Fire in the Attic

No, I dont mean the band. I mean actual fire.
On Friday night I sat in my appartment and watched The Butterfly Effect, when the TV made a loud cracking sound and turned off. Damn it, I thought, I will miss the last minutes of the movie now...
My phone and my internet also work over the cable network, so it was all turned off. What now?

I heard a loud knocking on the door... Whoomp Whoomp Whoomp it went. Mh, I thought, maybe someone wants to know if my cable tv stopped too.

"Helloooo?"
"Oi, its the porteiro! Come out please!"
"Uhm, hold on a second" *key search, turn keys, open door*
"We gotta go. There is a fire. Upstairs."
"A what?..." *grab wallet and cellphone, grab shoes*
"Fire. Come quick.*

We ran down the stairs. 15 floors. He had run them up before. He was sweating. Nervous. The building had just been opened and he was new. New to this job. New to this responsibility.
My knees were a little shaky. I had done this before. Ran down the fire stairs, once from 11th floor once from the 26th. It always turned out to be a false alarm and as there was no smoke, I thought this must be a false alarm too. Yet the porteiro seemed very nervous.

The only thing I could be thinking was: This is not possible. This cannot be true. My stuff made it all the way from Germany to Brazil, by train, by ship and by truck. It will not burn down now. And why am I carrying my sneakers in my hands. My socks will be ruined when I get downstairs. Why I was thinking that? No idea. Kinda ridiculous. My socks? I mean, who are you kidding... I run around on socks all the time and for years my mom keeps telling me that I keep ruining my socks and i never before cared. The brain works in weird ways sometimes...

When we arrived outside there were already people standing there. From the outside I could see that the building had a light alarm, that was blinking heavily in the night, but I did not hear a sound.
From the other few people that live in the house so far, I learned that the little three year old girl saw the fire. When going to bed she looked out of her window and saw the fire reflection in the new building next to ours. "Oh look mommy, how pretty. It has fire in the window." Mommy of course didnt think it was so pretty, grabbed her little one and ran downstairs informing the porteiro and the local fire brigade.

When the fire brigade arrived, the fire still didn't seem to be big, there was not much to see from the outside.
The fire was on the top floor, where the appartments arent ready yet and noone lives there so far (well, there are only 5 of 22 appartments used so far). Apparently a construction worker had left one of those tools on, that make a flame to melt things together. He had left it on small, so it took a couple of hours before the material caught fire. As far as I understood, we all reacted right. When the chief of the fire brigade came back downstairs to tell us the fire was out and why it happened, and all the details that everyone wanted to know so badly... I didn't really understand it all though, people were all talking at the same time, talking fast, talking portugese (of course), but at least the guy was very handsome... so I just looked, and had someone explain it to me later...

A little later we wore allowed to go back upstairs. It was a little weird. The fact that i did not hear any alarm got me a little worried. What if it happens again and the porteiro cannot run up 15 stories again... but then again, what are the chances of it happening again in the same night, when the fire men just took care of it?! And the alarm will be repaired or re-adjusted too.