This is an excerpt.
Jack woke up, startled. A scream had penetrated his dream. He rarely heard much from his neighbors—the walls of his 3rd floor walkup were thick—but he was sure he heard a scream. He closed his eyes and settled back down into bed, hoping it was just part of the dream.
The scream came again, louder. It was the scream of a mortally wounded animal.
Jack’s heart began to race. He leaped out of bed and pulled on some jeans as he stumbled through the door. He opened the door to the hallway and looked around. 3F’s door was cracked. “You all right ma’am?” he yelled at the door. The door opened wider and an older lady stuck her head out, eyes wide. “I’m … OK,” she said. “Did ya hear where that came from?” Jack asked. She pointed down the hall in the direction of 3A.
Jack ran down the hall. As he got closer, he could hear loud sobs in between the screams. It sounded like a woman, either 3A or 3B. He put his ear to 3A’s door, and tried to calm the thundering heartbeat that threatened to overwhelm his senses. He heard a loud thunk like a piece of heavy furniture smacking the ground.
“Lady you alright?” he yelled through the door as he thumped it with his fist. The door shook in response. There was silence on the other side. He banged the door again. Silence.
He stepped back. A dog was barking in 3B behind him, one of those small yippy dogs trying to sound big and mean. The guy in 3D was standing in the hall, rubbing his eyes. Something was wrong with 3A. He had to get in there.
He lifted his foot and swung it hard against the lock side of the door. It bounced off like a rubber ball. His leg lit on fire, throbbing. He yelled at the door again, this time more angry than concerned. “LADY – open the door!” Nothing.
Jack looked around, searching for anything that might help. He locked gazes with 3D. “Call the fucking landlord man – tell him to get over here,” he said. “Uh … ,” came the response. 3D rubbed his eyes again. “Just fucking DO IT man!” Jake said. 3D’s eyes got wide. He shuffled back into his apartment and the door clicked shut.
Jack was pretty sure the landlord lived uptown. At this time of night, unless he had a car, it could be a while before he got there. He needed to do something, fast. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a red shape on the wall. He snapped his head over to see what it was – a big red fire axe, encased in a glass box. That would do. He smashed the glass with his elbow and pulled out the axe.
He gripped the axe with two hands and practiced a few swings at the door. The axe felt heavy, but well balanced, and a slight curve at the end kept his hand from slipping. He pointed the axe and swung hard at the door, just above the knob. It thunked into the door, and stuck there. He pulled it out and swung again. The door crackled and a split appeared, running from the edge of the door toward the middle. He hit it again, and again. The door splintered. He could see the outline of a wall. “I’m coming to ya lady – hang in,” he said through the crack.
A few more thwacks and he made a hole big enough to reach his hand through. He stuck his arm in up to the elbow and felt for the deadbolt, found it, and turned it. Click.
Jack breathed deeply and opened the door. The hallway was dark, and shadows played off the wall as the light seeped in. He could smell something that seemed familiar. Like charcoal, but sweeter. His heart kicked up a few beats. His gut knew what it was, but his brain had blocked it out.
At the end of the hallway was a doorway, and he could see the shape of a hand sticking out. He found a switch on the wall next to the entry, and flipped it on. The hallway filled with light and burned out the shadows. He walked over to the doorway and turned his head around the corner. The smell hit him hard, and the memory came back. “Holy fuck,” he said.
~
Jack had wanted to be a firefighter for as long as he could remember, and he’d obsessed about it as a kid. Within a week of graduating high school he applied to the FDNY, and six months later he was on the job.
It was his second call out, a 2-alarm fire in a high-rise apartment building in Queens. 40 people died that day—a whole subway car of parents, kids, lovers, and friends. He was the rookie on Engine 52 and his sole job was to shadow Jim “Sully” Sullivan. Sully was a big man, not as tall as Jack but a respectable 6 feet and about twice as wide. He was a 30-year veteran who would crinkle his eyes to slits while he was talking. Usually though, he didn’t say much, and preferred using hand signals to make his point.
Sully and the crew of 52 were second on the scene. There were two guys from Engine 46 knocking in the front door, and another spraying water to keep the flames from hopping out and chewing up anyone and anything in its reach. As the engine pulled up, Sully made an X with his hands—there was no going in until a commander gave the OK. He jumped out. Jack followed. Sully headed to the back of the truck and started pulling out the soaker hose.
There was crash of breaking glass, and somebody made a whoop sound. Jack turned and saw what looked to be a man—it was hard to tell for sure because flames obscured his body—waving his arms and running out of the building. It was like a scene from a movie, except he could smell it. Fuck, he could almost taste it. Charcoal and sulphur, acrid and sweet.
Sully jumped into the truck and pulled some fire blankets from the back. He ran over to the man, knocked him down, and threw a blanket over the flames. Smoke billowed out from under the blankets, and the sulphur smell got stronger. Sully grunted and pulled the blanket back, and Jack caught a glimpse of the guy’s face. His skin looked like someone had filleted it with a knife, yet only part way, and over and over again. It just hung off, black and pink and purple and slimy looking, like a burned roast that had spoiled in the summer heat.
~
There was no question that this woman had been burned. But there was no smoke, and no heat. No evidence of fire.
Jack stepped back and leaned against the wall. He put his shirt over his face and took a deep breath, trying to calm his thumping heart without sucking in any more of that goddamned smell. Jack hadn’t been in emergency services for almost 5 years now, but the instinct to help was imprinted in his soul. He had to check her vitals and see if she needed CPR.
He crouched down and leaned over the naked woman, putting his ear close to her face, listening for breath. He was loathe to touch her skin and feel her pulse, and besides, the risk of infection with burn victims was incredibly high. He closed his eyes and tried to quiet his breath. He felt a small puff of air hit his cheek, accompanied by a low, almost imperceptible sigh. She was alive, but barely.
Jake turned back toward the hallway. “Someone fucking call the paramedics!” he yelled. “Get a fucking a bus over here!” Silence. “I know you assholes are out there,” he said. “Say ‘yes’ if you heard me, and call it in!”
“Yes.” It was tentative, almost whispered. He heard a door shut. “Mrs. Cox is calling an ambulance,” someone else said.
Jack relaxed slightly and leaned back. His quads were starting to burn. “Lady, you’re gonna be alright,” he said. Fucking bullshit, he thought.
~
“Sir, could you step aside please?”
Jack opened his eyes and looked up. He had been somewhere else—walking through a forest that he couldn’t quite place but might have been behind his parent’s house—and for a moment he thought he might have been dreaming it all. He breathed in, and the smell brought him back with a jolt. Charcoal and sulphur. The sweetness made him gag.
A paramedic was staring at him, his eyes darting back and forth between Jack and the woman lying motionless on the floor. He was a small skinny guy, with deep sockets about to swallow his eyes whole. He looked nervous.
“Yeah …. yeah,” Jack said. He stepped back and ran his hand through his short, crew-clipped hair. “She looks like she got burned pretty bad. Weird fucking thing though—no evidence of fire.”
The paramedic squinted and looked down. “Second one I seen tonight,” he said. His eyes opened a bit wider. “Last one didn’t make it to the bus.”
Another paramedic, gut hanging over his belt, came through the door with a board and a ventilator. They went to work, carefully strapping her to the board. The woman shivered, like she had just opened a window to the freezing air outside, and let out an audible sigh. A cardiac monitor began to beep rapidly, beep beep beep beep beep. “She’s in trouble,” the skinny one yelled out, “better hit it!”
The paramedics lit out of the apartment and headed toward the stairs. The elevator was out today, as it usually was. Jack followed, and then ran in front to open the door to the stairwell.
About half way down, the monitor beeped louder and faster, and then skipped on a long tone. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep … beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. “She’s fucking crashing! Get the defib!” skinny guy said. They went down faster, taking two steps at a time. Jack pushed through the exit door and out onto the street. The night was black, and the air was hot and damp.
The ambulance was on the corner, lights flashing. Jack ran up to the back and pulled the doors open. It was a feeling both strange and familiar.
The paramedics slid her into the ambulance, skinny guy in front, gut guy bringing up the rear. Skinny guy reached over to a defibrillator strapped to the side and pulled a set of leads off the side. He put the leads on the woman’s chest and leaned back. “Clear,” he said—he said it calmly, not panicked like every TV doctor always seems to be—and pressed an orange button on the defibrillator.
The woman shivered again, this time her arms jerking inward, like a wasp had stung her. *Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep … beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. *The monitor, refusing to acknowledge any change, continued its long tone.
He looked at his watch, and waited. He leaned in, put his hands on the woman’s chest, and began pushing rhythmically. After a short time he leaned back, and pressed the button again. Again the woman shivered. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep … beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
“Let’s roll,” skinny guy said. Jack slammed the doors shut, and gut guy jumped in the front. The ambulance pulled out, flashing lights punctuating the dark like fireflies.
~
Jack walked slowly up the stairs. He was trying to wrap his mind around what had just happened. There was just no fucking way that this woman was in a fire – but she was cooked like she was. It made no sense.
He shook his head. He’d seen plenty of things that didn’t make sense during his stint as a firefighter—why should this be any different?
He walked past 3A. The axe was leaning on the wall next to the splintered door. The landlord had arrived, and was staring at the door and grunting. Jack said nothing, and kept walking toward his apartment.
“Mister S!” said the landlord. In his thick Irish accent it sounded more like “master”. “Mister S!” he said again. The landlord had hard time saying Jack’s last name, Sawicki, so instead called him Mr. S. “What happened here?”
Jack waved at him without turning. “Call the fucking FDNY and ask them,” he said, and shut his apartment door.
Jack walked over to his brown leather couch and eased back into it. The leather, softened by the years, felt cool and comfortable. His put his hands behind his head, closed his eyes, and stretched his arms back. He felt a few pops in his neck, *pop pop pop *like popcorn exploding in a bag.
He was back in the forest. There was thick underbrush under his feet, and twigs and dry leaves crunched as he walked. It was dark, but looking up he could see the sun peeking through the trees, and a small clearing off in the distance, where sunlight was resting on a pile of rocks.
He opened his eyes. The blank TV hanging on his wall stared back at him. The clock on the box below it read 3:04. It was a shimmering green reminder that he was still in the same world, where a human died every second of every minute of every day. At night, at times like this, sometimes the deaths went unnoticed. People slept through it, watched TV, got drunk out of their minds, fucked. He’d been one of those people once, too oblivious to the world of pain and death to let any of it in. But now all the bodies of the dead and dying danced in his head. What’s one more? He thought. Join the fucking party, lady.
A siren screeched past his window and off into the distance. Another, and then another, followed closely behind. Jack reached for a set of headphones on the table in front of him, and snapped the end into the jack on his stereo. He settled the cans onto his ears, and the sound of Coltrane’s sax enveloped him. He lay back on the couch and closed his eyes.
~
Coltrane was gone and had been replaced a siren, loud and insistent. The siren wasn’t moving. Jack sat up and looked at the clock. 5:22. He stood and walked to the window. Two engine trucks, a ladder truck, and two ambulances were scattered along the street.
Perhaps it was innate, or from all the years on the job, but he had this desire—or perhaps more like compulsion—to follow any ambulance or fire engine or police car to see what was going down. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Mostly he needed to see. The helping part was just convenient, something that put him in places where most people weren’t allowed to go, places where the yellow tape or stern looking cops blocked the way.
He rubbed his eyes. He really needed to piss. Whatever was going down would have to wait.
He flushed the toilet and turned on the tap. The water sputtered out at first and then came in a stream. Jake put his hands under the stream, and worked up to a lather with a bar of soap. He had a small bristled brush, and scrubbed his nails with it—a habit from a short stint as an EMT.
His hands started to sting. It was mild at first, a tingle like the nerves were waking up from a deep sleep. But just as quickly as the sting had started, his hands began to burn. He cried out in pain and instinctively put his hands back under the water. The pain got worse—it felt like the water was acid—and he pulled back sharply. He grabbed a white towel that was hanging next to the sink. The towel felt like sandpaper on his hands, and the pain got worse.
He winced and dropped the towel to the floor. What used to be a white fluffy cotton towel now looked like a rag that had been used to dry a bloody piece of beef. Jack looked in disbelief at his hands. They were raw and starting to bleed, and the nerves were on fire and screaming, flooding his brain and making his vision blur. He’d never been burned even after 15 years on the job, and suddenly he knew how it felt.
His mind was occupied with the pain, but he pushed it back for a moment and tried to think. He had to rinse off his hands and cool the burning. He remembered a jug of distilled water in the fridge, which he kept for the swamp cooler in his living room. He ran to the kitchen and pulled on the refrigerator door. The pain shot through his arm, making him queasy. The jug was on the middle shelf. He pulled it out and grabbed the lid with his teeth, twisting it off and spitting it onto the floor.
He tilted the jug over his left hand. The water felt cool and immediately the pain subsided. He switched grips and doused his right hand. Relief. His brain began to spin down slightly from its former frenzied overdrive. His eyes snapped back into focus, like he had just cleaned the film off a dirty pair of glasses. He walked over to the kitchen counter, pulled open a cabinet, and fished out a ceramic bowl. He poured what was left of the jug into the bowl, rested his hands in the water, and leaned his head forward against the cabinet.