Tercer Paso: El Cambio

                                        

                                              
A/N: Dedicated to all those men and women who volunteer or are active duty firefighters. My father in law is a retired fire chief, my brother is a firefighter, you all have my respect and thanks
                              
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Reaper sucked in a deep breath, trying to quell the terror churning his gut into a frothy, acidic mess and trying to make his dinner reappear in an unappealing mess. Now that the time had come for the real action, he regretted eating so much but at the time it had all tasted so good. Part of him was slightly mortified by his complete cowardice; he could kidnap drug lords, dodge gunfire and stitch wounds shut without flinching, but a day as a firefighter had him quivering in his boots.
                              
The other men on the current fire shift were all older than Reaper, and to the young gangster’s vast surprise, many of them had run the streets as youth too. He’d know that Ricky had been a Barrio Boy, it’s how he’d gotten a job here, but he hadn’t known that of the 30 men (six were women) that worked in the firehouse, two thirds of them had some sort of unsavory past themselves. Somehow it made it easier to do this volunteering job amidst being a student and a gangster, knowing that these others had made it out of ‘the life’ relatively intact. Though the guilt that nearly always ate at Reaper’s conscience still weighed heavily on some of their shoulders, Malcolm knew that he could always depend on them, in a way that even the other Barrio Boys wouldn’t necessarily get. The fire crew worked together to keep each other, and complete strangers, alive and safe. It was a vastly different attitude than the Barrio Boys’ own ‘protect yourself and your brothers, nothing else matters.’
                              
When the truck they rode in hit the rough surface of the turn on road, Reaper’s stomach jumped to take up residence in his throat and he coughed hoarsely to try and clear his suddenly Sahara-desert-dry mouth. He was surrounded by eight men who all knew exactly what to do without needing to think about it first, and for the first time in a long while, Malcolm felt as young as his seventeen years suggested. Their ‘chief’ Aaron was ahead of them in the scouting truck, making sure that the bigger fire truck  could make it through some of the narrower streets, or to help clear away the crowds of people standing about, gawking at the buildings engulfed in flames. Driving the fire truck itself was Eduardo, the man that had put in a good word for Malcolm and was once a Barrio Boy himself. Carlitos had put Reaper into contact with him. He was quiet and would often not actually say anything, instead using his impressively bushy eyebrows to speak for him.
                              
Esteban was the joker, either telling the most inappropriate one-liners at the very worst time or pulling pranks to help kill the tension. He was only ever serious when there was a beautiful woman or a flaming building involved. Jacobo was the opposite of Esteban, which was humorous as they were identical twins. He was serious, never cracking a smile or joining in on the craziness the others got up to. He was the team’s first aider though and often had to deal with the most tragic parts of their job so it made sense that all the happy had been beaten out of him already.
                              
Oscar passed Reaper a piece of gum, his way of being silently encouraging. He was the eldest man on the team and seemed to take a fatherly role where Malcolm was concerned. When Reaper had been so nervous his first day that he had thrown up, the others had razed him, but Oscar had simply helped clean up and told him about everyone else’s embarrassing first day stories. Raul was older than Reaper but looked even younger, having a baby face that came across as rather feminine. To counter that, he was the biggest playboy and his sometimes misogynistic comments had caused Reaper to pull him up short, usually by busting his nose. Stefano was normally on one of the other fire teams so Reaper didn’t know him all that well yet, but he seemed steady and calm, smiling a cautious hello when they’d been introduced this morning. Tomas and Victor were in the farthest dorsal seats, bouncing and jounced around every time the truck hit a pothole or a pebble. They were betting on what the team was going to encounter once they were on site and even though Reaper couldn’t hear what the specifics were, he knew that by the time they unloaded from the truck, he’d be putting money down on it too. Tomas was a recovering drug addict, clean for ten years but refusing to call himself ‘recovered’. His arms were heavily scarred and his face bore pockmarks that made him intimidating in the light of day, in the dark of night he was a nightmare. Victor was half Spanish and half Russian, which gave him the genetic inheritance of being almost 100 pounds heavier than anyone else in the truck and all of it, was muscle. He burned like a forastero but his ‘exotic’ features drew in a lot of female attention. Reaper was the only one in the truck, and in fact in the entire fire team, that knew that Victor had a secret that could get him killed. He was homosexual, and in the machismo obsessed culture that pervaded their city, if a single hint of it got out he was a walking dead man. Reaper only knew because he had been with his mother in another city writing his finals and saw Victor with his lover.  And even though it was supposed to bother him, Reaper found that he couldn’t care less about his team mate’s sexual preferences, he was an asset to the team.