I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Crawlspace

I clipped the pager to my belt and didn't take it off for nine days.

I wore it to the shower and set it on the soap shelf.

I slept with it on my stomach.

It went off at 2:14 in the morning on a Thursday.

The sound was like a smoke alarm having a panic attack.

I was out of my bunk before I was awake.

Boots, pants, suspenders, down the pole. Emory had made me practice it forty times.

The engine was already rumbling in the bay with the doors going up.

"Structure fire," the captain said from the front seat. "Cabin, Chena Ridge, owner on scene."

Emory slid into the seat across from me and checked the straps on my mask without asking.

"You're on me," he said. "You don't go anywhere I don't go. You don't touch anything I don't tell you to touch."

"Okay."

"Say it back."

"I'm on you. I don't touch anything."

"Good."

The cabin was at the end of a long gravel driveway between black spruce.

Half of it was already burning.

The attached woodshed was fully involved, and the fire was crawling along the roof toward the main room.

The heat hit me from sixty feet away.

A woman in pajamas and rubber boots was standing in the driveway, screaming.

Not at the fire.

At the cabin.

"She's under there! She's under there!"

The captain got to her first.

"Ma'am. Who's under there?"

"My dog! She went under the porch when the alarm started, she always goes under the porch, she won't come out!"

I looked at the porch.

It ran along the front of the cabin, on the far side from the shed.

There was a gap underneath it, maybe a foot and a half high, with lattice nailed over most of it.

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