A piercing, anguished, bone-chilling scream slashed through the air, and I knew instinctively she had seen their bodies…their tiny, burnt, unrecognizable bodies. They no longer had faces or features or hair; everything had been burnt off them, leaving behind only empty shells, husks of what they had once been.
“Madness,” I muttered under my breath. “Complete fucking madness.”
“Get in the truck and wait there,” Mel ordered me.
We drove back to the station in complete silence. Usually if we’d had a successful stint, the truck was full of laughter, conversation, and exaggerated tales of our own heroic actions. But if we had lost anyone, the atmosphere was so potent with heavy emotion and sadness that you could cut it with a knife. We got to the station and then each disappeared to our separate corners to lick our wounds and get over the losses we hadn’t managed to prevent.
I was sitting by myself in one of the bunks in the residential section of the fire station when I realized the only thing that might soothe me right now was hearing Megan’s voice.
Acting on instinct, I picked up my phone and dialed her number. She answered almost immediately, and her tone was slightly panicked.
“Phil?” she said.
“Hi.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked immediately before I had even said a word.
“I… What makes you think something is wrong?” I asked.
“The fact that you’re calling me at this time while you’re on duty,” she said. “And your voice. What happened?”
“There was a fire at the tenement building on Pike. It’s the building that all the squatters live in.”
“I know the one,” she acknowledged. “Were you able to put the fire out?”
“We were.” I nodded. “But not before we lost two people.”
“Oh God,” her voice was soft and earnest. “Phil…I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything,” I told her. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“You can’t save everyone, Phil,” she told me softly. “But the point is, you tried.”
“Not hard enough.”
“Don’t do that,” she insisted. “It won’t help.”
“They were children, Megan,” I sighed. “The boy was only five, and the girl was only seven. They were tiny little kids who burned to death.”
“Phil—”
“I can still hear their mother screaming… It was the most terrible sound in the world.”
“How long until your shift is over?” Megan asked.
“Not for another eight hours,” I replied. “I won’t be home till after midnight.”
“If you don’t mind some company, I’d like to be there when you come home.”
The moment she made the suggestion, I felt better, and I could see a little light once more. “You can go a little earlier and wait for me at my apartment. The spare key is under the mat.”
“I’ll do that,” she assured me.
“You’ll be there when I get home?” I asked, desperately wanting to see her.
“I will.”
“You promise?”