The inside of the barn was worse than the outside, as I suspected. The back wall was engulfed completely, the fire eating through the old timber with fierce appetite. Smoke rolled low along the rafters.
Falon was at the last stall.
I could see her silhouette. She and Duke, the Shire, were on their way out. She’d managed to get her wet shirt over his head and was leading him blindly. He threw his head and picked her up off the ground, but settled back down, sort of.
"Duke, baby, I've got you." I heard her coo when I got closer.
The horse was enormous. Duke was a draft, weighing close to two thousand pounds of pure, terrified muscle.
“Bo,” I heard her say when I got to his other side.
She had one side. I had the other. Both of us were talking to him in low voices, urging him to trust us.
Duke's feet pounded deep and heavy as he walked.
We moved him toward the door together. Another crash from behind us was the back wall giving up a section of itself. Duke lurched, and Falon shushed him until we made it to the doors.
We got him through, and she grabbed her shirt, and we both let go of the halter, and Duke bolted.
He ran for the fence line and didn't stop until he hit the other horses, and even then, he kept moving, circling and blowing, tail flagged in fear.
Falon had her hands on her knees.
I stayed close but gave her a beat as the adrenaline ran and the body caught up to the fact that it was over.
Then I squeezed her shoulder once. "You okay?"
"Yeah." She’d been breathing smoke for a bit. Her voice was rough. "Yeah."
Mason had made it to the barn while Falon and I were still in there, and had already pulled his gear from his truck bed. Levi had the gate between the properties open, moving the horses out of the way so the trucks could get in without hurting them. Austin had eyes on the structure, reading it the same way I was.
I looked at the barn.
The volunteer crew was pulling up. Four trucks. Everwood ran on a ghost crew, but volunteers made up most of the department and had been for 30 years. Men and women, all happy to help. The fire chief was directing the hose setup, and Mason fell in beside him. Mason knew fire the way he knew everything else in this town.
Falon sat in the back of Mason’s truck in the care of her parents, and I went to work.
The next forty minutes were controlled chaos. The smooth operation of the fire response focuses water on the hot spots, provides ventilation at the roofline to pull the smoke, and protects the standing walls from the spread. The horses were out, and the structure was a loss, but the horses and Falon were fine, and that mattered the most.
While I worked, I thought of what I almost lost. When I was overseas, Falon had always been on my mind. She was the reason I had enlisted. Yeah, I did it with Tyler, but our motives were very different. He wanted to make a dent in the world. I wanted to escape heartache and hoped that training and distance would help me find perspective, and it did. But as I expected, every close call, every almost, they all reminded me that if something did ever happen, then Falon would never know.
Somewhere in the middle of it, John Jenkins appeared.
He'd come from the far pasture in his truck, face white, moving through the yard with a stunned gait and confusion. I watched him count the horses. Once. Twice.
He crossed the yard and spotted me, making a beeline for me.
His hand was shaking when he held it out. He’d been crying.
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you, son."
I took his hand. Shook it. Looked him in the eye.
I was about to correct him.
It wasn't me.Falon got four of them out before I arrived.She went in five times.
But John Jenkins was sixty-eight years old, and his barn was half gone, his wife was crying at the fence, his horses were alive, and the man in front of him was the one he found first. He was just happy we were all here.
