Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 16 HOURS AND 09 MINUTES

DANI ALLEN HAD never doubted that she and her crew could handle any fire.

Until today.

“Power is out.” Chief Loftus’s voice boomed over the intercom through the Waketa Township fire station. “Phones are down, 911 is down. Cell service is down.”

Lights along the hallway ceiling, over the doors, and out in the bay flashed red. At regular intervals, high-pitched tones filled the firehouse as the company hurried into their turnout gear.

“There is no switchboard,” Chief Loftus continued. “There are no calls for help. Our entire community is in a virtual blackout.”

“Jesus Christ,” Levon Miller muttered, pulling the thick, flame-resistant bunker pants up over his long underwear. Zipping up, he grabbed his bunker coat out of his locker with one last glance at the picture taped inside: a selfie of himself and Carla, taken in the cab of the fire engine as they were driven from the church to the reception hall. She looked beautiful. Her jet-black hair, dark brown eyes, and dark tan skin against a strapless cream-colored wedding dress. His dirty-blond mop and pasty-white skin looking even pastier in that rented tuxedo. Both smiling a just-won-the-lottery grin. It was his favorite picture. He’d never been happier.

Levon glanced up at the clock on the wall. Carla should be outside monitoring recess right now. He wondered if she’d seen or heard the plane crash; he wondered if she was okay.

Of course she was. Carla was one of the smartest, most resourceful people he knew. She was fine. She was with her students, and she was fine.

She had to be.

Levon kissed his fingers, touched the photo, then banged his locker shut.

“Today will be a day of tough choices,” Chief Loftus continued. “ We will be needed everywhere. We cannot be everywhere. Let me repeat myself: Today will be a day of tough choices. But we will not stop until the job is done.”

Dani shook a pant leg down over her insulated, steel-toed rubber boots while trying to block out the thoughts of her six-year-old daughter, Brianna. Dani had never had a problem compartmentalizing work and home. But work didn’t usually involve home. Today it did.

Looping her arms through the elastic suspenders, Dani glanced down at the bench, to Bri’s kindergarten school picture tucked inside her helmet. She could have been looking at her own picture at that age; mother and daughter were practically identical: Same toothy grin. Same dark brown skin, hair, and eyes. Same tightly coiled curls. Mother and daughter shared a love of guacamole, and neither liked pickles. Both paid attention to detail and were resistant to change. Dani always wondered if, as Bri aged, she too would have great taste in friends. And, later on, if, like her mom, she too would have terrible taste in men.

“Here’s what we know,” Chief Loftus said as Dani and Levon hustled, fully suited, into the bay where the chief was addressing the rest of the company. “The plant has been hit. The plant has been compromised. I don’t know how badly— they don’t know how badly. We go and we do what they say. They got shit burning we don’t even know about. So today, your egos don’t exist. The only words I want to hear you say are How can I help? Because the difference between what they know and you don’t is the difference between living and dying. No one’s a hero today. Today, we just do the job.

“The priority is Clover Hill,” Chief Loftus continued. “That’s the first domino. But the plane created a debris field several miles in diameter with damage to residential and commercial structures. There are injuries. We must assume fatalities. We’ve got a seventeen-car pileup that has shut I-35 to all traffic in both directions at Appamatok—”

“Seventeen?”

“Fucking hell.”

They all started talking over one another. That one call alone would have been the biggest thing they’d ever faced.

“Chief, hold on. Thirty-five is the main way—”

“Yes. The main way in and out of town,” Loftus said, finishing Boggs’s thought.

“But we need backup,” said Levon. “How are they getting here if not up thirty-five?”

“They’re gonna, what, come up Schnebly Hill?” said Frankie, the truck engineer.

“With no thirty-five, we won’t have backup for hours,” said another firefighter.

“One engine and one ladder.” Frankie shook his head. “That’s what we got. That’s it. That’s nothing. This is a huge crisis. A goddamn national crisis. We can’t do this alone. We need—”

“We need—Frankie, what day in this job have we ever had all we need?”

The bay went quiet. Loftus didn’t usually raise his voice.

“We are a small rural firehouse facing maybe the largest crisis this country has ever seen, and until we know otherwise, we’re facing it alone. Help will come. State. Federal. It will come—but not yet. For now, it is up to us and we are on our own, which we know all too goddamn well is no different than any other day.”

“Same as it ever was,” Dani said.

Firefighters repeated her words, nodding as they bumped fists.

Chief Loftus nodded too. “We run the day like we run every day. Making it work because there is no other choice.”

Moments later, the ladder truck company, Ladder 42, rolled out of the station and turned left to approach the power plant campus from the north. Levon and Dani’s engine company, Engine 42, followed, turning right to approach from the south. As they went, Dani looked over to the firehouse and, not for the first time, considered that word.

It was a house, in the literal sense. There were beds, showers, a kitchen. They were on duty for days at a time, so they lived there, together, in that house. But what people who didn’t work with fire didn’t appreciate was that it wasn’t just a house—it was a home.

A home where brothers and sisters spent holidays and weekends together and fought over whose turn it was to do the dishes.

Brothers and sisters who knew everything about one another. Their ups, their downs, their fears, their vulnerabilities. Brothers and sisters who were always there to give you shit and never let you forget an embarrassing moment. Brothers and sisters who were there to help shoulder the burden or offer a hand up.

They were a pack. A pack of wolves, running toward the chaos as one. They never knew exactly what they would face. No two calls were the same. But they always knew the wolves out in front and by their sides had their backs, because they knew they had theirs. A firefighter understood that any day on the line could be the last. That kind of relationship with death was uncommon, but that’s what made them not common people. And when, day after day, call after call, you stand shoulder to shoulder and put your life on the line together, you are no longer just firefighters.

You’re family.