The burning mansion rose above him like a great beast of flame. The flames roared red from its high windows. They pranced and jabbered behind the picture pane on the ground floor. Above the lovely wooded lane, patches of the pale blue dawn caught the glow and turned a feverish pink. Swaths of the meridian, meanwhile, were smothered under the black smoke that flooded up out of the raging heart of the conflagration.
Later, Guerrero would say he sensed Death standing inside that burning house, sensed Death standing like a hooded phantom, very still amidst the dancing fire.
Lenny Guerrero was Search and Rescue, Truck 48, the first truck. A broad, strong, boyishly handsome man in his mid-30’s, he was at the truck’s side near the curb, near the lawn. The light arrays from the truck and the nearby engine, Engine 39, flashed scarlet and shadow over him as he worked to get himself game ready. Strapping his air pack on, his mask on, his hood on, his helmet.
Around him, there was movement, action, everywhere. The pipeman was ‘making’ the hydrant by the curb while the heelman kept the line clean behind him as the water brought the hose to life. The two-man entry team was already at the mansion door, one man hacking at the jamb with an axe, the other working a Halligan, trying to pry the whole structure free.
Guerrero had often noticed ― a lot of the guys noticed ― how such moments ― these moments just before you went in ― could become bizarrely quiet, bizarrely slow ― slow and graceful and almost silent, beautiful even, like some kind of strange ballet without the music. Supposedly it was because your brain was working so fast, the images and noises of the world couldn’t keep up with it. That’s what the Captain said anyway.
Anyway, it was in that moment ― that slow, quiet, graceful moment, with the pipeman setting off the first blast of water as the door came free, as the flames exploded outward into the dawn light, as a second engine pulled up with its array leisurely turning and its siren sounding weirdly far away ― it was in that moment that he felt Death, Death like a phantom, standing in the house, waiting in there, waiting for him, Guerrero, to come and discover the work of his skeleton hands.
Then he was racing up the rolling lawn, under the autumn trees beneath the smoke-choked sunrise. He followed the hose through the gaping door and suddenly everything was fast. The black smoke swallowed him fast. The heat washed over him fast, heat but no light. He dropped to his knees for safety.
He started crawling in the dark. Searching, blind, deaf except for the click of the regulator, the thump of his own heart. His heart ― that was fast, too. And the flames were fast to the right and left of him.
Guerrero worked to calm himself. At best, he had 45-minutes of air in his pack, but breathing this hard, he’d be ‘on bells’ in fifteen minutes tops. A Catholic, he drew himself down into the quiet of his faith, and handed his life to God. Experience had taught him he could do this, and it worked. His breathing slowed. The world slowed and grew quiet again.
Good, he thought. Good. It would make the air pack last longer.
He began to make his way, crawling through the roiling darkness, searching for the fallen.
You found them just inside the doors usually. They tried to get out and couldn’t work the knob or couldn’t locate it. Then the smoke overcame them and they went down right there, sometimes blocking the door so you had to shove it open to get to them. Kids, a lot of times, you found hiding under a bed, or in a bathroom in the bathtub, any place that felt safe to them in the panic of the moment.
But Guerrero found the first woman at the foot of the stairs. Crawling on his hands and knees, blind in the black smoke, he felt the yielding softness of her hand beneath his heavy glove. His heart seemed to stop and darken because he knew at once there was no chance for her. Swiftly, expertly, he worked her limp body over his shoulder. It was still too hot in the house, too black for him to stand straight. He found his feet, but kept low, very low, and charged back toward the doorway with the woman slung over his back.
It wasn’t until he laid her on the grass that he saw she had been murdered. Even when he did see it, he could barely comprehend what he saw. He brought her body forward and released it, cradling her head in his hand to soften her landing.
She floated gracefully down to the grass, her arms slanting out to either side of her. She seemed to him oddly untouched by the smoke and flames.
She was a woman in her forties or early fifties, blonde and slim and attractive. She was wearing an elegant powder blue nightgown. There was a bullet hole in her, right in the center of her torso. It flashed through Guerrero’s mind that she’d been killed with a deer rifle, something like a thirty-ought-six slug. The hole in her was almost the size of a fist. For another second, he still considered starting CPR, but there was no point. She was way, way dead.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition. 
