So I did.
Because they were right, because that’s what she’d wanted, and maybe if I’d come home, none of it would’ve happened.
Maybe Beau would still be alive.
The tears come without asking.
They fall heavily against my palms as I sit in front of the fire, my shoulders hunched, the heat blurring my vision until the flames merge.
I try to swallow it down, but it’s no use; the ache in my chest opens wide, spilling everything I’ve been holding.
I close my eyes, and when I open them, the room around me isn’t my home anymore.
I’m taken back to the second-worst day of my life.
We were on day thirty-eight of training. It was a containment drill, and it wasn’t supposed to go wrong.
The instructors had constructed a mock structure to simulate a live-fire environment. The rules were simple: containment, rescue, suppression.
I could recite them in my sleep.
Beau and I had run this drill five times before. He was in front, his voice even through the comms. “We’re good, Hayes. Just another walk in the park.”
But that hiss, that fucking hiss, changed everything.
It came from the far corner of the room, a sound that didn’t belong.
I turned toward it, saw the gauge shaking, the line trembling where it fed into the gas system.
The pressure reading plummeted, and before I could give a warning—BOOM.
A flash of light and a roar like the sky tearing apart. Heat slammed into me so hard my helmet cracked the floor when I hit. I couldn’t hear anything but ringing, the kind that drills straight into your bones.
Beau’s voice came through the static. “We gotta move, brother! Now!”
Flames consumed the room in seconds, climbing the walls and curling over the ceiling.
The temperature soared—over eight hundred degrees. We found each other through the thick smoke, dropping to our bellies, crawling blindly through smoke so thick it turned day into night.
My tank alarm screamed, alerting me that my oxygen was low. So did his.
We had minutes, maybe less.
I looked back, saw his regulator sparking, the airflow dropping to nothing. “You’re out!” I shouted, pulling at my own line. “Take mine!”
Beau shook his head, his voice breaking. “No. You got air. You can make it.”
“Like hell I will!”
I ripped the mask off my own face, tearing at the straps, trying to shove it toward him. The heat punched into my skin, searing, eating through my turnout coat before I could blink.
The pain was instant, but I didn’t fucking care.
“Put it on!” I yelled. “Don’t argue, just take it!”
He shoved it back, eyes wild, the firelight flickering across his soot-streaked face. “Go, brother.”
“Beau—”
