The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass Page A

and life is never the same, never has deep joy and wonder to it again.
    The men and women spend all their time and energy fighting the enemy,
fire
—fighting the way it consumes structures, consumes air, consumes darkness—but then when it takes a life, it is as if some threshold has been crossed. It is for the firemen who discover that victim a feeling like falling down an elevator shaft, and there is sometimes guilt, too, that the thing they were so passionate about, fighting fire—a thing that could be said to bring them relief, if not pleasure—should have this as one of its costs.
    They curse stupidity, curse mankind, when they find a victim, and are almost forever after brittle.
    This fire, the apartment fire, had no loss of occupants, no casualties. It was fully involved by the time Kirby got his men into the structure, Christmas Eve, and they were doing room-to-room searches. No one ever knows how many people live in an apartment complex: how many men, women, and children, coming and going. They had to check every room.
    Smoke detectors—thank God!—were squalling everywhere, though that only confused the men further—the sound slightly less piercing, but similar, to the motion sensors on their hip belts, so that they were constantly looking around in the smoke and heat to be sure that they were all still together, partner with partner.
    Part of the crew fought the blazes, while the others made searches: horrible searches, for many of the rooms were burning so intensely that if anyone was still inside it would be too late to do anything for them.
    If you get trapped by the flames, you can activate your ceased-motion sensor. You can jab a hole in the fire hose at your feet. The water will spew up from the hose, spraying out of the knife hole, like an umbrella of steam and moisture—a water shield, which will buy you ten or fifteen more seconds. You crouch low, sucking on your scuba gear, and wait, if you can’t get out. They’ll come and get you if they can.
    This fire—the one with no casualties—had all the men stumbling with tunnel vision. There was something different about this fire—they would talk about it afterward—it was almost as if the fire wanted them, had laid a trap for them.
    They were all stumbling and clumsy, but still they checked the rooms. Loose electrical wires dangled from the burning walls and from crumbling, flaming ceilings. The power had been shut off, but it was every firefighter’s fear that some passerby, well meaning, would see the breakers thrown and would flip them back on, unthinking.
    The hanging, sagging wires trailed over the backs of the men like tentacles as they passed beneath them. The men blew out walls with their pickaxes, ventilated the ceilings with savage maulings from their lances. Trying to sense, to
feel,
amidst the confusion, where someone might be—a survivor—if anyone was left.
    Kirby and his partner went into the downstairs apartment of a trophy big game hunter. It was a large apartment and on the walls were the stuffed heads of various animals from all over the world. Some of the heads were already ablaze—flaming rhinos, burning gazelles—and as Kirby and his partner entered, boxes of ammunition began to go off: shotgun shells and rifle bullets, whole caseloads of them. Shots were flying in all directions, and Kirby made the decision right then to pull his men from the fire.
    In thirty seconds he had them out—still the fusillade continued—and thirty seconds after that the whole second floor collapsed: an inch-and-a-half-thick flooring of solid concrete dropped like a fallen cake down to the first floor, crushing the space where the men had been half a minute earlier, the building folding in on itself and being swallowed by itself, by its fire.
    There was a grand piano in the lobby and somehow it was not entirely obliterated when the ceiling fell, so that a few crooked, clanging