Mila – Maple Creek Fire & Rescue – Chapter 1
The phone buzzed against Mila Garcia’s thigh, a brief jolt against the roar of sirens and the acrid tang of smoke already curling in the air. She didn’t need to check it. When the call came, she moved. Her focus sharp as she shrugged into her turnout gear, the jacket’s weight settling like a second skin. Her crew moved around her—Elliot hauling hose, Jamie checking the rig’s pressure, Nate, the EMT on staff was grumbling about the rookie’s sluggish pace.
“Jamie’s fine!” Mila shot back without looking. She caught sight of the rookie’s hands, steady as they snapped the couplings into place, her movements practiced, even graceful. Quiet didn’t men weak. Mila had seen that girl throw herself into a backdraft without flinching.
Mila’s eyes, sharp and unblinking beneath the shadowed brim of her helmet, swept over her crew with the practiced precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. She tracked every muscle twitch, every bead of sweat, every subtle shift of weight—cataloguing not just their readiness, but the small tells that, in the heat of the job, could mean the difference between walking away and being carried out. Elliot, all bravado and biting jokes, was the best damn hose man she’d ever seen: his biceps flexed beneath soot-streaked sleeves, the tattooed raven on his forearm leaping with every haul. Jamie, quiet but stubborn as a granite boulder, checked and rechecked the pressure gauge with the solemnity of a priest at communion, lips pressed into a steady line. Even the rookie, whose name no one could remember but whose dogged persistence had already become a station legend, moved with an odd, focused grace that suggested a capacity for faith Mila had lost years ago.
In those moments, with the world outside blurred by adrenaline and the distant exodus of civilians, Mila took silent roll call—not by name but by quality: Dependable. Unbreakable. Loyal. Hers. That last word lingered, a taste both bitter and sweet. For all her deliberate distance, every one of them was stitched into the quilt of her life, their history written in the scars and inside jokes that only made sense at the end of a shift. She trusted them more than she trusted herself, and if she let her heart dwell on it, she might have even called it love.
The station had always been a fortress against the chaos of the outside world, the one place where Mila’s word was law, her instincts gospel. It was a family not by blood but by shared ordeal—a bond seared together by the unyielding logic of the job. Most days, that was enough to keep the ghosts at bay.
Today, though, something in the air felt different. There was an urgency in the way Elliot’s eyes flicked over her during the scramble, a wire-tight tension in Jamie’s measured movements. Even the rookie seemed to sense the shift, shoulders squared and mouth set, as if bracing for the world to tilt beneath her feet. Mila felt it too—a premonition of something more than smoke and flame, a storm gathering just beyond the emergency call.
“Mila, you good?” Elliot’s voice crackled through the radio, his usual smirk buried beneath the job’s weight.
“Born for this,” she replied, her tone clipped as she secured her helmet strap. Her pulse thrummed, steady but alive, a rhythm honed by years of facing down flames. Fire was a beast, and Mila had learned its dance—step for step, no hesitation.
The second engine rolled up to the squat, single-story house in the quiet neighborhood on the edge of town. Smoke coiled from the eaves in slow, deliberate twists. Flames flickered at the kitchen window, small but ravenous. Mila’s gaze narrowed. Something was wrong. The fire was too tidy, too posed, like a scene staged for a training manual. No wild spread, no chaos. A ripple of unease coiled in her gut. Fires didn’t behave like this, not unless someone coaxed them to. It mirrored too many late nights spent hunched over old case files, her eyes heavy as she had traced flame patterns and found only more questions.
“Elliot, Jamie, flank east. Nate, vent the roof.” Her voice cut through the noise, nerves of steel wrapped in calm. The crew moved as one, extensions of her will, their trust in her unwavering. She led them toward the house, the heat greeting her like an old rival as she crossed the threshold.
Inside, the living room stood untouched, but the kitchen glowed, flames gnawing at the cabinets. Mila scanned for tells—accelerant trails, unnatural burn patterns. Her mind flickered to Matt, the shadow she couldn’t shake. They said he’d left town, gone for good. She wasn’t convinced. Then Jack Maddox’s face surfaced, his smug grin from a month ago when she’d accused him of setting those fires. The evidence hadn’t held, and worse, his damned eyes had lingered a little too long, stirring up feelings she had no interest in entertaining. She shoved the thought aside like she always did.
“Garcia, you seeing this?” the rookie called out, steady but sharp. She pointed toward a scorched doorway just off the kitchen, where thick, greasy smoke oozed from the gap like a living thing.
Mila pivoted, her instincts snapping into place. Not the kitchen—there. The laundry room. She tightened her grip on the nozzle, noting the unnatural pull of the fire, how it seemed to breathe deeper from that direction. A subtle shift, but she felt it in her bones.
By the time the blaze was declared under control, an hour had blurred by in a grim rush of foam and black water, of shouted orders and the low, anxious drone of the second engine idling on the curb. The house—if it could still be called that—was now a hollowed carcass, the bones of its two-by-fours picked clean by flame and left to steam under the fire crew’s practiced evisceration. Clouds of chemical smoke lazed in the aftermath, curling in the eaves and drifting over the sun-warmed asphalt where a small flock of residents had gathered to gawk, their faces a pageant of morbid awe and whispered speculation. The world had narrowed, for Mila, to a single street and the wound that now gasped at its center.
She yanked her helmet free and scrubbed at her brow with a gloved hand, feeling the sticky residue of sweat and ash cling to her skin. Her hair was damp, matted to her scalp, and her eyes throbbed from the sting of ozone and the sleeplessness that had shadowed her for weeks. The rest of the crew moved through the smoking ruin on autopilot, dragging in fans to vent the toxic haze, flipping charred furniture with the impersonal efficiency of a garbage crew. Even the rookie looked worn down to the marrow, her jaw slack, her movements slowed as she hauled yet another length of hose out to the sidewalk.
Mila prowled the perimeter of the house in slow, deliberate arcs, cataloguing the aftermath with the obsessive attention of a jeweler grading stones. She stepped over a collapsed rafter and under the sag of a scorched stairwell, her boots making obscene, sucking noises as she traversed puddles of sooty runoff and melted insulation. The smell was overwhelming: not just wood and plastic, but something chemical that reminded her of her father’s old garage, of the acetone and lacquer that lingered on his hands even when he tucked her in at night. It was a smell she’d never been able to shake, one that visited her in dreams and left her waking with the taste of copper on her tongue.
The laundry room was more of a suggestion now, its appliances warped and slouched against the far wall like refugees from a shipwreck. The sheetrock had vanished entirely in places, exposing the skeleton of pipes and wiring that snaked behind the once-floral wallpaper. Water dripped from the ceiling in slow, methodical tears. Mila stood in the ruin and tried to reconstruct the moments before the fire—tried to imagine hands reaching for the detergent, a basket of folded towels, the last ordinary gesture before the world unraveled. She crouched, running her gloved fingers over the blackened linoleum, and found what she was looking for: a hint of accelerant, sharp and sweet, hiding beneath the general funk of cooked plastic and vinegar.
She straightened, pulling in a long, slow breath, and let her eyes go soft as she scanned the walls for patterns. The burn had started low, near the vented panel where the water heater sulked, then crawled up in a perfect chevron—a classic pour and light, the signature of someone who wanted the fire to walk, not run. It was too clean, too measured. Mila felt a jolt of recognition, as if she were reading a half-familiar script.
A damp cough echoed from the next room, followed by boots crunching through debris. Elliot swung into the doorway, helmet cocked back on his head and a flat grin plastered to his face. He lifted something pinched between his thumb and forefinger: a scrap of fabric, half melted and charred at the edges, but with a bright blue patch still stubbornly visible.
“Garcia,” Elliot called from the doorway, holding up a scorched scrap of something. “Found this near the water heater.”
She turned the scrap in her gloved hand, the fabric brittle, stinging of scorched lint and chemicals. Denim, sure enough. Faded, worn. But there, along the hem, charred blacks against the blue, a crooked line slashed like it had been clawed into the weave. Lightning bolt. Just like before.
The sight of it prickled under her skin.
Weeks without a whisper, and now… this.
She clenched the fabric in her glove. “He’s back,” she murmured, the words barely a breath. And this time, she wasn’t going to let him slip away.