The Last Alarm

Harry Spencer sat alone in his den, with the silence pressing in on him like a heavy blanket, smothering the usual sounds of his dull existence. He had become so used to the constant joy of every day in the company of his beloved Karen that the strains of his life since her death had enveloped him with an increasing cloak of loneliness.

Afraid this cloak might close around him and choke him, he tried to contemplate a future without his lifelong companion.

The all-engulfing flames of sadness that now confronted Harry seemed to spread much more quickly than the fire he had beaten back for 20 years as a firefighter. It seemed like the fates had turned his once happy and interesting life to cinders.

The downturn had begun three years before when his wife came running into the house after her doctor’s appointment and threw her arms around him as her eyes welled up with tears. The diagnosis: breast cancer.

Karen and Harry fought the dreaded “C” word with every tool in their arsenal from the most advanced medical and surgical techniques available, thanks to the connections she made in her long service with the local hospital. They didn’t stop there. They took advantage of every experimental treatment they could find on the internet locally and outside the country. Despite their best efforts and the fact that the treatments almost caused the couple to go into bankruptcy, nothing seemed sufficient to fight off the inevitable.

In the next several months Karen’s life slipped away as she succumbed further and further into the clutches of the poisonous evil spreading throughout her body. The disease finally totally consumed her and robbed Harry of his precious angel–on Christmas Eve.

Harry and Karen always thought their love and devotion to their busy lives and the many interests that drove them outside of their careers provided more than enough fulfillment. They therefore chose not to have children.

Besides, Harry’s always-on-call occupation as chief of the village fire company and Karen’s dedication to the long hours necessary as head emergency room nurse in the local hospital meant a limited amount of left for expanding or caring for additions to their immediate family.

Distant relatives on both sides of both the chief and his wife did exist, but they didn’t live close enough to care for Harry and his bride.

The couple did travel to see them during the limited spare time they had available, and they took a great interest in every facet of the lives of these distant relations. In the end, the cousins, aunts and uncles and their children had become so absorbed in their own climbs up the corporate ladders that they found no time or inclination to return the favors.

Despite treasuring his independence, after the death of the love of his life, the blanket of loneliness began to close in more and more tightly around Harry. He began to realize that his future would include a home life filled only with emptiness.

Luckily, his duties kept his work life busy. The top-notch counseling available in the department also stopped him from carrying out the most radical final solution that surfaced in his psyche during his infrequent trips to his dark side.

Not that he feared death. Over the course of his 25 years in the department he had put his life on the line in the most dangerous blazes in the history of his city. During each daring episode Karen had stood by, either tending to his wounds in the ER or anxiously waiting at home hoping not to get the fateful call that would put an end to everything that meant life itself to her.

Even without this support system, on a more positive note, the commendations and praise that had followed Harry throughout his meteoric rise up the ladder of the fire department brought him a great deal of comfort. He now searched every corner of his home hoping that the pleasant memories they brought back would heal his mental wounds.

On Christmas Day in the year of Karen’s departure, the horns of praise grew silent and the headlines slipped out of Harry’s universe as he wandered listlessly around his rambling ranch home hoping to discover the key that would unlock the path to his future.

His search for answers finally led Harry to a dark and rundown storage shed on the far corner of his property where he and his wife had stored a lifetime of memories.

Anxious to erase the negative thoughts he associated with Karen’s passing, Harry thought about doing the unthinkable, blotting out the darkness he thought he could no longer fight off in the flames he had fought his entire life.

After he spread gasoline around the shed and prepared to strike a match to destroy it and himself, he stumbled upon a suitcase. This piece of luggage had never appeared either during Karen’s life or after her departure. The gaudy piece of baggage did not resemble anything either of them ever owned or thought about owning.

Blowing out the match, he carefully approached the valise and attempted to unlock one of its rusty latches, which broke off in his hand To his surprise, the bag did not contain clothing, photos or other memorabilia.

The lid of the suitcase flew open and knocked Harry off his feet and unconscious on the dusty storage shed floor.

He awakened sometime later in what could only be described as an alternative universe.

The voice that boomed through the air around the suitcase seemed strangely distant yet overwhelmingly familiar.

“Where did you get that wound?” the angelic figure asked, “it doesn’t look like anything you ever got on a 911 call.”

Suddenly, the angel kissed the wound and it miraculously disappeared.

She then waved her hand and a strange wind swept Harry and the angel away, finally answering the question that had burned like a flame in Harry’s mind for three long years: “Will my life’s team respond to the final emergency call as we have all our lives?”