Chapter 9: Smoke

"Exam room one," I said. "There's a patient in exam room one."

I was already off the porch.

The old stray woman I'd admitted Saturday had pneumonia in both lungs.

She was on oxygen.

Oxygen and fire.

Lucille's truck keys were on the nail inside the door.

I grabbed them.

Lucille woke up in her armchair and said, "What."

Then she smelled the smoke through the open door and was out of the chair before I could answer.

Stellan was already in the passenger seat when I got in.

"Get out," I said.

"Drive."

I drove.

Lucille rode in the truck bed because there wasn't time to argue about it.

We came down Main Street at seventy.

The hospital's back lot was full of orange light.

Smoke rolled out of the basement windows along the ground, low and black, and the glass in two of them had burst.

A security guard was standing by the loading dock with a fire extinguisher he hadn't used.

The fire engine from the human station was still a siren somewhere across town.

I was out before the truck stopped rolling.

"Doc, you can't..." the guard said.

I went past him and through the loading dock doors and down the back stairs.

The heat met me on the third step.

The smoke was thick in the stairwell, gray going black.

Under it was another smell, sweet and sharp.

Gasoline.

I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and went down on my hands and knees, where the air was thinner.

The basement corridor was burning at the far end, by the supply room.

Flames were walking along the ceiling tiles.

Exam room one was ten feet from the stairs.

I crawled to it and shoved the door open.

The old woman was sitting up in bed with the oxygen tubing in her nose and her eyes huge and wet in the dark.

"Doc," she said. "I couldn't find the door."

"I've got you."

I turned off the oxygen at the wall and pulled the tubing off her face.

She weighed maybe ninety pounds.

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