Echoes in the Ashes

Chapter8

Chapter Eight: The House in the Fire

Derek hit the front porch at a dead run and didn't slow down.

The door was already half-consumed, the wood soft and blackened, and it gave way under his shoulder with almost no resistance. Heat rolled out to meet him — a wall of it, thick enough to feel like a physical hand shoving him back.

He went in anyway.

The first floor was a maze of smoke and collapsed furniture, orange light pulsing through gaps in the ceiling where the fire above had already started eating through. Somewhere close, glass cracked and gave way in a small, bright shower. He dropped low, counting doorways by memory and instinct the same way he had a lifetime ago in Suite 318, except this time there was no woman waiting on the other side to look at him like he was an inconvenience.

There was just a staircase, half of it already burning, and a house that had stopped feeling like a house and started feeling like something with intent — something actively trying to keep him out.

"Fire department!" His voice cracked in the heat. "Call out if you can hear me!"

Nothing. Then — faint, cut off by a fit of coughing — a voice from above. "Here — I'm—"

He went up the stairs two at a time, testing each one a half-second before committing his weight, feeling the wood soften and char beneath his boots. Halfway up, a step gave out entirely and he lunged for the railing, catching himself, forcing himself not to think about how close that had come to putting him through the floor into whatever was burning underneath it.

His radio crackled against his ear, Rodriguez's voice tight with static. "Moss, truck's two minutes out. Access road's still clear but it won't stay that way. Talk to me."

"On the stairs," Derek radioed back, breathless. "Occupant confirmed, second floor. Working the extraction now."

"You've got maybe four minutes before that road closes for good. Move fast, Moss."

"Copy that."

At the top, the hallway was a solid wall of black smoke, visibility down to nothing. He dropped to his hands and knees, feeling along the wall, following the thread of a voice that had gone quiet again.

His glove found a door. Locked, or jammed, or simply swollen shut from the heat — it didn't matter which. He drove his shoulder into it twice before it gave.

An elderly woman lay collapsed just inside, half-propped against an overturned dresser, one hand still curled tight around the strap of a leather satchel pressed to her chest like she'd rather burn than let go of it. Blood ran from a cut above her eyebrow where the exploding window had caught her. Her lips had gone the wrong color.

"I've got you." Derek got an arm under her, pulling her up against his chest, feeling how light she was, how little strength was left in the grip she still had on that bag. Her breathing came shallow and wet, the kind of sound that told him they had less time than he wanted to believe. "I'm getting you out. Stay with me, can you hear me?"

Her eyes fluttered open — pale, unfocused, fighting hard to land on his face and mostly failing. "The — the papers—"

"We'll worry about the papers later. Hold on to me and nothing else." He kept his grip tight on the strap she refused to release, deciding it was easier to carry the bag with her than to fight a dying woman for it while the ceiling came apart above them.

He got her over one shoulder as gently as the moment allowed and started back toward the stairs, and that was when the ceiling behind them let go — a section of it collapsing in a shower of sparks and burning insulation, cutting off the hallway they'd just come through.

Derek didn't slow down to consider the noise. He found the window at the end of the hall — already partially blown out from whatever had happened before he arrived — and made a decision he didn't have time to second-guess.

"This is going to hurt," he told the woman, not sure if she could even hear him. "Hold on."

He kicked the remaining glass clear, got them both through the frame, and dropped them onto the porch roof below in a controlled fall that was mostly controlled and mostly a fall. Pain lit up his already-injured leg like a struck match. He didn't stop moving. He got them both off the porch roof and onto the ground, staggering the last few feet away from the house as a low, groaning roar announced the second floor giving way entirely behind them.

The truck Rodriguez had promised skidded to a stop twenty feet away, headlights cutting through the smoke, and hands were suddenly pulling the woman out of his arms, easing her onto a stretcher.

Derek went down onto one knee in the dirt, lungs burning, leg screaming, and looked at her face for the first time in full light.

She was maybe seventy, silver hair singed at one temple, and even half-conscious there was something sharp and deliberate in her expression, something that didn't belong to a woman who'd simply been caught off-guard by a wildfire in a vacation home.

Her hand found his wrist. Her grip was startling for how little strength she had left anywhere else in her body.

"You," she rasped, staring at him with an intensity that had nothing to do with panic and everything to do with recognition. "You look just like—"

Her eyes rolled back. Her hand went slack.

"Losing her—" someone shouted, already working. "Get the mask on her, move!"