Another great chapter!

Good job, Alan. I just finished yesterday's installment.

A couple comments: at the conclusion of the chapter, you bring up the source of the big fire--Union Street Station. Then in the following few sentences on how the fire started. A suggestion: for fleshing-out purposes, is Union Street Station an old train station that's been rehabbed into shops, urban low income or upscale housing, or what. A little background can go a long way in telling the story.

Another little nit to pick: In our larger neighborhood, when bad things happen, word spreads like wildfire...and I think that's what might be bugging me about the story (bugging is the wrong word, though). Over the past few years we've had a couple of domestic situations resolved with mixed results, including a murder/suicide/arson fire (that was an eventful day!), and an ice storm that shut off power for either days or weeks. Ugly.

When bad things happen, news and information spreads insanely fast. Telegraphed. Right and wrong. When our power goes out (for any length of time--over fifteen minutes), we've checked on all our neighbors, etc. and tried to track down the reason. Usually huddled out in the middle of the street or over at the fence wondering what happened. When the murder/suicide/arson fire happened, I heard first on the radio, that it was on my street--it wasn't--I was 10 miles away at work. The fire took out all power and phones in the neighborhood, then we were on word-of-mouth. Shots fired. Neo-nazi. Cops shot. Firemen shot. All wrong, with the exception of shots fired (guy killed his brother, then himself after setting the house afire. 'Shots fired' was sound of several hundred rounds cooking off). Anyway, wild speculation runs its course--and I think that we've all seen that lately with the upcoming war, we'll see it in the media this week with this 'super pneumonia'.

FWIW!

Tom S.
Spokane:spns: