Page 33 of Second Alarm
Cal and I are going before she finishes the sentence. Aiden's on the truck, orders coming over the radio. Harrison is running the pump. Deluca is on the door with an axe, because Deluca gets the door on residential and he's earned it and I trust him to get the door.
The door goes down and we're in.
Smoke to the knee. Visibility five feet. Heat on our faces, not yet unbearable. Cal left hand, me right. We call out for the kids. I hear Cal calling. I hear my own voice calling. I don't hear anybody answer. I don't expect to. Kids hide when they're scared. They hide under beds. They hide in closets. They don't answer strangers yelling their names.
Back left. Back left.
We find them in the bedroom closet. Both of them. Five-year-old boy, seven-year-old girl, in pajamas, curled around each other in the back of their own closet behind a laundry basket, because the laundry basket was tall and it was a barrier and they thought it would help. They're terrified. They're breathing but alive.
Cal takes the boy. I take the girl. We're out of the house in under ninety seconds from the door going down. On the front lawn, I hand off the girl directly into Hanna's waiting arms.
Hanna takes her.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is: Hanna's face does a thing. It's a work thing, a paramedic thing — it's the face of a woman who's now in charge of a child and going to get that child to the ambulance and get her on oxygen and get her checked — and underneath the work face, there's a half second of naked relief. Not for herself. For me. For the fact that I came out of that house with the kid. And it's a half second so fast that nobody else is going to catch it, and she closes it down before her arms have even settled around the girl, but I catch it, because I was looking.
"I got her," Hanna says.
"Got her."
"Go."
I go. I don't go back inside, because the house isn't going to kill anybody today, and Aiden is putting water on it, Rivera is running pressure, and there's nothing left for me to do in this house. I go to the mom in the yard who’s on her knees. Cal has handed her the little boy and she's holding him like she's going to absorb him through her own ribs. She sees the girl in Hanna's arms on the way to the ambulance, and the wailing shifts into the specific, ragged crying of a mother who's just found out her children are alive when she thought they might not be.
I crouch down to her level. "They're okay. They're scared. They're going to need the hospital to check them for smoke inhalation. Your daughter's with our medic. We're going to take care of her. She's going to be right over here, okay, you can see her, look — "
The mom nods.
"We're going to transport both kids and you — "
"I'm going with them — "
"Yes, ma'am. You'll go in the rig with your kids — "
"My husband — I have to call — "
"An officer will help you call your husband, okay, just focus on the kids, they need you to be calm — "
I hand her off to the officer who's just pulled up. The officer is in uniform and is, with a small jolt of recognition, Riley — because Riley is an arson investigator and has to showed up at the scene. Riley nods at me and takes the mom.
I go to the engine, pull off my helmet, and wipe my face. My face is hot. My hand is shaking a little. Not visibly. Privately.
Cal is ten feet away, breathing hard, bent at the waist, helmet off, hands on his knees.
"Ty — "
"I know — "
"Those kids — " He can't finish it.
"I know." I mean it.
He straightens up. He comes over and claps me on the shoulder — the slightly harder clap, theI-need-this-to-be-physicalclap, because Cal is shaking too, a little, because it was two kids in a closet.
"We got them."
"We got them."
