The Burning Desire to Save

Chapter 6

Sumire and Lieutenant Takahiro Washio, a man who was about fifty-one years of age and had eleven years in the fire brigade, crawled into the burn building right behind Hideaki, with Tomoko feeding in hose right behind them. "It's right in there," Hideaki told them as he pointed to the next burn room and then stood to the side. "Go in there and get it!"

Sumire could, of course, barely see where she was due to the intense smoke. She could also feel the heat within the building as she inched closer to the fire. Takahiro asked her, "Suwabe, are you alright?"

"Yeah," she assured him as they got to the opened door to the room and began to crawl in. The fire was slightly more intense than the one that Rumiko had dealt with. "Hit it right now?!"

"Yeah! Open up on the nozzle!"

Sumire did as ordered and pulled back the bale on her nozzle, spraying into the room and darkening down the fire, which immediately reduced everyone's visibility to zero due to the steam from her putting out the fire. Sumire inched closer as she continued to flow water, allowing Takahiro to move up and Tomoko to move into the room to search for a window and open it for ventilation. She told Takahiro, "Lieutenant, do you see anything else?"

"Keep spraying it! It's not out yet!" Takahiro told Tomoko as she crawled into the room, "Break the first window you find to vent the smoke!"

"Got it," she replied as she put her left hand on the wall and searched around for a fake window to open.

In Sumire's mind, she thought about her past and how she got the scars on her face that had defined her for so long. To her, being able to put out a fire was cathartic and satisfying. "So this is how they felt when my house burned all those years ago," she thought to herself. "If not for them, I'd be dead..."

Tomoko then opened up a fake window to the outside, telling Takahiro, "I opened up a window!"

"Good," he replied. He then patted Sumire on the shoulder and told her, "Change to a fog pattern and spray out the window! The fire's out!"

"Got it," she replied as she turned the nozzle off, turned it to change the pattern, and then pulled back on the bale again to flow water out of the window to vent the room.

As Hideaki watched from nearby, he said to Takahiro, "Have Suwabe get closer to the window! She's a bit too far back!" He also thought to himself, "To think, just seven years ago, she was on the other side of this... The doctors never thought she would live, let alone come this far, after what happened to her."

...

Outside, Sumire and Rumiko were talking among themselves, relaxing and drinking water in the sweltering summer heat. Both of them had taken all of their gear off except for their boots, which were rolled down. As they watched several other firefighters practice setting up hoses from the outside of a building and flowing water into a nearby creek, Sumire told Rumiko, "That felt amazing."

"How did you do, Sumire-chan?"

"I think I did pretty good for my first time. How about you?"

"Lieutenant Yamada told me I was great," Rumiko replied with a confident smile. "I didn't get corrected once on either the drill tower or the burn building."

"I got some minor corrections, but nothing too crazy."

Rumiko then wiped sweat off of her forehead, looking up at the sky and remarking, "It's way too hot out. I pre-hydrated a ton before I got here, but even then, I was exhausted."

Then, Yui walked over, having heard Rumiko's remark, and said to the two of them, "Get used to it, girls. When you get your first fire with an SCBA in the summertime, it's gonna really suck."