The Fire Chief’s Firsthand Account of Bravery Under Fire
“The long and short of it is: I should have been wearing the gas mask. It was my fault and I take full responsibility. I’d fail as an example to you if I didn’t own up to that right off the bat. The no-good mutineers who left me to die under a pile of smoldering wreckage, they’re not to blame. There’s an expression: in the end, a man’s left with the face he deserves. This face is mine, because I was a goddamn fool, and anyone who follows me should learn from my mistake.
“Always keep your Tarnhelm on.
“Six months ago, when the Gemini Building burned—the east tower—I was there with the first dispatch to the scene. I always took pride in leading the charge into danger. Men want to follow a leader, not a hologram of some idiot flailing around in a motion-capture suit across town. But twenty-five, thirty stories up, the laddermen behind me were moving slow. A bunch of rank, cowardly bastards. Every one among them had been caught participating in demonstrations. This was their punishment. We called it the probation squad. Usually I could motivate even the worst of the lily-livered pantywaists, rouse them to their civic duty, but on that day they wouldn’t fall in line. So I turned back, and I pulled up my gas mask to yell down the stairs.
“And that’s when I did it. I looked up. Unthinkable. Chief of the whole goddamn operation, decades of experience under my belt, and I made a rookie mistake. Just as the ceiling caved in, I looked up. The slicker did its job. Gloves too. But the mask—the mask didn’t have a chance.
“Made matters worse that I lay there for two days while the mutineers ran roughshod all over the city. Metropolitan Police Department was overfaced. You can’t shoot deserters when it’s all of them. Not enough bullets in the world. But that didn’t stop the MPD from trying, God bless ’em. It was forty-eight hours later, when city gov officially lifted conscription, that they finally found time to send a couple of patrolmen to sift through the wreckage for my corpse.
“Lo and behold, I was still kicking—what was left of me. Cheekbones shattered. Nose smashed flat. Jaw fractured in nine places. Nine. And you know how it smells when your skin cooks to a crisp? Delicious. Just like bacon. A goddamn cannibal’s delicacy. I didn’t even know how bad I looked. My eyes were fried. Hardboiled eggs. That’s why they hooked them up to these falsies. Don’t flinch, I can tap on my eyeball all I want. ’Bout as sensitive as a camera lens. Ha! Miracle of science.
“I begged to die, I’ll admit it. I’d lost my men, my face, my name. My place in the world. My faith in heroism for its own sake. I’d fought the fires for more than forty years, and I’d lost. But the chief of police is a friend of mine, and he wasn’t ready to let me shrug off this mortal coil just yet. He kept the news out of the papers that I was alive, in case someone might see fit to assassinate me in my weakened state, and sent me to recover at the same burn ward where they sent the governor’s son a few years back.
“The air hurt; when they changed the bandages it was like they were peeling off my skin. And the surgeries were brutal. When you feel bolt join bone, you have to believe it happened for a reason. For me, that reason was gone. All the painkillers in the world can’t defend you against the darkness inside your own mind. But lying in that bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, something happened—a revelation, I’d say, if I were a man of faith. Only it didn’t come from a higher power. It came from me. I figured it out: why my life’s work mattered, why it was still too soon to give up the fight. I suppose you could call it a vision.
“You see, I saw the future.
“I saw throngs in the streets, lights in the windows, money in the shops, the way it used to be when I was just a boy. I saw Empire Island restored to her former glory. And what’s more, I saw how it would happen—how, and when, and why. I went over and over it until all my doubts were gone, so when I finally rose from that bed, I rose with one purpose only: to take damn fine care of my city until her day comes again.”
The ashtray is full of used cotton swabs, unctuous now with scabby goo. Trank pops off his chin plate, indented slightly for the cleft, and peers discontentedly at the gunk inside. He takes his time wiping it out with a handkerchief.
“Prosthetics,” he grumbles. “More of an art than a science, if you ask me.”
But Ripple’s mind is working overtime. A sky full of HowFlys—streets full of life? It’s as crazy as anything from Abby’s weird religion, and yet Paxton Trank isn’t a feral teenage hermit-girl; he’s a legit authority figure, a seasoned dadster who’s seen some shit. He doesn’t sound crazy. He sounds determined…like he has a plan.
“I don’t get it. In the dream, did you slay the dragons?”
“Slay the dragons? Hell no, son. The dragons will be our salvation in the end.”
“How?”
“Because in my vision, the dragons did what they should have been doing all along.” Trank’s hydraulics shimmy inscrutably. He lowers his voice. “They protected this place. They belonged to the city.”
“Uh, you think the dragons are going to stop torching us?”
“I know it.”
“Riiiight.”
“I’ve already told too much.” Trank finishes polishing his chin, snaps it back on. “Believe what you want. But I intend to save my city from the ash bin of history. Someday soon, you’ll be able to say you played a part in that.”
Ripple nods slowly. Even if this old pro’s lost it, he made a name for himself once. Maybe Trank knows more than he’s saying; maybe he’s just an optimist. But everybody’s got to believe in something.
“I want to be the greatest fireman in the world,” says Ripple. “Do you think you can make that happen for me?”
“Not until I keel over dead.” Trank chuckles, lifting his rubberized epidermis from the table. It hangs from his hand like a tattered flag. “But you’ve got spirit. You’ll go far.”
Neither Trank nor Ripple has paid attention to Abby in quite a while. They haven’t noticed her quivering lips, her rigid, seized-up posture, or the fact that she’s barely blinked for the last five minutes. So when she abruptly rises, knocking her chair to the ground behind her and, with a single shakily extended finger, at long last points to Trank and lets loose a full-throated scream, they are too surprised to react before her eyes roll back in her head and she faints in a pile on the floor.
* * *
A ceiling of electric white. The People Machines have caught Abby. They have beamed her up into their Contraption and will never bring her home. She lies strapped to a padded table as they stand over her, faces in shadow. One of them holds a device. “This will sting a little,” he says, touching it to the bottom of her foot.