Five Firemen Carried Me Out, and Not One Will Put Me Down novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Gilles's POV

Gilles's POV

I sleep on watch in a cot in the lean-to behind the engine bay, with a radio on the shelf and a space heater that ticks.

It is the one place in Tewksbury Corners where nobody wants anything from me at three in the morning.

I was not asleep.

I was lying on my back with my hands behind my head, thinking about a hundred and four pounds.

I had set her down at last on the schoolhouse step, and she had walked past four men with her chin up.

I had gone to the sink and stood there with my hands braced.

I am forty-four.

I have been captain of this company nine years.

I know what it is to carry a person out of a building, and what it costs, and what it does not mean.

It does not mean you get to keep them.

Under all of that I was thinking about a different woman, one I had never seen.

For fourteen months a voice has talked to me from a console in Newport at three in the morning.

I know her only by the way she says "Four, Control."

Last Christmas Eve, after a chimney fire in Sheffield, I keyed the mic on the way home and said, "Merry Christmas, Control."

She said, "Merry Christmas, Four.

"Come home."

I have not told a living person that I drove the last six miles with the window down so I would not have to cry in front of my truck.

I am telling it to myself, in a cot.

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