The Tall Dog of Barrow Heights | Part 4
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What triggers the narrator’s frantic drive to the fire scene?
Part four. The promise. When I finish debriefing the order, it's late. I sign the reports and hand over Torson's red book and sit through the decontamination protocols and answer the same questions from three different handlers who all pretend they aren't recording me. And it's later. By the time I get into my car and pull onto the highway, the dashboard clock reads 147 a.m. I missed it. Abigail's birthday. Nice work, I mutter. Father of the fucking year you are. But the rain starts somewhere around the bridge. Fat, heavy drops that hit the windshield like thrown gravel. I don't turn on the wipers. I let the world blur, disassociate. I'm remembering Stevenson's face as the ceiling came down. Ellison's ashes and the shape of a man.
The boy in his mother's arms, their skulls pressed together. I tell myself I didn't have a choice, that someday, when she's older, Abigail will understand why tonight's job mattered more than a birthday cake. I tell myself a lot of things on that drive. Sirens behind me. They scream past in a red and white blur, fire trucks running hot toward the east side. I watched them go in the rear view. Probably a smoke detector. Some drunk on the fifth floor cremating a frozen pizza. I'll get home to find the building evacuated, a hundred irritated tenants standing in the rain, while a board fire crew clears the alarm, and Abigail will be among them, tired, annoyed, wrapped in the quilt her mother made. Another thing to be angry about, another reason to hate me over something I can't control.
But the trucks keep coming. Three Five Then more. Engines, ladders, and ambulance. Than cop cars. The convoy thickens as I get closer, the sirens stacking on top of each other until the sound is a single, sustained wail. I crest the hill so fast my tires leave the asphalt. My breath catches. No. The apartment is engulfed in ten floors of flame, the windows blown out, black smoke churning upward in a column so thick it bolts out the streetlights for two blocks in every direction. The fire climbs from the middle floors in both directions, fast, like it's feeding on gasoline. I don't remember screeching to a stop. I don't remember leaving the car. All I remember is running, past the barricades, past the trucks, into the crowd of evacuees huddled on the
far sidewalk, faces lit orange by the blaze, blankets, bare feet, children crying. Abigail! Abigail! Are you here? I'm grabbing people, pulling them toward me, scanning every face for the one that matters. An old man in a bathrobe, a woman clutching a cat, a teenager with headphones still around his neck, staring slack-jawed at the building. She's not here.
Abigail!
Then, from above, small, raw, cracking under the weight of its own terror. Tenth floor, her bedroom window. She's leaning out, coughing, the smoke pouring around her in black curtains. Her pajamas, her hair. The ladders are up. I can see the crews working them, extending the sections, but they won't reach. Rigs are rated for seven floors, and she's on ten. I'll do it myself. I'm past the first barricade before they even see me coming. A firefighter grabs my arm. I break his grip. Another step. In front of me. I feed him an elbow, hear the crunch of a nose guard folding. The chief is shouting something about a meth lab, about a drug operation on the sixth floor, about accelerance and structural compromise, and everyone needing to stay the fuck back before.
I don't hear any of it. My daughter is in that building. My daughter. I hit the front doors at a sprint, both hands out, and throw them open. The flashover catches me full in the chest. Hits a wall of superheated air and gas detonating outward. It lifts me off my feet and throws me 15 yards across the pavement. I land on my spine, skull bouncing off asphalt. For a moment, everything is white, ringing. Then I hear it. A sound like the earth clearing its throat. I lift my head in time to see the middle of the building sag. The sixth floor collapses into the fifth, which collapses into the fourth, and the cascade travels upward. Seventh, eighth, ninth, each floor pancaking into the one below with a groan of steel and a detonation of glass.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What triggers the narrator’s frantic drive to the fire scene?
0:00–6:46
2
How does the narrator discover the building is engulfed in flames and what does he see?
6:46–9:52
3
What desperate actions does the narrator take to rescue Abigail from the tenth floor?
9:52–21:02
4
How does the confrontation with the “tall dog” unfold inside the building?
21:02–30:23