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“Got it!” Cappy acknowledged.

Another firefighter helped her load up with an air tank and connect up her breathing apparatus.

She pointed at the new crew, all men.

“You

men with me. Let’s go.”

She led the group back to the service elevators. A young firefighter with a baby face was waiting in it. Probably a probie, Becca thought. They got stuck with all the shit jobs at a scene. In this case, the probie was the one stuck operating the elevator in EFS mode with the fireman’s key.

“Eleven,” Becca told him once they were all on board.

“Yes, Chief.”

The young man turned the key and pressed the button for the eleventh floor.

Becca had decided she’d check the situation where Putnam was and then head up to fifteen. They needed to get those civilians out of the building. If the fire had already spread up there, the window for doing that was closing rapidly.

When the elevator door opened on eleven, Becca knew right away how bad things were.

Christ!

On this part of the floor, where the service elevators were, there were no flames, thank goodness. But she could hear the fire raging elsewhere. And when a fire was this loud, that meant she was about to walk into Hell.

“Let’s go to work,” she told her small crew, leading by example by being the first one out of the elevator. They only had to turn two corners and then…wham! The heat from the inferno slammed into them. It even made Becca stagger backwards a bit.

It was a typical office building layout—an open floor plan, drop ceilings and row after row of cubicles. And it was all engulfed in flames—angry, writhing, consuming flames. The fire had grown to the point where it was no longer just a fire. It had instead become what Becca called the Burning Beast. It was a living creature now…a beast…and like all living creatures, the Burning Beast was fighting to stay alive while others were fighting to kill it.

The brigade of firefighters already up here were hard at work battling the flames. Becca could barely make them out. In all the smoke and all the steam the firefighters were like shadowy, ghostly figures moving about in some kind of murky underworld.

She turned to the fresh men she had brought up with her.

“You two, that way,” she ordered, pointing at two tall firefighters and then pointing at a gap in the brigade’s defenses. “Grab lines and relieve whoever is lowest on air.” The two men hurried off. “The rest of you,” she continued, “get down that hallway and work that one!”

She had spotted a smaller blaze burning out of what was probably an electrical closet down a side hallway. No one was on it yet.

Putnam was easy to spot because he was wearing a white battalion chief’s helmet like hers. Though they were the same rank, technically Becca was the senior officer of the two. Putnam, despite being twenty years older, had only made battalion chief a year ago, whereas Becca had held the rank for nearly three. This meant that this was her fire to command.

She hurried over to him. Putnam was in a crouch beside three firefighters who were working a hose. He was guiding their efforts to douse a blaze in what looked to be a conference room.

Crouching beside him, she tapped his shoulder.

“What’s it look like, Frank?”

Putnam shook his head.

“It’s starting to run the ceiling!” he answered, his voice slightly muffled by the respirator mask. “I don’t like it!”

That told Becca something. With his years of experience, if Putnam didn’t like the looks of how a fire was spreading, it meant trouble.

She pointed towards the hall she had sent the rest of her men down.

“What about that?” she asked.

Putnam looked.

“Must have just happened,” he replied.