* * *
The dog’s barking broke through Gil’s stupor. Gil had been somewhat stunned by the sudden appearance of the airbag in his face. It took a moment for him to realize that it had deployed after he rammed his car into the tree that was not a tree and another moment to realize that he had knocked it over onto the house that the barking was coming from…not only barking but smoke.
“It’s all me.”
And he was out of his car and running into the house because it was his fault and there was someone in there and even if they lost their house because of him he hoped that would be all they lost. But he knew it would be more than that. He tried to get out of town before he could do anymore. He tried and failed and that did not surprise him and he didn’t even know why he was trying to get into the house because he could not succeed at saving anyone in there. His world just didn’t work that way and yet he went into the house because there was nothing else to do and if he died doing it at least he wouldn’t be there to destroy people’s lives anymore.
There was a lot of smoke in the house and it was hard to see and even harder to breath. He hated smoke and knew it was a bad idea for him of all people to go charging into a house full of it. But he followed the dog’s whimpering and found her…it was Ivy and that meant this was Denise’s house and he could feel the heat burning through the door from the room that Denise must be in given the claw marks on the door and Ivy still struggling despite the smoke to get to her owner. Gil knew that there was no way for him to get to Denise and there was no way she was going to make it out of that room. He also knew that the one thing she loved more than anything else in the world was her dog and if he could at least save the dog he would have done something for her. So as hard as it was, he got his good arm around the dog, who was barely conscious enough to give a protest whimper, and tried to wrap his damned prosthetic around her as well, but that didn’t do much at all. And he stopped thinking and he started dragging the dog as best he could. He couldn’t see anything and didn’t even know if he was going in the right direction, but he just kept telling his body to go and to get Ivy out of the house that was coming down all around him. He wished there wasn’t all this smoke. He hated the smell of smoke.