He didn’t think. He never thought when it mattered.
He plunged through.
The wet coat did its job as he reached the room. Inside, two girls—not older than two and three—curled around a trembling, whimpering puppy.
He gathered them all under the damp coat, clutching them close to his chest.
“Hold tight, angels.”
The heat was unbearable in the hallway. His hair ignited. Skin blistered. His face felt like it was being peeled with knives. He couldn’t see clearly. But he knew the way. The stairwell. The light.
He hurled himself forward, fire tearing at every inch of his exposed skin. The coat steamed. The pup yelped. One child screamed.
And then—
Air. Screams. Sirens. Hands.
A firefighter caught one daughter. A neighborhood woman caught the other, and a teenager grabbed the dog. Willie fell into the dirt—little left but seared flesh and pain.
***
The mob had retrieved the black sedan—assumed the north-gang killed their blade.
***
In the hospital, his memory blank, they called him John Doe, Hero.
His ID of a man long dead. No fingerprints that matched. A face unrecognizable even to God.
Mayor Jackson himself visited.
“This man,” he declared to the news cameras as he pointed through the glass window into the room of the heavily bandaged hero, “is what Chicago should be. Selfless. Brave. Decent.”
The city paid three of Hollywood’s finest plastic surgeons to reconstruct the melted face. They carved him a new one—chiseled, handsome, movie-star clean. Months passed. Skin grafts, painkillers, rehab.
He barely remembered his name—just bits.
“Bill,” he said once, blinking at the nurse. “Bill… something.”
So, he became Bill Benson—after a neighborhood boy who thought he remembered a Mr. Bill Benson once giving him a puppy when he was six.
And Bill Benson became a handsome hero. A parade marched down Michigan Avenue in his honor. He rode on the back of a red Bentley convertible. The two girls, healed and bright-eyed, rode by his side with the full-grown dog between them. Firefighters and police who lined the streets saluted. Men cheered. Women waved and wept.
At the end of the parade, they gathered on the viewing platform. At the podium, Bill and Mayor Jackson. Behind them, the two ladies in wheelchairs, the mother, her two daughters, and the dog. The mayor announced into the echoing PA system, “Bill, you can have any job with the city you want, except mine,” and he chuckled along with the audience. “Any department. Anything you want, and we’ll train you.”
The crowd went silent.
After a pause, Bill smiled and said, “I want to go to the police academy and be a cop.”
Thundering cheers erupted.
But no one knew that back in Bridgeport, a crime syndicate quietly whispered. “The Blade’s dead,” said the Godfather. “No body, but dead enough.”
And in a hospital bed, William “Willie” Morretti let that name die.
Because the blood on his hands was gone now.
Burned clean.
[END]
