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“Today will be a day of tough choices,” Chief Loftus continued. “We will be needed everywhere. We cannot be everywhere. Let me repeat myself: Today will be a day of tough choices. But we will not stop until the job is done.”
“We are a small rural firehouse facing maybe the largest crisis this country has ever seen, and until we know otherwise, we’re facing it alone. Help will come. State. Federal. It will come—but not yet. For now, it is up to us and we are on our own, which we know all too goddamn well is no different than any other day.”
“We run the day like we run every day. Making it work because there is no other choice.”
A firefighter understood that any day on the line could be the last. That kind of relationship with death was uncommon, but that’s what made them not common people. And when, day after day, call after call, you stand shoulder to shoulder and put your life on the line together, you are no longer just firefighters. You’re family.
“Well, either we got a new pope or the building’s about to blow.”
She’d spent fifteen years in Washington being on the losing end of the “low-probability, high-consequence” debate with bureaucrats and businessmen who were more concerned with re-election or the bottom line than public safety.
“It’s Coastal… we… please help. He’s dead. The captain’s dead. He had a medical, I think a heart attack. The FO’s in the lav. He’s not here. He’s… the pilots are gone!”
Well, not everyone will like what you’re doing. Sometimes, progress and change come at a price.”
Now Joss was nodding. “Yes, Mr. President. And I will do everything possible to make sure we have a world you’d want to bring them into.”
“Kids make bad choices when they’re scared.”
He was a child. He wasn’t supposed to know suffering and pain and death as intimately as he did. It was so unfair.
Sure, you could spend your life tilting at windmills, but to what end?
Joss might be remembered; she might be missed. But she would not live on. And there was something profoundly sad in realizing, too late, that inside her—perhaps even as strong as her maternal instinct to protect—was the equally human desire to create.
