Chapter 21: Twelve Minutes

Ansel's POV

We reached the farmhouse in three minutes.

Fire had taken the front porch and was climbing the stairs inside.

A woman stood at a second-floor window with a girl of about six in her arms, screaming for someone to catch her.

I dragged my turnout coat out of the truck bed, and then Dalton's, and threw his across the hood.

He was already into it.

"Grandfather's on the ground floor," I said. "Back bedroom."

"I'll take him."

"The back door's a long way round."

"Then I'll run." He pulled on his helmet. "You take the window, Lieutenant."

He said it plainly, with no edge, and then he was gone around the side of the house.

There was a ladder lying in the long grass beside the barn, old and wooden and too short.

I carried it to the porch roof, on the side the flames had not reached, and set it with a bang against the wall.

"Hand her down!" I shouted. "Come to the glass!"

The woman kicked out the screen with her bare foot and passed me the girl through the window.

The girl clung to my neck, small and hot and rigid with fear.

"Don't let go of me," she said.

"I won't."

I took her down the rungs, and a neighbor who had come running across the field caught her at the bottom.

Then I went up again for the mother.

She climbed out with a burn along her forearm and her hair singed, and she did not look down once.

From the back of the house came a crash of glass.

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