Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  Toward evening a battalion chief from Chattanooga named Frost called in response to messages I’d left. He told me I could cheerfully disregard anything Charlie told me, that Charlie had been spouting nonsense about Southeast Travelers for so long, nobody listened to him anymore. When I mentioned Charlie’s garage fire and his thoughts on the LPG truck accident, Chief Frost said, “Charlie started it hisself, left a sack of hot ashes from his woodstove too close to a wall. And that LPG truck driver? He reached over to change the radio station, got a bee in his briefs, whatever. Nobody but Charlie and some asshole works over at the paper ever thought there was anything odd about it.

  “The tank itself must have ruptured with the crash, which would have weakened the double-wall construction. Burned real hot. We went in like we’re taught, hard and aggressive, two teams on two hose lines, each spray pattern protecting the team behind it, but the tank blew before we got it cooled. The explosion was unbelievable. Hey. Out of those eight guys, six died, which was a miracle in itself, because they all should have been blown to Kingdom Come. One escaped with minor burns, and one had to retire. Helluva deal. We also lost the truck driver and a news photographer who happened to be in the way. I didn’t get there myself until minutes later, but I saw it from a distance and believe me, I thought twice about turning around and heading on outa there. You ain’t lived until you’ve seen an LPG tank go up. It hadn’t been mostly empty, we would have lost a lot more people. Damn lucky.”

  “The same shift had the LPG fire as went to Southeast Travelers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The guy at the paper seemed to think that was significant.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  I spoke to several more fire officers who either had been at the tanker fire in Chattanooga or were intimate with the details. Unfortunately, the details shed little light on our problems in North Bend. Even though Drago told me at one time he had a complete list of the companies involved in the Southeast Travelers fire, he couldn’t confirm or deny JCP, Inc., had been involved. So far, neither could anybody else.

  We fielded several calls from people in the upper Snoqualmie Valley asking to confirm Scott Donovan was working with us, so we knew he was making the rounds.

  At five-thirty people began disappearing to go home and have dinner with their families. By six-thirty there were only three of us left, myself, Stephanie, and Cherie, God bless her. She’d been with us all day.

  Stephanie looked across the conference room table at me and said, “None of these doctors has called back. I told their people this was a matter of life and death.”

  “They’ll call.”

  “Know what else?”

  “What?”

  “I sure wish we could have done an autopsy on your friend.”

  “Why not wait and do one on me?”

  “Not funny. And please don’t talk like that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I spoke to the CDC today. I was honest with them. I shouldn’t have been. I told them most of these cases had been officially attributed to something other than a syndrome. For instance, your chief dying out in the woods. Or the two car accidents. They’re real busy. They need more conclusive evidence of a syndrome before they’ll send someone out.”

  The girls called every half hour or so to make sure I was all right and to find out when Stephanie and I would be home. Later they called to tell me they were going to a movie with Morgan.

  At a few minutes after six o’clock we got a call back from one of the doctors Stephanie had been waiting on, a neurologist in Biloxi who’d treated a young woman who had been brain-dead for three years; after complaining of dizziness and ringing in her ears, the woman had gone down in a matter of days, her only outward symptom waxy-looking hands. Stephanie kept the doctor on the line for half an hour.

  When she hung up, she turned to me. “She’s exactly like Holly and the others.”

  “They ever track down the source?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do they know anything?”

  “Nope.”

  46. THE DEEP BLUE DREAD

  The shower shut off with a bang of the pipes in the wall, and for some minutes there was no sound from the bathroom. When the door finally opened, Stephanie’s silhouette was limned by the light behind her. She walked toward me as relaxed as if she were shopping for groceries.

  She padded barefoot across the room, stood beside the bed for a few moments before I felt her weight on the mattress. Slowly, she crawled next to me, smelling of soap, toothpaste, and shampoo, pressing the length of her body against mine. It was at times such as this that I usually came up with my dumbest comments, as if the occasion inspired the idiocy. Tonight was no exception.

  “This is a mercy fuck. Right?”

  “Yes, it is, sweetie.”

  “Then it’s not going to happen.”

  “What? You don’t want to help out a socially maladjusted doctor who’s been so busy putting herself through med school and residency and establishing a practice, she never had time for a social life?”

  “You’re only doing this because you feel sorry for me.”

  “No. You’re doing it because you feel sorry for me.” Her faulty logic forced a laugh from me. I could see by the look on her face that she liked me. It always came as a surprise to discover a woman liked me. Any woman. Maybe my reluctance to accept love came from those years after my mother vanished, for whatever else was going on in her life, my mother had certainly abandoned her only child. Lorie’s disappearance probably didn’t help. Or maybe somewhere down deep, all guys felt that way. I’d never talked to another man about it, so I couldn’t say for certain.

  Running my fingers over the silky skin of her hips and stomach, cradling the hint of her belly with my palms, wrapping my hands around her waist, encircling her girth with my hands, I tried to lose myself in the moment. It would be the first time all day I’d stopped thinking about the syndrome.

  She began helping me off with my T-shirt, then unbuckled my pants and began wrestling them off. I was so ready to make love, it was embarrassing.

  “I can see there’s going to be no mercy here,” she said.

  I took her in my arms, rolled over, and kissed her. As we played, I began having flashbacks to all the times I’d made love with Holly. Holly had been more relaxed in life, more uptight in bed, more serious making love, while Stephanie, so solemn in life, took immense delight in every little nuance of our bodies.

  Still, I couldn’t shake visions of a naked Holly from my brain.

  Holly lay in some dank nursing home, alone and forgotten the same way I would lie alone and forgotten in just a few days. I had treated her terribly, and now I was about to pop her sister. Looking at it in this new light, our tryst seemed wrong in the worst of all possible ways.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, it’s pretty obvious you can.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Grasping me, she said, “What’s this?”

  “Some sick cosmic joke.”

  She rolled on top of me.

  “Stop.”

  “Hey, don’t turn this into a big moral issue.” She hovered over me and stared into my eyes. “Let’s not analyze this. I’m sick to death of analyzing every little thing in my life. It’s the reason I don’t have a life. I think it’s the reason you don’t have one, either.”

  Thinking had always been my downfall, and I found I couldn’t stop now. Ironic, because in three days I wouldn’t be able to think. “I feel so bad about my life. The way I—”

  “Shush,” she said, her hair tickling my face as she leaned over, her small breasts brushing my chest. “Don’t talk. That’s the secret, big boy. Just lie back and enjoy the night.”

  “Did you call me big boy?”

  “Okay, medium-to-slightly-above-average boy.”

  “Let’s go back to big boy.”

  “Sorry. You lose what you questio
n.”

  Later, lost inside her, I felt her hot, moist breath on my ear, her legs wrapped around mine, her hands on the back of my neck. It was an animal thing making love, but it was magnificent, too, and I wanted it to be so deliciously slow, we would both explode with desire before it was over.

  And then, just for a moment, I thought my heart stopped.

  Afterward, twined together, wet and sated and full of warmth we’d each appropriated from the other, I found myself beginning to drift off. I struggled to remain alert but failed. Lately, each time I went to sleep, I was just a little afraid I wouldn’t wake up. Then Stephanie was shaking me, and I was half-awake but still dreaming. A weird sensation.

  It seemed forever before I got my eyes open. “I was worried,” she said.

  “It was as peaceful as I’ve ever been. Like I was dead.”

  She’d turned on a lamp, her hair down around her face as she watched me. I had no idea how long we’d been here: one hour, two, a day? While I was rapidly coming to terms with my fate, I could tell by the deep blue dread in Stephanie’s eyes, she was not. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  Making love with Stephanie had been penny fun and pound foolish. Worse, it had been diabolic. After I joined her sister in the mental ether, the pain of Stephanie’s consanguine betrayal would only be that much greater for her.

  Ironic. Just as I was recognizing my own unhealthy need to inflict suffering on the women around me, I went out and did it again. The fact that it had been her idea didn’t make it any easier to stomach.

  We dressed in silence, kissed briefly at the door, and stepped out onto the walkway. It was almost eleven-thirty. Two doors down, a man and a woman, half-crocked from the sounds of their movement and slurred voices, quarreled over which of them had the room key. A moment later I realized we were listening to Wes and Lillian Tindale.

  Our meeting surprised me, but it shocked them. Mouths agape, they both turned and stared.

  For a few moments the four of us looked at one another and then, without a word, Stephanie pivoted around and began walking away. I followed. Downstairs, we climbed into the Lexus, while a dumbfounded Wesley and Lillian gawped down at us.

  As we headed out of the lot, two men in a rental car headed in. “Stop,” I said. The two men parked next to us and headed toward a room on the ground floor. “I thought you two were leaving town,” I said, rolling the car window down.

  The two balding men looked startled. Hillburn and Dobson from Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. I’d been suspicious of them for pulling out of town after our chat, but now I was even more suspicious because they hadn’t pulled out of town at all.

  “What are you two doing?” I asked, getting out of the Lexus.

  They looked at each other and headed for their room without answering. I ran over to them and grabbed Dobson by the arm. “No. I want to know what you two are doing. I thought you said your company couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with our syndrome. If that’s so, why are you hanging around?”

  “Doesn’t have anything to do with you,” said Hillburn, who had the key in the door.

  “You two are up to something.” They just stared at me. Before I could say anything else, they opened the door, went in, and slammed it in my face.

  “Did you see those bastards?” I said, getting back into the car.

  “I don’t like them, either, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Achara was going to look into rocket fuel products. Maybe she’s found something.”

  “I’m surprised we haven’t heard from her. The library closed hours ago.”

  We stopped at the fire station, where Stephanie retrieved some personal items out of Holly’s Pontiac, which was still parked there.

  It was hard for me to look at our fire station, a place I’d loved for so many years, a home away from home, a place I was destined never to inhabit again.

  Just as we were about to leave, a black Suburban pulled around the corner, Scott Donovan at the wheel.

  “I’ve been looking for you two,” Donovan said. He had a strange look on his face, as if surprised to see us.

  “Here we are,” Stephanie said.

  “Do you have some news for us?” I asked.

  “You guys . . . I just want to meet with you in the morning. Before the news conference. That all right?”

  Stephanie turned to me. “Sure.”

  “I just . . . I’ve been looking all over for you. Where were you?”

  “Out and about,” Stephanie said cheerily.

  “We ran into Hillburn and Dobson. From JCP? They’re still in town. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  Donovan rubbed his chin. “It seems very odd. Where’d you see them?”

  “The Sunset Motel.”

  Donovan gave us a look. “I’ll go check it out. And don’t look so glum. We’re going to lick this.”

  “I’m not glum,” I said.

  “No? Is there a reason you have a room reserved over at Alpine Estates?”

  It took a moment to realize what he was talking about. He seemed disappointed when Stephanie explained the room was my father’s.

  After we left, I said, “He look like he’s been drinking?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That newspaper guy in Tennessee hinted that he was quite a drinker.”

  The street lamps on Ballarat complemented a gigantic moon dangling over the south corner of Mount Si.

  My girls would be wondering where I was. Once again I’d fobbed them off onto a baby-sitter and was ashamed of myself. Tomorrow was little enough to give, but tomorrow was theirs. We were getting nowhere with this quest, and I wasn’t going to waste my remaining hours struggling like a wild horse in quicksand. It seemed the more I fought, the more hopeless things looked. Tomorrow I would hold the news conference, gather my family around, and wait for somebody to throw a rope over my neck and save me.

  If somebody produced information that altered my lot, so be it. If not, my destiny was in the hands of God.

  If there was a God.

  Spooky.

  I didn’t believe in him, so why was I invoking his will now?

  I began deep breathing again.

  In my mind there was no longer much hope that I would be cured. It was a weak trail, and we were moving slowly. The fact that I had someone to share this with meant a lot to me. It meant even more that it was a woman who’d once reviled me.

  We were on Ballarat, just past the library, when Stephanie pulled to the curb. My ears were ringing, and for a moment I couldn’t figure out why she’d stopped. Then a fire engine raced past, siren squalling, red lights whirling. The ground seemed to shake as it passed. A moment later Jeb Parker raced past in his Volkswagen. I wasn’t wearing my pager, so I had no idea what they were responding to. It must have been a fire call rather than an aid response, because moments later another volunteer sped past at seventy miles an hour. The engine could have handled an aid call by itself.

  The moonlit road out of town took us north, then veered east directly toward the base of Mount Si, then north again paralleling Si toward my house, three legs, each about half a mile long. My place was in a small enclave of treed properties next to the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River.

  Across the fields a plume of fast-rising black smoke rolled upward. The smoke, highlighted as it was by the moon’s light, looked like an act of war.

  “Step on it,” I said, irritated that I wasn’t driving.

  Stephanie followed my gaze and accelerated.

  “A grass fire?” There had been two nuisance grass fires outside of town that afternoon.

  “More likely a structure fire. Or a vehicle. Smoke from vegetation is light-colored.” Even as I spoke, I caught another glimpse of the column. It was close to my property, too close, and hot, with orange streaks high up in the black smoke.

  “Hope it’s not one of your neighbors,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  During the minute or two it took to complete the trip, my mind went
blank, which was odd, because when I was riding the engine my mind never went blank. I would have been mentally running over the list of things to do when we arrived.

  From 428th S.E. you took a dirt and gravel spur road, passing Helen Neumann’s place, to reach mine. A little farther along was Fred Bagwell’s homestead, Fred a confirmed bachelor, an acknowledged alcoholic, and a lifelong misanthrope. The odds were about a hundred to one the fire was Fred’s place.

  As we approached the long gravel drive that led to my house, I saw the flashing red lights of the engine in front of us, the dust from Jeb Parker’s Volkswagen running along the center of the dirt road like a huge gray hedgehog, volumes of thick black smoke rising up off a structure partially hidden behind the trees.

  “Oh, God,” I said, the words as dry as day-old toast.

  “What?”

  “It’s my house.”

  “How could that be?”

  “I don’t know. Drive in. I need to make sure my girls got out.”

  47. INTO THE INFERNO

  The confusion at the site could have been worse, but not by much. The engine clogged the one-lane driveway, Parker’s vehicle having swung around them. The engine had stopped too far from the fire. There were two trees next to my house and they were both alight now. The roof was burning, smoke pouring through the broken-out living-room window. Caution was one thing, but they were too far back.

  I didn’t like the speed of the smoke. Or the color. Or the fact that some of the windows were already broken out. I didn’t like anything about it.

  I motioned for Stephanie to drive around the engine and into the field, which she did, heading for a spot between Helen Neumann’s house and mine. It was good to have a partner who didn’t panic, a woman used to working in emergency rooms.

  Before the car stopped rolling, I opened the door and leaped out, running past Jeb Parker as he donned his bunking clothes next to his Volkswagen. Anonymous volunteer firefighters in bulky yellow turnouts were climbing down off the engine. Helen Neumann stood in front of my burning house, a rumpled sweater thrown over her shoulders, looking small and frail, her thin gray hair in disarray, a woman in her forties who seemed seventy.