Page 59 of Single Mom's Firemen

“Watch your back!” Chase shouts.

I whirl around and see the aggressor coming. I see the fury in his eyes. But my crowbar swings out, landing across his face. Blood sprays out as he falls backward.

“What the fuck is going on here?” someone calls out from the western corner of the building. “Hey! Stop! What the hell?”

Wyatt’s voice booms from somewhere behind us. “Motherfuckers!”

He flies past me and tackles one of the remaining attackers. Another is down, courtesy of Chase, and not moving. I injured one, and a third is about to meet his maker. Wyatt just rammed into the fourth, and I heard a bone or two crackle in the process.

Actual firefighters come rushing over from the western corner to assist.

Whoever the assailants are, they decide to abandon their mission and flee. They run back up the street, peeling their equipment off and dropping it along the way. I’d like nothing more than to run after them but there’s no time.

“What the hell was that?” one of the other firefighters asks us.

“Damned if I know!” I reply. “They just came at us, out of nowhere.”

“Station 20,” Chase says. “It was on their uniforms.”

“Call one of the officers already on the scene,” Wyatt instructs the assisting firefighters. “They need to collect the jackets and anything else they dropped for evidence.”

Everything blurs into a confusing, frightening haze. “Who the fuck disguises themselves as a firefighter to attack firefighters in the middle of a fucking fire?” Chase snarls, constantly looking around. He’s in his fight mode and would like nothing more than to crush a few more skulls.

“We need a coroner for this guy,” a paramedic says after checking the fallen attacker for a pulse. “He’s gone,” he adds, pointing at an alarmingly large puddle of blood beside him. “Looks like you hit the carotid.”

“He came at me, it was self-defense,” Chase replies, blood still dripping from one end of his crowbar.

“You’ll give your statement later,” one of the seasoned firefighters cuts in. “In the meantime, we need to go back in there. The head count is still off, that’s why they sent us over here.”

“It’s a good thing we found this exit, then,” I reply with a shrug.

It’s infuriating, to say the least. We can’t yet recover from our attack because the fire is still raging and killing people inside this warehouse. Whatever that was, it was premeditated. Those guys had a purpose. An objective had to be met.

Somebody clearly wants us out of their way badly enough to pull something like that.

We need to get back to the fire. We check each other’s gear and make sure we have everything we need before heading back in. The fire is still spreading, the water helicopters are still a few minutes out, and we’re running out of time.

22

Chase

Hours pass as we work through the fire while also keeping an eye on each other’s backs.

“The idea was to get us to that part of the building,” Wyatt surmises.

We’ve practically collapsed in the back of our truck, utterly exhausted. Most of the people were safely evacuated. The death toll was around thirty the last we heard, with about three hundred injured, most from smoke inhalation. The city has been working overtime sending patients to each major hospital with a burn unit available.

It’ll be a while before they can make sense of the whole thing and figure out what happened, what started the fire in the first place.

At this point, there’s not much left for us to do. Three more fire stations sent people over to help. My brothers and I are merely resting while waiting for Holt and the other fire chiefs on scene to finish debriefing the Dallas PD. We watch in exhausted awe as the last of the flames finally die down.

The warehouse itself has been completely destroyed. It will require a controlled demolition once an investigation is completed, but the general consensus is already settled on accidental combustion, likely from faulty wiring and exacerbated by a lacking fire safety system.

“Nothing else makes sense,” Wyatt says, still thinking about the attack. “They had breathing masks and tanks, axes and crowbars, and marched right toward the building to blend in with the rest of us.”

“We were definitely the target,” I say. “But I’m still confused about how they planned it. There were a ton of firefighters here. What were they gonna do? Work side by side with fire and rescue, hoping they bumped into us?”

Eric frowns. “I’m thinking they had someone on the inside. Or they tapped into our radio line. Which can easily be done with store-bought equipment and minimal knowledge of frequencies and how they work.”

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