Chapter 1: A Lesson for Western Infidels Begins

Amy Brickhouse was a big girl.

It was a fact that she was comfortable with, even though her team members on the squad tended to tease her mercilessly about her size. I personally never teased her about anything because I figured she would probably bust me in my chops or kick me in my balls without hesitation.

That was just the way Amy handled things like that and I didn’t see anything wrong with it because she never went looking for trouble the way some of the other firemen at our station did just to keep from getting bored when things were nice and calm.

Calm and peace was something you never knew as a certainty in a firehouse.

You could be sitting down at the table eating a slice of pizza one minute and sliding down the pole another minute hoping you remembered to zip up your flies and nothing was in danger of getting rubbed wrong on the way down.

My name is Dave Donner.

My folks are from this area going way back to the time when it was populated only by Indians and bears. There is a mountain pass not too far from the city that has our family name in prominent display. If the name “Donner Pass” carries a sense of something not quite right, you got the right idea. When I see people look at me strangely after hearing my name is Donner, I know right away that they wondering if I am one of “those Donners”.

The fact of the matter is that there are not too many of us Donners left in these parts. I think it was because a lot of my name-connected relatives choose to change their name to Smith, Jones or Brown just to escape the inevitable question. “Are you one of those Donners?”

I was fortunate in the fact that most of the guys at the firehouse were pretty much from out of state. I guess that is the way of things here in Las Vegas ever since the Mafia decided it was a good place to put down some roots. In my own way, I was kind of proud of my name because our family was a part of history of the region and we really didn’t have anything to be ashamed of regardless of the slings and arrows of slurs based on inaccurate historical details.

Our firehouse was actually far enough away from the Strip that we seldom got involved in any of the exciting fires that happened in or near one of the fabulous gambling casino hotels that were the backbone of the city’s financial base. The city was a lot different these days because of the urban sprawl that extended the city limits all the way out into the previously vacant desert in every direction. Of course, once you got outside the city limits, it was barren emptiness all the way to the California line where a bunch of new casinos rose from the desert sands like wild weeds in the front lawn. These were not your “prime time” casinos, but more like wildcat oil rigs that took a risk to make a lot of dough. The crime element was much higher outside the city limit because a number of laws enforced inside the city limits of Las Vegas were virtually ignored in the remainder of the State of Nevada.

We had four fairly new fire engines and a shift roster of twenty-eight duty workers. Each engine had seven crew members with specific jobs in certain emergencies. Amy was the only female crew member on our engine, but the other three engines each had at least two females on each shift. Most of the female firemen were young, strong and agile and fully qualified to respond to any emergency. Amy was probably the prettiest girl on our shift which started at midnight and ran to eight AM in the morning. It was the least popular shift because it always seemed like the difficult assignments occurred on our shift just like regular clockwork.

Sometimes, we would be called in for a casino fire, but it a rare case and that was just fine with me because the high-rise casinos were the most dangerous locations to protect.

I was dating a female fireman on the daytime shift called Maria. She was from Tijuana, Mexico originally and had an accent that you could cut with a chainsaw. I thought she was the sexiest thing since “Girls Go Wild” and when she looked over her shoulder at me shouting her native language like machine gun fire, I was driven to frenzied humping that left me out of breath and sweating like a pig in the rented motel room with crappy air conditioning.

Shamefully, I must confess that Maria was happily married with two kids of her own and a husband that was so pussy-whipped that he stayed at home and did all the cooking and the cleaning like a frigging housewife. I met him at a Christmas party and couldn’t look him in the eye because of the depraved things his wife and I had been doing for the entire past year. I knew the geography of Marie’s pussy like the back of my hand and she was one hot number when that bedspring started squeaking with no need for translation. He gave me kind of a strange look and right away I started wondering if she had told him of our relationship and it sort of scared me because some of these husbands could be real mean pricks in a dark alley.

That was the main reason why I made a move on Amy in the solitude of the midnight hours hoping to find greener pastures for the exercise of my masculine needs. At first, Amy was all giggles and disbelief because she was not exactly a feminine type. After some fumbling and fooling around, we got into a kind of rhythm that was more lust-making than love-making and she managed to sustain some memorable orgasms standing against the stucco back wall of the firehouse in a dark corner that hid our sins.

Things were going along on a fairly even keel, when we got this post 9-11 notification that the Las Vegas Fire Department, or I guess I should say the Clark County Fire Department because of the merger, would be assuming responsibility for anti-terrorist response to all incidents of Chemical, Biological or Radioactive attacks within the city limits. That sounded like a real challenge to most of us but they were real serious about it and, shortly after, a team came down from Reno to start training us in the use of the HazMat suits with built-in breathing apparatus and equipped with contamination alert systems to let us know when we were approaching the upper limits of our permitted exposure.