Free Burning Down the House by Russell Wangersky Page A

never have another call that takes you past that property again, so that it lives on forever in your head as a crazy quilt of dislocated pieces sewn onto the same blanket.
    Inside, the house was like many serious fires. Downstairs, the walls had a reverse tide line of smoke stains, soot-black near the ceiling and getting lighter as the smoke had crept down the walls, although the air was almost clear by then—windows broken out upstairs were wicking the smoke away up the stairwell, the heat creating its own powerful updraft. The rooms had a kind of toppled, windswept disorder; things knocked crooked or tipped over, the couch at an awkward angle with its legs bunching the carpet, and light-shadowed spaces on the wall where pictures had briefly blocked some of the smoke before falling from the heat.
    Things take on their own lives in the heat of a fire. It’s easy to imagine that all the pictures would do the same thing, but often there are three or four whose frames curl like animals twisting to escape the heat, and they pop themselves away from the wall and break on the floor. If you’re crawling towards them in the smoke when they fall, you stop and call out, wondering if there’s someone out there in front of you, knocking things over. You crawl faster forwards.
    There were shelves where the top row of books had burned but, lower down, others sat untouched. Something plastic on the top shelf of one bookcase had started to turn to soup, and then reconstituted itself as a sooty and black-specked blob, its original definition gone.
    The stairs had a red-patterned runner up the centre. The edges of the steps were white, and I could see the yellow of the hose clearly, feel each heavy, wood-denting thump as the brass coupling between hose lengths struck the wood through the runner. It was hotter upstairs, oven-hot and steam-wet. So quickly in a fire you feel the sweat gathering into a thick runnel and streaming down the hollow of your spine, soaking the back of your shirt and sticking the cloth to your skin.
    At first the heat is gentle and body-warming, but with each upward step it becomes closer to a claustrophobic baking, a stultifying, strength-sapping heat that makes every step difficult, especially with fire gear and air tanks. On top of that, there’s the awkward struggle to turn the single-minded water-filled hose in directions it never wants to go, pulling it around corners while its taut curves fill every space from edge to edge like a huge overfed snake. The couplings catch on newel posts and door frames and always take an extra, draining tug to move.
    By then the fire was mostly in the back two upstairs bedrooms. There were already other firefighters from different departments working downstairs, crews from Aylesford and New Minas. Out front, the big, slow water tankers from Kentville and PortWilliams were pulling up, old air-driven sirens and big dome lights. The tanker, slow and steady, is always the last thing you dress up.
    Dave Hennessey and I were paired up with the hose, and we moved along the hall and knocked down the fire in the back, sweeping water across the burning, charcoaled two-by-fours where the wallboard had burned away. The paper burned off both sides of the Gyproc, and the white core fell away in dirty white mounds, but the nails stayed in place, marching in stub-headed lines up the burning two-by-fours.
    As the fire got heavier, or at least as we got closer to it, the combination of steam and smoke filled in down to the floor. We were moving around by touch, wrapped tight in the dark.
    Afterwards, the fire out and the smoke lifting to a thin haze, we moved slowly, overhauling the hot spots and salvaging whatever possessions we could. I looked out through the bubble of my mask with a kind of absent detachment, set apart somehow, as if I thought the fire and the damage couldn’t affect me. In a fire, no part of your body, not even your eyes, is supposed to be in direct contact