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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/SteveMcNellyFiction on 2026-05-16 20:39:38+00:00.

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The call came in after we had already gone to bed for the night. Our station’s blaring loudspeaker alarm forced me to rocket out of a state of half-slumber and sit up in my bunk. The words “fire response” came over the same loudspeaker as I looked at the alert on my phone and saw that only about thirty minutes had passed since I had closed my eyes. My phone read “Forcible Entry—Victim Trapped Inside of Building”, followed by an address that I didn’t think anything of at the time. I wasn’t terribly tired—I never really drift into a deep sleep while doing overnights at the firehouse—and so I was able to step out of my bunk and quickly make my way to the gear room without having to shake off too much grogginess along the way.

It was a cold night in the dead of winter, but my usual bunk room always feels like it’s about a hundred degrees in there, so I had gone to bed that night in my usual attire of black gym shorts and a gray T-shirt. The gear room, on the other hand, tends to mimic the outside temperature with near-perfect accuracy, so I mentally prepared myself to step out into the frigid winter air in what was barely more than a pair of skivvies. The cold hit me hard, and I couldn’t prevent myself from shivering as I walked past Ozgood and Fuller, who already had their turnout pants on and were busy pulling their suspenders over their shoulders.

“Feeling a little chilly there, rookie?” Ozgood said. I had been with the department for more than three months at this point, but seeing as I was still the newest guy on the payroll, I had not yet shirked that nickname.

“A bit,” I admitted as I made it to my locker and began stepping into my pants. “Maybe you can cuddle me when we get back, Ozzy.”

The guys laughed at that—methods of tickling their funny bones had been some of the first things I had learned while working there.

Once we all had our pants on, we grabbed the rest of our gear and began walking into the apparatus bay. Pryce, our driver, was already in the driver’s seat of the Rescue, his gear stashed in the cab where Fuller and I would be sitting. It always blew me away how quickly the guy managed to get ready during nighttime calls. The other guys all said that he didn’t sleep when he worked overnights, and instead spent all night sitting in the bay, just waiting for the call that may not have even been coming.

Fuller and I jumped into the cab, and Ozgood climbed into the officer’s seat up front. Pryce had the Rescue peeling out of the bay before I even had my seatbelt on.

“You’ve got the address, right Pryce?” Ozgood asked our driver.

Pryce nodded. “Yeah.”

“Do you recognize it?”

“Yeah,” the driver said again.

“How could somebody possibly be trapped in there?”

“I don’t know,” Pryce said, “but I don’t like it.”

“What’s so weird about that address?” I asked, confused by their conversation.

“It’s the address of that supermarket that shut down a while back,” Fuller said.

“Not just shut down,” Ozgood said. “Ten months ago it was completely abandoned, out of the blue. It’s been closed up ever since. There’s no way somebody could be trapped in there.”

“Maybe some teenagers broke in or something,” I said. “What do the notes say?”

“Somebody called 9-1-1 and said that they were stuck,” Ozgood explained. “They said ‘I can’t get out’ a handful of times before they hung up the phone. Dispatch couldn’t get any other details from the caller before the line got disconnected.”

“Maybe it’s somebody pulling a prank,” I offered.

Fuller shook his head. “The notes say the call came from the landline in the office at the back of the store. Whoever made the call definitely made it from inside of the building.”

Pryce partially glanced in Ozgood’s direction while he drove. “So what’s the plan then, Officer?”

Ozgood, evidently not finding anything useful in the digital system while browsing through the tablet sitting in front of him on the dash, flipped through the binder of old preplans resting on his lap. When he found the page he was looking for, he took half a minute to skim its details. “We’ll pull around back and enter through the door in the rear,” he eventually said. “You boys back there good to do some forcible entry?”

“Yeah,” Fuller said. He looked at me. “You take the Halligan, I’ll take the axe.”

I nodded. “Alright.”

Our conversation went dormant as we continued our way to the scene of the call. The frigidity from the outside world seeped into the cab as we drove, and I soon found myself shivering once again. Pulling on my turnout coat helped the cold some, but I still found myself wishing desperately that I could be back in that 100-degree bunk room. I silently resented whoever had called us out here on such a brutal winter night. We were almost certainly in the midst of being pranked by some kids. With any luck we would arrive on-scene and find them outside without ever having to enter the building, where we could quickly scold them for wasting emergency resources before returning back to the warmth and comfort of our station. We still had a long, cold night ahead of us, and I prayed to God that this would be our only call before my shift ended at 6am.

Ozgood looked at Fuller and me in the rearview mirror. “Get your packs on now, boys,” he said. “I want everyone on air. We ain’t taking any chances with the air quality in this place, considering how long it’s been sealed up.”

“You think it’s gonna be dangerous in there?” Fuller asked.

“Don’t know,” Ozgood said, “but it can’t hurt to be safe.”

I resisted the urge to groan. Going on air meant we’d have to refill the cylinders when we got back. Of course, we could’ve just slapped fresh tanks into the SCBAs and left the used ones in the engine bay until morning, but if Ozgood didn’t insist on refilling them right away, then Pryce most certainly would. Our long night just got a few minutes longer.

Ozgood, Fuller and I all pulled our SCBAs over our shoulders and began tightening the straps. Pryce’s pack was in a compartment just outside of the driver’s side door, so he wouldn’t be able to get it on until after we arrived. None of us pulled our masks on yet; we knew we would likely have to force the rear door, and we didn’t want to fog up the face coverings with the effort.

We arrived at the strip mall where the abandoned supermarket lived and had to drive the length of the shopping center before we could loop around to the rear side. Much like our destination, most if not all of the storefronts along the strip appeared to be devoid of businesses. It was difficult to make out many details in the dark, but from my spot in the cab I could see that several storefronts lacked any kind of signage or branding out front, and those that did possess these things looked to be in varying states of disrepair. The road we drove on as well as the parking lot on our left side were riddled with potholes that were stared down upon by row after row of completely dead or rapidly flickering streetlights. The entire place felt incredibly eerie; it was as if we were driving straight into an apocalyptic hellscape that existed only a few short minutes from our fire station.

Pryce pulled around back and we disembarked from the Rescue. Ozgood approached the rear of the supermarket while Pryce pulled on his SCBA and Fuller and I grabbed a set of irons from the rescue tools compartment on the truck. We had also each grabbed a flashlight from the cab of the apparatus before stepping outside; they hung from our sides by their straps and gently bumped against our hips as we approached the structure.

The building’s rear wall was constructed of old, faded, crumbling brick. A single loading dock, complete with a rusty iron shutter, was carved out of a section of the wall. A couple of yards from this dock was a small concrete platform, accessible by both a staircase and a ramp of the same material. A metal door existed at the top of the platform on the same wall as the shutter. Ozgood was already standing outside of this door; Pryce was climbing the steps while Fuller and I approached with our tools. I followed Fuller up the stairs to the platform and stepped forward, ready to shove the fork end of my Halligan into the door frame. Pryce stopped me by placing a firm hand on my shoulder before shaking his head.

“Don’t they teach you to try before you pry anymore, rookie?” he said.

I frowned, taking a step back. “They do,” I said sheepishly. “Sorry.”

Ozgood laughed. “I guess you can’t blame the guy for being a little eager.”

He wrapped a gloved hand around the door’s handle, gripped the latch, and pulled. Much to my surprise, the door put up no resistance as it came away from its frame. Ozgood noted my change in expression and grinned.

“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “The caller had to get into the building somehow, after all.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess you’re right.”

Ozgood released his grip on the door and allowed it to fall back into place. “Alright,” he said, “let’s get on air and get this over with.”

We did as our officer instructed and pulled our masks onto our faces before we opened our air cylinders. I heard my SCBA’s low pressure alarm ring briefly, indicating new airflow, before I attached my regulator to my mask. My next breath allowed a small blast of air to fill my mask and kiss my mouth and nose. When we were all ready and our breaths were coming in the form of slow, deliberate swallows, Ozgood once again opened the doo...

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