was already in.
I hadn't seen them go in. I hadn't heard the order. The radio in my ear was half static and half someone else's channel bleeding through. When I looked at Cap he was shouting something at a captain from another station who was shouting back, and I couldn't tell if the argument was about who was inside or what they were supposed to be doing.
Tyler's voice came through the mask.
"Is anybody in charge?"
I didn't answer him. Because I didn't know.
It got worse fast.
The smoke coming out of the showroom windows shifted from black to that angry brown-yellow that means you're minutes from flashover. Sean saw it the same time I did. He closed the nozzle down and looked at me. I looked back at him and neither of us said the word.
Cap came up the line at a run.
"New team going in. They're pulling the guys who were in first. We're support."
"Support for what?"
"Just stay on the line."
He was gone before I could ask again.
I looked at Tyler. He looked back.
Somebody had just sent a new team into a building that was about to flash.
The radios were failing.
I'd heard three calls in a row turn to static mid-sentence. Voices cutting off. Channels crossing. The inside crews were talking to each other on the same frequency as the staging officer and nobody stepped on anybody because the signal wasn't making it through the walls.
Sean was on the nozzle keeping water on the showroom windows, I was standing behind him with my hand on the hose. I could feel my heart inside the coat and I could hear my breathing inside the mask.
A window on the B side blew out. I heard it before I saw it. The pop of tempered glass giving up all at once, and then the sound of a fire getting the oxygen it had been waiting for.
Somebody screamed on the radio.
I couldn't make out the words.
The front windows went next.
