Chapter 4
The interior of the textile mill was a suffocating cavern of gray mist, glowing embers, and the sickeningly sweet smell of burning polyurethane. Visibility dropped to zero within three feet of the threshold. Vance dropped to one knee, sweeping his gloved hand across the linoleum floor until he made contact with a melted section of electrical conduit that served as an impromptu guideline.
“Engine Four, Interior, searching for Seven-Actual,” Vance muttered into his mask mic, his breathing sounding loud and hollow in the confined space of his facepiece.
The hiss of steam was deafening. Water from the exterior deck guns cascaded through holes in the charred roof rafters above, turning the superheated air into a scalding vapor bath that made every breath feel like inhaling boiling water. Vance kept low, his palms sliding along the debris-strewn floor, feeling for the heavy canvas hose lines or discarded equipment packs that marked the path of Miller’s squad.
Ten feet in, his hand struck something hard and metallic. He pulled it toward him—a steel Halligan bar, its black paint blistered and peeling from the heat. A few inches away lay a discarded air cylinder, its pressure gauge resting firmly in the red danger zone. Empty. They had drained their air tanks fighting a flashover.
“Mayday… sector… three,” a broken fragment of audio crackled through Vance’s radio channel, barely audible over the roar of the fire above.
Vance pushed forward, crawling over a mountain of collapsed shelving units loaded with scorched rolls of industrial fabric. The heat was intensifying exponentially; the chemical binders in the warehouse walls were outgassing, creating small, rolling pockets of blue flame that danced across the ceiling timbers just inches above his helmet.
“Tom!” Vance shouted into his internal comms, though he knew the sound would barely carry past his own regulator. “Tom, answer me!”
A sharp crack echoed overhead, followed by the terrifying groan of stressed structural steel. Vance threw himself flat against the floor as a three-hundred-pound section of timber crashed down just two feet to his left, kicking up a blinding geyser of white-hot ash and splintered lath. For three agonizing seconds, he lay motionless, waiting to see if the entire ceiling was coming down on top of him.
When the settling debris finally stopped shifting, Vance lifted his head, coughing as a wisp of smoke managed to breach the perimeter seal of his mask. Through the haze, a dim, pulsing amber light flickered beneath a pile of heavy corrugated metal sheeting.
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It was a personal pass-device—the motion-sensor alarm worn by every firefighter, designed to shriek a piercing electronic wail if the wearer remained motionless for more than thirty seconds. But right now, the alarm wasn’t screaming. It was emitting a slow, dying chirp, like a mechanical cricket running out of battery power in a tomb.
Vance scrambled over the wreckage, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, and began clawing furiously at the twisted metal.
