All stories › Horror › Every Tuesday at Station Two › Episode 3
In Service
Episode 3 of 3 of Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing · free to read
“Whoever goes, goes alone,” Wes said.
He set pack six on the tailboard and stepped away from it. Nobody touched it.
“That’s not a rule.”
“No. It’s what I’ve got.”
“Then it isn’t a rule.”
“Tyler. Get your coat.”
Deb signed out at 9:58.
She put her coat on at the door and stood there with her hand flat on the frame.
“Shane.”
“Go home, Deb.”
“Thirty one years.”
“Go home.”
She went.
Kenny signed out at 10:07 with his hand wrapped.
He stopped twice on the way to his truck and both times I waved him on.
Tyler went last. He cried in the parking lot.
“I’ll stay if you say it.”
“I’m not saying it.”
“Ask me and I will stay.”
“Go home, Tyler.”
He was twenty. It was his second month.
“He signed out?” Wes said.
“10:14. Deb left the sheet on the desk.”
“Then he’s clear.”
“You believe that?”
“I believe what she reads me out of that book.”
Marcus stayed at the radio desk with the county scanner up.
Wes stayed on the apron with the doors up.
Neither of them offered again and I did not ask.
Marcus came out to the truck before I got in. He put his hand flat on the mirror.
“Count out loud,” he said. “All the way back to the rig.”
“Why.”
He went inside.
I put pack six on in the seat.
I buckled the waist strap over my coat.
Forty five hundred on the gauge, flat and steady.
I pulled Engine 41 out at 10:20 with no lights, because it was not a call and I was not going to make it one.
Delcher Road is four miles.
I took the county road with the window down and the scanner low.
Six minutes in that truck.
I have run that road four times for real calls and once for this.
The once is the trip I can still drive with my eyes shut.
The house has been a foundation since 2009.
County took the debris and left the slab and the steps.
The steps go up to nothing now.
There is a mailbox at the end of the drive that somebody in that family still repaints.
I backed her in the way you would on a real job.
I set the brake and left the headlights off.
I stood in the drive with the pack on my back.
The bell was already ringing.
It is the low air bell on pack six, the one that goes off at a third of a bottle.
My gauge said forty five hundred. I put a light on it twice.
Then the bell was not on my back anymore.
It was down in the foundation, under the slab line where the stairs used to go.
It rang steady. It did not move and it did not come up.
I never looked into that hole.
I put my light on the mailbox instead, on the numbers.
Four inches of white paint over four inches of white paint over whatever the first coat had been.
Marcus was twenty four out here. Kenny stood on the pump in the road.
Wes was six years off being chief. Deb held the clipboard in the rain and wrote down six names.
I said all six of them out loud, and then I said mine, and that made seven.
I stood on the slab with my boots square.
I got my thumb on the mic and took it off twice.
The second time I heard Marcus at the mirror telling me to count.
“County, Alder Springs Engine Forty One. On location, 4418 Delcher Road.”
She read it back and gave me the time.
I let a full minute go by with my hand on the strap, the way you do when there is nothing showing and nothing to do.
“County, Engine Forty One. Nothing showing, no action taken. Put us in service from Delcher Road at twenty two forty one, and carry it on oh nine dash fourteen.”
“Copy, Forty One in service.”
The bell stopped mid ring, the way a bell stops when a hand closes around it.
I loaded the pack and drove home to a Tuesday that only happened once.
Deb called me Thursday at work.
“Oh nine dash fourteen is closed,” she said. “In service time, typed, and it stayed.”
“Personnel line?”
“Seven names.”
Nobody in this company has had the same Tuesday twice since.
Deb keeps the binder in her truck now.
She reads me the inspection column when work keeps me off the floor.
Every line is filled in ahead of us. Pack six, weekly inspection, S. Purvis, in a hand I would swear to in court.
Line seven was never a night. It is a seat.
The dates run further out than I do.