It's a Wonderful Fireman: A Bachelor Firemen Novella (The Bachelor Firemen of San Gabriel) Read Free Page A

truck came to a stop, everyone got busy. Mulligan jumped out of the rig, then stashed his breathing apparatus on the ground while he set chock blocks behind the tires and lowered the ground jacks that would stabilize the aerial ladder. While Fred got the aerial into position, Mulligan grabbed a chainsaw from inside the rig. He donned his breathing apparatus, set his face mask into place, then swung himself onto the roof of the truck.
    He squinted through smoke-laden air at the aerial, which made a bridge from Truck 1 to the roof of the strip mall. Inside the building, the fire howled like an injured creature, like a wild, mocking witch ready to wreak fury on the world. Mulligan was not a religious man, but he muttered “Lord, help us” under his breath. Throngs of civilians clustered around the edges of the parking lot, gawking and taking photos or videos. Fire was photogenic, no doubt about it.
    Mulligan tightened his grip on his chainsaw and swung one-handed up the aerial. It took a lot of muscle power to hump ninety pounds of gear up a ladder using only one hand. Thank you, free weights. Fred, Skeet, and One followed him up the aerial, while Ace grabbed a rotary saw and crowbar and headed to the front door to provide forcible entry for the engine company.
    The ferocious heat of the flames cooked the air, sending it in weird little currents and swirls. Mulligan had obsessively studied the science of fire because he’d grown up with no education, and a burning curiosity about anything and everything consumed him. He’d spent hours and days and weeks learning how to read smoke. He’d practiced with old video footage from Channel Six News. Pop in a tape, watch the smoke. How much, how thick, how fast, what color? He’d picked the brains of veteran firefighters who’d been on thousands of firegrounds. No one, no one at Station 1 could read smoke as well as he could.
    As he climbed the ladder, he automatically analyzed the information he gleaned from the storefront window and smoking cracks in the building. The black, turbulent smoke moving at such high velocity meant the fire was very hot and very close—a heavy fire load. It would be impossible to tell more about the materials being burned by the fire because a strip mall like this would contain a huge variety of substances. The large quantity of heavy black smoke, its velocity, and its thinness told him that if they didn’t ventilate this thing soon, it would flash. It hadn’t quite reached the “black fire” stage he’d seen only a few times, in which black snakes of smoke curled back toward the fire. But if he didn’t release some of the superheated air inside Under the Mistletoe, the heat would radiate back on the fire and the entire “box” would become so hot that every surface would combust.
    No firefighter could survive a flashover, not even in full bunker gear. The truck company’s job was to make a heat hole to keep that from happening.
    Mulligan reached the edge of the roof and stepped onto the blistering asphalt tile surface. His blood pounded in his ears, telling him to hurry, but not make any mistakes. They needed to get this done, then get the hell off the roof. Sounding with his roof kit and stepping gingerly along the main beam line, he found his spot between the rafters. With his chainsaw, he made a head cut—the first cut—then turned the corner and made another, longer line, so he had two sides of a rectangle. Fred worked from the other side until they’d chainsawed out a rectangle of plywood. One and Skeet used their rubbish hooks to pop the boards, stepping nimbly back when black smoke attacked the open air in tumultuous billows.
    They all watched for a brief second, then headed back to the ladder. Mulligan gestured for the others to go first. That was how he liked it; he’d claimed that role when he first joined the truck company. Skeet went down first, then One, then Fred, the crew stepping quickly from rung to rung down the steel