“Would that make the power and phones go
down?”
“No . . . shouldn’t.”
“And there are other fires. At least four,
judging by the smoke.”
Joe peered at the sky. “Yeah. Looks like
they’re a ways off. In Waterloo, maybe.”
I tried to sit up. The motion triggered a
coughing spasm—dry, hacking coughs, every one of them setting
off a sharp pain in my head. By the time my coughing fit passed,
the headache was threatening to blow off the top of my head.
“You want some water?” Joe asked. “Yeah,” I
wheezed.
“We should take you to the hospital,” Darren
said again, as Joe trotted back across the street toward their
house.
I closed my eyes again, which helped the
headache some. The water Joe brought me helped more. I chugged the
first bottle and sipped the second. Joe left again—said he was
going to find batteries for their radio. Darren stood beside me,
and we watched the firefighters work.
They’d strung two hoses through a window at
the side of the house. All four of the firefighters were inside
now, doing who-knew-what. The hoses twitched and jumped as water
blasted through them. Pretty soon the flames shooting out the roof
died down. I heard sizzling noises, and the smoke pouring out the
windows turned from an angry brown to white as the fire
surrendered.
Two firefighters climbed out a window. One
jogged to the truck and got two long, T-shaped metal pry-bars. The
other guy walked over to me.
“Are you okay? Having any trouble
breathing?” he asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Good. Look, normally we’d call a paramedic
and the Red Cross truck to get you some help, but we can’t even
raise dispatch. You got anyone you can stay with?”
“He can stay with us,” Darren said. “Till we
can get hold of his family, anyway.”
“That okay with you, kid?”
“Yeah, fine.” I’d have preferred to see Mom’s
minivan roaring up the street, but Joe and Darren were okay. They’d
lived across the street from us forever.
“The fire’s pretty much dead. We’re going to
aerate some walls and do a little salvage work. Make sure you stay
out of the house—it’s not stable.”
“Okay. What started it?”
“I don’t know. Dispatch will send an
investigator out when we reach them.”
“Thanks.” I wished he knew more about what
was happening, but it didn’t seem polite to say so.
“Come on,” Darren said. “Let’s get you
cleaned up.”
I struggled to my feet and plodded
across the street alongside Darren. The sun had gone down; there
was a hint of orange in the west, but otherwise the sky was a
gloomy gray. No lights had come on. About halfway across Darren’s
yard, I stopped and stared at the white steam still spewing from my
partly collapsed home. I put my hands on my knees and looked at the
grass. A numb exhaustion had seeped into every pore of my body,
turning my muscles liquid, attacking my bones with random aches. I
felt like I’d been sparring with a guy twice my size for an
hour.
Darren rested his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll
be all right, Alex. The phones will probably be back up tomorrow,
and we’ll get your folks and the insurance company on the line. A
year from now, the house will be as good as new, and you’ll be
cracking jokes about this.”
I nodded wearily and straightened up,
Darren’s hand still a comfortable weight on my shoulder.
Then the explosions started.