In The Smoke

The woman had been hanging upside down in her seatbelt for twelve minutes, and the man holding her head kept saying so.

“Twelve minutes, Katie. You’re doing great. Twelve minutes.”

“You said ten.”

“I did. Then two more happened.”

Jack lay on his stomach in the median grass with his arms through the smashed rear window of a Honda Civic, and his hands were full of a stranger’s shoulders, and there was petrol in the air thick enough to taste at the back of his throat.

Forty minutes ago he’d been driving to the first day of the rest of his life with a pressed polo shirt on a hanger in the back seat.

He’d seen the skid marks before he saw the car.

Two black arcs peeling off the westbound lane of Highway 9 and vanishing over the lip of the median, and then the median itself, and then the Civic sitting on its roof in the wet grass like something dropped from a plane. One wheel still turning. Six-forty in the morning, sky going grey at the edges, nobody else on the road.

Jack had his father’s truck because his own car had died in April. He pulled it onto the shoulder, put the hazards on, and was halfway down the embankment before he’d worked out what he intended to do when he got there.

There was already a man inside.

Jack could see the soles of his boots sticking out of the rear passenger door, which had been forced open somehow, and the rest of him was in there in the dark with the roof lining hanging down like torn skin.

“Hey,” Jack said. “Hey—are you—”

“Do you have a phone?”

“What?”

“A phone. Do you have one.”

“Yeah.”

“Then you’re already ahead of the last guy.” The voice from inside the car was low and completely level, which struck Jack as insane, because there was a woman screaming in there. “Call 911. Tell them a single-vehicle rollover on Highway 9 westbound, mile marker forty-one, one occupant, entrapment, fuel leak. Then get in here and hold this.”

Jack made the call standing in the grass. The dispatcher asked him three questions and he got two of them right.

Then he got down on his stomach in the wet and put his head through the shattered rear window.

The car smelled like hot plastic and coolant and blood. The woman was inverted, her hair hanging straight down into the crushed roof, her arms floating loose. Blood ran up her forehead into her hairline, which was the single most disorienting thing Jack had ever seen, and he had watched his father come home from a warehouse fire with his eyebrows gone.

The man was wedged behind her with both hands cupped around her skull, elbows braced against the seat frame, holding her head off the roof lining.

He was younger than Jack expected. Black, maybe late twenties, short hair, dark T-shirt already soaked through the front with somebody else’s blood. Nitrile gloves. A small nylon bag on the grass behind him that he’d clearly grabbed from a vehicle, because who drives around with that.

“Hands,” he said, without looking up. “Here and here. Don’t move her. Take the weight, not the position.”

“I don’t—”

“You’re taking it from me in about five seconds either way, so put your hands where mine are.”

Jack put his hands where his hands were.

Their fingers overlapped for a moment, and the man’s were absolutely steady, and Jack’s were not.

“Good. Elbow into the seat post. That’s it. Your arms will start burning in a minute and you’re going to hold it anyway.”

“Okay.”

“Katie, this is—” A pause. “What’s your name.”

“Jack.”

“This is Jack. He’s holding your head now. Same as I was. Nothing’s changed.”

“Where’d you go?” the woman said. Her voice came out wrong, syrupy at the edges.

“I’m right here. I’m doing your arm now.” He was already cutting her sleeve with shears out of the nylon bag. “Katie. Tell me your daughter’s name again.”

“Maya.”

“How old’s Maya.”

“Six. She’s six.” Her eyes rolled toward Jack and didn’t land on him. “She’s at my mother’s. She’s at my mother’s, right?”

“That’s what you told me,” the man said.

“She’s at my mother’s.”

“Then she’s at your mother’s.”

Jack looked left and saw the booster seat.

Empty. Buckled. Hanging upside down beside him with a granola bar wrapper still stuffed in the side pocket, and for about half a second his entire body went cold and hollow, and then he understood, and the relief was almost as bad.

“Hey.” The man’s voice, sharper. “Jack. Look at me.”

Jack looked.

“You’ve got her head. That’s your job. That’s your whole job. Don’t do any other job.”

“Yeah.”

“Say it back.”

“I’ve got her head.”

“Correct.”

Jack held.

His arms started burning around ninety seconds in, exactly as promised.

The medic—Jack had decided he was a medic somewhere in the last minute, because nobody talks like that unless somebody has trained the panic out of them professionally—worked through the woman’s arm, then her collarbone, then her ribs, narrating everything he did in a flat voice about two degrees warmer than a weather report.

“Katie, I’m pressing here. Tell me if that’s sharp.”

“That’s sharp.”

“Thank you.”

“Am I dying?”

“No.”

“You’d say that anyway.”

“I’ve said a lot of things this morning, and that one’s true.” He shifted, and his shoulder pressed into Jack’s, and Jack felt the whole body of him go tense for a moment before it relaxed again. “Jack. Smell that?”

“Petrol.”

“How long?”

“Since I got here.”

“Getting stronger or staying the same?”

Jack made himself breathe in properly, which was an unpleasant thing to volunteer for.

“Stronger.”

“That’s my read too.” The medic didn’t speed up. He didn’t slow down either. “Okay. New situation. If that finds an ignition source, we are not going to have a conversation about it first. You’ll feel it before you hear it. If that happens, you let go of her head and you get out backwards, and you do not stop to be brave, because you and I cannot lift a car and neither of us dies for a spine we can’t protect anyway.”

“I’m not leaving her in a burning—”

“You are, if I say.”

“I’m not.”

The medic finally looked at him properly. Dark eyes, blood on his cheekbone that wasn’t his, and an expression that Jack could not read at all, which was novel, because Jack could usually read anybody on sight.

“What’s your last name, Jack.”

“Collins.”

Something crossed the man’s face and left again.

“Sirens,” he said.

Jack hadn’t heard them. Now he did, thin and far off up the eastbound lanes.

“Six minutes out, maybe. Katie, you hear that? That’s for you.”

“That’s for me,” she repeated.

“Say her daughter’s name to me again,” the medic said quietly, to Jack, not to her.

“Maya.”

“When they get her out, she’s going to ask for Maya, and she’s going to ask again, because her head’s not filing anything. Answer her every time as though it’s the first.”

“Okay.”

“Every time.”

“I said okay.”

The engine crew got there first, then the ambulance, and the whole thing changed shape in about two minutes.

Two firefighters cribbed the car with wedges Jack hadn’t known existed. A third laid a charged line across the grass without being asked, and Jack understood, watching him, that this man had smelled the fuel from the top of the embankment.

Somebody’s hands replaced Jack’s on Katie’s head, and Jack backed out into the daylight on his elbows with his forearms shaking so badly he couldn’t make a fist.

He sat down hard in the grass.

Behind him the medic was standing at the back of the ambulance giving handover, and Jack listened to it because it was the most competent noise he’d ever heard a human being produce.

“Katie Alvarez, thirty-four, unrestrained—no, restrained, correction, restrained, single-vehicle rollover, inverted approximately fifteen minutes. GCS thirteen and drifting. Obvious deformity left humerus, tenderness left lateral ribs seven through nine, no flail, breath sounds equal on arrival, radials present bilaterally. She’s been asking about her daughter every ninety seconds and not retaining the answer, so I’d call that a head injury and treat her like one.”

“You on shift?”

“No.”

“You out of Eastgate?”

“Not anymore.”

The paramedic on the ambulance didn’t ask a follow-up. She wrote it all down.

Jack sat in the wet grass and watched them slide a board in, and watched a woman’s blood-matted hair come out of the dark of that car into the light, and thought: this is the job.

Not the version his grandfather told at Christmas. Not the version on the wall at Station 12.

This one.

He was still sitting there when the man walked past him, peeling off his gloves, balling them inside out with a flick of his wrist that suggested he had done it ten thousand times.

“Hey,” Jack said, scrambling up. “Hey—hold on.”

The man kept walking toward a battered grey pickup on the shoulder.

“You were—that was—” Jack ran out of sentence and grabbed for another one. “I don’t know your name.”

“You don’t need it.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“It’s the one you’re getting.” He opened the driver’s door and threw the nylon bag across into the footwell. “Wash your hands before you touch your face. You’ve got blood in the beds of your nails and you’re going to forget it’s there.”

“Are you serious? You’re just—”

The door shut.

The pickup pulled out and was gone up Highway 9 with its indicator on, obeying the speed limit, which for reasons Jack couldn’t explain annoyed him more than everything else combined.

He was fifty minutes late.

He’d changed in the truck at a service station outside the city and scrubbed his hands under a tap until the water ran clear, twice, and there was still a rust-coloured crescent under the nail of his right thumb that would not shift.

Briar City Fire Academy sat behind a chain-link fence on ten acres of concrete, and the first thing anybody saw coming through the gate was the training tower: seven storeys of scorched grey block with hose still hanging off the fourth floor like something had gone badly there recently.

Jack stood in front of it with a duffel over his shoulder and let it land on him.

Third generation. His father had stood here. His grandfather had stood somewhere like it.

Forty-four names on the intake list. His father had told him the number that graduates, and had told him it as though it were reassurance.

Inside, the corridor smelled like floor wax and old smoke. A whiteboard by the dorm stairwell had ROOM ASSIGNMENTS printed across the top in marker, and the whole intake under it in two columns.

Jack ran his finger down the C’s.

214 — COLLINS, J. / WILLIAMS, T.

Two beds. Two desks. One sink, presumably, because his father had described the room once and made it sound like a punishment for a crime nobody remembered.

He was still looking at it when he registered that somebody had come up beside him and stopped, close, reading the same line.

Jack turned his head.

A dark T-shirt. Blood dried in a dime-sized spot below the collar that its owner clearly hadn’t found yet.

“You,” Jack said.

The man didn’t take his eyes off the board.

“Two hundred and fourteen,” he said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”