YELLOWJACKET - CH.14: SENSE OF A SPARK

APRIL

In my entire career, I had never seen so many fires in such a short amount of time.

It started off slow: first, a fire in a condemned trailer, then a blaze in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but that was nothing unusual given my line of work. On average, most of our calls involved traffic collisions, lift assists or even people stuck in malfunctioning elevators.

And yet just this week alone, we’d been getting fires larger than your typical kitchen accident nonstop - and they were getting progressively more intense. That morning, we were called to a fire in an office building, which was one of the bigger fires we’d dealt with since my accident. Unlike that one, nobody died or got seriously injured, and I was very thankful for this; we were used to seeing some pretty grisly things on calls, and I had to admit, the chemical fire had spooked me badly.

Of course, nobody had noticed my newfound caution except for Garrett. Since my return from the hospital, he’d been the only one checking in on me regularly, though I tried not to let my weakness show. It didn’t seem fair to burden him with my problems, especially when he was still struggling to accept his place in the food chain at the fire station.

But rather than talk to Garrett at length about the warehouse call, what ate up my attention instead was the impassioned debate the crew was having about this latest string of fires.

 

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