Page 94 of Burn

When she realizes I’m staring at her, she smiles and says, “I said all of it.”

So. Fucking. Gone.

Stew

Adrian

“McCoy comes back in a week,” Donovan says as we walk back into the station.

The guys erupt into cheers behind us.

“Fuck yeah! About time!” Harrington shouts.

The kitchen smells incredible, and my stomach growls as I stalk over to the stove. There’s a giant pot of stew, and when I reach for the wooden spoon, Donovan slaps my hand.

I slowly turn to face him, blinking in disbelief. “Okay, bitch. Relax.”

“No one else wants you polluting this with your fucking cooties. Set the table, it’s almost ready.” I chuckle as I pull a stack of bowls from the cupboard. Harrington grabs napkins, and Thorne grabs the cutlery from a drawer.

We pull up a seat, waiting for the last guy to come inside. The razzing is instant when Keaton steps into the kitchen and heads to the sink to wash his hands.

“Your world, man. We’re just living in it,” I taunt.

Donovan follows up with, “Please, take your time, we love cold stew.”

Keaton takes his time, soaping his hands twice, then stepping to the stove to dry them on a hand towel. This kind of shit is why I love the fire services. Outside of the constant adrenaline rush, this camaraderie is what I live for. It’s so similar to the constant jokes exchanged in the hockey change room, and it keeps us sane with all the horrible shit we see on the daily.

Keaton joins us at the table, and the guys all dig in. Donovan is buttering a piece of bread when he asks, “How was the call?”

Thorne is in the middle of a mouthful of stew and chokes on a laugh, sending stew spraying across the table. The room erupts in laughter, and Donovan shifts his eyes across the table, looking perplexed and intrigued.

“Yeah, Thorne, how was the call?” I snicker into a glass of water.

He sets his spoon down, leans back in his chair, and rubs his eyes. “Yuck it up, you fuckin’ clowns. I’m traumatized for life by probably the most haunting scene I’ve ever walked in on. I am not okay.”

Keaton leans over, slapping his hand on Thorne’s shoulder, and says, “You sure that’s why you’re not okay? Or are you just positively green with envy?”

“That’s fucked, and you know it.” Thorne sounds genuinely distraught, and it causes the rest of us to laugh even harder.

The call came in about an hour ago: VSA —vital signs absent — in a retirement apartment down the road. This is not an uncommon call, given that the building’s minimum age is sixty-five. Donovan was in the middle of dinner, and a couple of other guys were doing training, so we took a smaller crew. When we arrived, I sent Thorne in first, and he radioed out that the guy was dead, but he didn’t know how to proceed.

Thorne is an excellent firefighter, so I was immediately concerned when I heard him say he didn’t know what to do — until we walked into the apartment. We found him standing in the bedroom door, hands on his hips, head cocked to the side. Keaton and I had stepped in behind him and stuck our heads over his shoulders to see what had him tripping over himself.

Without question, the guy was dead. He had been in bed when he expired and wound up awkwardly hanging over the edge of said bed. Head toward the ground, legs on the bed. I asked Thorne about the issue, and he nudged the guy with hisboot. The entire body had shifted, locked tight in full rigor. The guy was big, so much bigger than most of the seniors we helped, and the issue was that he needed our help to move him.

“So,” Keaton speaks in an animated tone. “We all stepped in to pull this guy off the bed. Liberty and I step up to grab his shoulders, our friend Thorne here grabs his hips.” Keaton stops speaking when he’s overcome with laughter. His shoulders shake, and tears shine in his eyes.

Thorne, on the other hand, looks like he might throw up.

I chime in, “He was a big fucker, and when we finally managed to lift him off the bed and flip him over, Thorne was front and center with his very… engorged dick. The blood all pooled there, and it was easily the biggest dick I’ve ever seen.”

Donovan laughs. “That says a lot. We’ve all seen your dick, Liberty.”

“It was fucking purple, and it hit my arm!” Thorne shouts, not seeing the humor in any of this.

“We get him on his back, and his legs are still bent, he’s in this weird ninety-degree angle, and his dick flops onto his stomach. It nearly hit him in the face.” Now I’m laughing, barely able to get the words out.

Thorne pales, pushes his bowl away, stands, and storms out of the kitchen. We finish our meal, laughing about the entire scene because if we can’t laugh about the shit we see, then it’s too real. Too terrible.