"Yeah, fine," Mike yelled. "Your cooking was a little off this morning, that's all!"
"My cooking is never off, you asshole!" I yelled back with a grin. "It's your pansy ass stomach that's incapable of making even the slightest change! From now on, I'm gonna make you plain oatmeal with fruit."
"Aww, fuck off, Connor." Mike grinned as he turned on the siren and pulled out of the firehouse.
He drove like a bat out of hell down Jackson and pulled up to the fire less than five minutes later. I wondered what was going on, but then got busy hooking up the hose and getting ready to go in and forgot to ask.
"Vangel, don't go in till Chief gets here," I yelled as Victor shouldered his axe and headed for the door taking the new probationary firefighters with him.
"Fuck you, Connor," he said, waving me off. "I've been doing this job longer than you've been wishing you could do it."
"It's not safe, you dumbass," I said loud enough for him and the probationary candidates to hear me then turned back to helping Danny get the hose ready.
The next thing I knew, Victor was at the side door to the warehouse knocking the handle off the door with his axe. There was a momentary silence before the familiar woosh.
"GET AWAY FROM THAT DOOR!" I shouted as the air entered the building and fed the flames. Suddenly, there were flames shooting out of the door and windows shattering as the intensity of the heat that had been trapped inside the warehouse struggled to escape.
Victor jumped to the side, but the two probies behind him didn't have the reflexes that he'd developed and were quickly engulfed in flames.
"Hose! WATER!" I shouted at Danny who cranked the hydrant and sent water shooting out of the nozzle. I pointed the hose at the probies and doused them as I pushed them back a good ten feet. Neither one was burned, or even hurt, but they were both shaken by the close call.
"Get back to the truck," I said, motioning toward the engine. "Just sit there and wait for Chief to tell you what to do next. You got it?"
Two heads bobbed in unison as they moved back to the back of the engine.
"Vangel, you son of a bitch, you almost got the probies killed!" I shouted as I pulled on my mask and prepared to enter the building.
"They need to get some on-the-job training sometime," he shouted back. "Don't be such a pussy, Connor!"
"Asshole," I muttered into my mask. Danny nodded at me as if to say he understood and we headed inside. The entire building was in flames, and I could hear people yelling in the back of the room. They'd gone into the back room to escape the flames, but it didn't have a way out and now they were trapped. The building was a textile mill, so there was plenty of material to be burned as the fire leapt from bolts of cloth and machinery used to sew enormous rugs.
"There's a shit load of flammable stuff here," I shouted at Danny as we sprayed the room, trying to get the flames under control enough to get to the people who were trapped. "Be careful, Newsome! Hold the hose, I'm gonna spray it all down."
Danny saluted me as held onto the hose and helped me guide it toward the worst parts of the fire. The rest of the guys were working their way across the floor looking for those who might have been trapped under the tables or injured by the explosion. Mike signaled that he'd found someone, and moments later, he pulled a small girl out from under the table. She couldn't have been more than fifteen, if that. He gave me a "what the fuck?" look as he carried her small body out to the waiting paramedics.
"They're in here! They're in here!" Victor shouted as he pried open a door that had been sealed shut by the intense heat.
"VANGEL, LOOK OUT!" I shouted as he slammed his axe into the door handle and pried the door open. There was a wave of air that cut across the sewing floor and then sucked the fire back into the room before everything exploded. Machinery went flying, and I could see the flames spreading up the walls that hadn't yet been ignited.
Overhead,
I heard the sound of cracking wood and looked up to see a large portion of the roof being pulled back by the guys from the ladder. They were venting the fire and looking for the trapped workers, so I aimed the hose at the area where Victor had opened the door and moved forward with Danny right behind me.
"Stay close!" I shouted over my shoulder and felt Danny pat my shoulder to let me know he would. The flames on the far side of the warehouse refused to die no matter how much water we poured on them, and I knew we were running out of time.
Victor had recovered from the blast and was now moving through the warehouse hacking wet equipment out of our way as Danny and I did our best to quell the flames. The guys above us sliced holes in the rest of the ceiling and vented the smoke in the hope that it would keep the oxygen flowing to the people trapped in the back room.
It was almost an hour before we were able to get the fire under control and access the back room. What we found there stunned us all into silence. The workers had all crowded into the small back room that was now filled with soot and ash. Two people were groaning and coughing, but the rest were still, and as we felt for pulses, we came up empty.
"Dammit!" I growled as I walked out of the room and slammed my fist against the doorframe yelling, "This is all your fault, Vangel! You're recklessness cost these people their lives! You're a menace!"
"Me? It's my fault that a bunch of illegals are dead in the back room of a sweat shop?" he shouted. "I don't think so, Connor!"
"You slammed your axe into that door and set off the explosion!" I yelled. "You're careless and dangerous! You could have gotten us all killed!"
"But I didn't," he shot back. "I vented the heat and got us closer to the back room, so I'd be careful about how you go spinning the story, Connor."
"Oh, I'm going to tell the truth, Vangel," I said. "Unlike you, I still value it."