Prologue
Cole
Everyone’s quiet around the dinner table tonight.
It’s been a nonstop shift with the shittiest results on record—seven calls, five deaths, two of those children.
None of us has eaten for going on seven hours, and we’re all ravenous. Once we get the pizzas laid out on the table, all fourteen of us—seven regular firefighters and seven volunteers—dive for a piece, creating a tangle of limbs.
I score pepperoni and olive, meat lovers, and barbecue chicken, but before I dig in, I push my chair back and address the table at large. “Anyone touches my plate, you will die.”
I get a lot of shit flung back at me like “Ownership is nine-tenths of the law” and “You snooze you lose” and “That’s like leaving mice to watch the cheese.”
I walk down the hall and call up the stairs, “Evan, pizza’s here. Better grab some. It’s disappearing fast.”
I get no response. He’s probably asleep.
Back at the table, I pick up my first slice with anticipation flooding my mouth.
A knock comes at our front door, and I look around the table. In a firehouse, no one who is meant to be here would knock. It generally means we’re about to be presented with something hilarious, stupid, or awful. Given this day’s track record, I’m betting on the latter.
“A baby.” Tucker Medina, a fellow firefighter and one of my best friends, is bent over a piece of deep-dish pepperoni. “The way this day has been going, that has to be a fucking baby on our doorstep.”
“It’s spring,” Bobby Stokes says, a paramedic firefighter who’s been with the team for about a year. “It’s probably baby somethings.”
Everyone stops eating and reaches for their wallets. Tucker grabs a pen and lists the bets on a napkin as guesses and money fly at him.
“Puppies.”
“Corpse.”
“Severed limb.”
“Pizza delivery guy wanting a bigger tip.”
“Sorority wanting a tour.”
“Girl Scouts selling cookies.”
“It’s Girl Scout cookie season?”
“It’s April,” someone says with a you-dumbshit tone. “Of course, it’s Girl Scout cookie season.”
By the time I push my chair back, everyone is laughing, and a sense of relief fills the house.
When I open the front door, a brush of chilled spring air hits me. I’m not surprised to find no one standing there. I’m also not surprised to find a cardboard box on the welcome mat. I step outside and look around, but there’s nobody hovering in the night’s shadows.
I drop to a crouch in front of the box. There’s no movement and no sound—that can’t be good.
I carefully slide open the flaps, which have been crisscrossed to keep the top closed, and cringe a little when I open it, braced for the worst possible thing this could be.
There are two kittens inside, huddled in a corner. They’re alive—one of the better moments in my day—and their frightened bright blue eyes stare back at me.
“Hey there, guys.” I exhale, and my muscles relax. “You two sure are little.” I lift the box, careful not to jostle them. “Prepare yourself to watch grown men turn into marshmallows.”
I return to the table with the box and announce, “Kittens.”
Half the men at the table stand to look in the box, the other half argue with Tucker over their bet, claiming their choice of puppies is the closest guess to kittens and they should win.
“Damn, they’re tiny,” one of the volunteers says.
“Maybe three or four weeks,” another guesses.
“At least they brought them here and didn’t throw them in the river,” Bobby says.
“My kids would love them, but my wife would kill me,” a volunteer says.
Tucker finally settles the bets and starts on his pizza again.
Logan Roberts, another firefighter and another friend for decades, stands to look in the box. “They’re black and white. We should keep them.”
“Knew that was coming,” I say to Tucker sitting across from me at the table.
“He always was bringing home strays,” Tucker agrees.
Tucker, Logan, Evan, and I grew up right around the corner from each other in Portland. They had regular, run-down houses, while I lived in a trailer park a corner away. Our parents used to call us the four musketeers, and we could always be found playing ball in the streets, climbing trees on neighboring property, or racing our bikes down the steepest hill we could find. We went to the same schools, made our way to the fire academy at different times during our youth, and ended up congregating at Station 21, here in Hood River, an hour from Portland.
“House cats,” one of the volunteers provides.
“We don’t need fuckin’ house cats,” Tucker says with a shake of his head. “One of you guys take them home to your kids.”
But, as expected, Logan lifts the kittens out of the box and rests them against his chest. They’re barely bigger than his hands. “Look, Cap. Dalmatian cats.”
Captain Ken Sorenson, about a decade older than the rest of us and twice as fit, wipes his hands on a napkin and pushes to his feet, tossing his paper plate in the trash. “I don’t care if you keep them or not, but you better make sure no one is allergic first. And someone better take responsibility for their litter box or teaching them to shit outside. The first hint of cat piss in this house and they’re out.”
“Tell us how you really feel, Cap,” Tucker tosses out as Sorenson heads upstairs, presumably to his office, which is next to the barracks. He’s going to have a shitload of paperwork to handle from this day.
“They have those automatic litter boxes now,” one of the volunteers says. “It’s all done for you.”
The kittens meow, a weak, whispery sound.
“They’re probably hungry.” Another volunteer pulls milk from the fridge and pours it into the smallest bowl he can find.
“Dude,” Tucker says. “That’s my milk.”
“Come on, we’re talking hungry kittens here,” Carter Morgan says, our newest member of the crew and a probie.
“You can’t give kittens milk,” another volunteer says. “It makes them sick. They’ll be shitting all over the place.”
“Then how do we feed them?” Logan asks.
“We don’t,” Tucker says. “We drop them off at a vet’s office.”
One of the volunteers scrolls through his phone. “There’s this thing called replacement mother’s milk. Looks like you can get it at a pet store.”
Everyone knows no pet store is open at this hour, so the volunteers decide to give them watered-down regular milk until they can get to the store tomorrow.
Then the naming games begin.
“Ben and Jerry.”
“Riff and Raff.”
“Double and Trouble.”
“Jekyll and Hyde.”
“Monty and Python.”
“Bud and Weiser.”
“Do we even know if they’re girls or boys?” I ask.
“Doesn’t sound like it matters,” Tucker says.