by Sean Flynn
Tom took another drag, held it, exhaled, lazy and slow. Then another. He stubbed out the roach, shifted on the bed, up onto his knees. He flashed out a hand, grabbed Julie's coloring book, tossed it to the floor. With his other hand, he grabbed her shoulder, rolled her over on her back.
“Get away from me,” Julie said. “Get off of me!”
Tom put his full weight on her, pinning her to the pallet bed, grabbing at her hips.
“Get off of me,” Julie said again. She pressed her hands against his chest, lifting his body enough to squirm out from beneath him. She pushed him, scrambled to a sitting position. Tom shoved her, tit for tat. She shoved him once more, hard, too. Tom lost his balance, flung a leg toward the floor to steady himself. His leg smacked the red candle, knocked it off the table. It landed in the clothes piled against the wall, disappeared into the dirty folds.
Tom caught his breath, settled back onto the bed. Julie glowered at him. He glowered back, the two of them making mean faces at each other, not saying anything.
After a moment, Julie crinkled her nose. “I smell something burning,” she said.
She looked around the room. She saw a wisp of smoke curling from the corner, rising from the clothes. The pile flickered with a faint orange light, like the glow of an oversize cigarette in the dark. Julie bolted upright, leaned toward the smoldering clothing. “Look what you did,” she said. “You set the clothes on fire.”
Tom stared at the jumble of cotton and nylon. The first tendrils of flame sprouted in the fabric, tiny shoots unfurling. He looked at Julie, still scowling.
He got up from the bed and stomped on the clothes, trying to smother the fire with his feet. But it was almost as if he'd angered the flames, forced them to fight back to survive. A spark leaped free, landed on a scrap of paper, erupted, multiplied. Tom picked up a filthy pillow and started flailing at the fire. He was trying to beat it to death; each swing pushed a gust of fetid air into the flames. An orange tongue licked at the wooden crate, wrapped around a slat, held on. Julie kicked at the night-stand. The flames were knee-high and hungry, searching for more fuel. The pillow in Tom's hands caught fire. He dropped it onto the burning clothes.
“Get the animals,” Tom said.
The cat and dog, spooked by the heat and the smoke, scurried through the door, running for somewhere to hide, somewhere to breathe. Julie couldn't grab them, couldn't herd them toward the door.
The fire spread. The blankets, the garbage, Julie's coloring book all fed the flames. Smoke stung their eyes.
“Get your shoes on,” Tom said. “C'mon, get your fucking shoes on!”
Julie squished her feet into her shoes, forcing them in as she took two stumbling steps. She followed Tom through the doorway, along the hall, and down the stairs to the loading dock. They sucked in deep breaths, cold, clear December air stinging their lungs.
Tom kept moving, Julie a few steps behind him, not saying anything. They took Franklin, passed under the highway, and walked two blocks to the Worcester Common Outlets. A third of the mall's storefronts were empty, but Media Play was still in business. Tom knew they could hang out there for a while, stay out of the cold.
Julie went all the way to the back, where the CDs are stocked. She slipped on a pair of headphones and listened to samples at a kiosk. Tom stopped in the middle, in the book section, and paced an aisle. It was hard to browse when you couldn't read. He went to get Julie.
She was fuming. “I can't believe I lost all my stuff,” she said. She was practically yelling, loud enough to attract the manager's attention.
“Don't worry about it,” Tom said, keeping his voice almost at a whisper, hoping to calm her down. “C'mon, let's go.”
“No,” she said. She stopped between the greeting cards and the computer software, planted her feet, like a toddler preparing to throw a tantrum. “I lost everything. I don't have anything. I lost all my stuff.” She stamped her feet. “I can't believe I lost everything. Everything.”
“Don't worry about it,” Tom said again. From the corner of his eye, he saw the manager walking toward them. “Let's just go.”
He guided her out of Media Play, out of the mall, out toward Main Street. They walked for fifteen minutes, to Piedmont Street. Maybe they could make it to the Mustard Seed in time for dinner. Maybe food would make her feel better.
8
THE FIRES ALWAYS SEEMED TO COME IN CLUSTERS, SHORT, SPO-radic surges gathered around one shift or another. There was never any pattern to it, nothing anyone could predict; in truth, buildings burned on an almost completely random schedule. Yet every few weeks, the haphazard order of three-tone alarms would coincide with one of the four shifts in the Worcester Fire Department. A kitchen would catch fire on a Wednesday night and a cellar would smolder before dawn Friday and then the flames would take a few days off before savaging a triple-decker on Monday afternoon, and men from Group IV would be on duty for all three of them. That would continue for a week or so, Group IV getting all of the good runs, until a hiccup in the cycle would bump the working alarms to Group II or Group I. No one could explain why the fires seemed to work out that way, and perhaps, if they were plotted and graphed and analyzed, they actually didn't. But it seemed like they did, and everyone got used to the rhythm. If the last shift had been quiet, odds are the next one would be, too.
Late autumn had been a slow stretch for Mike McNamee's men. A handful of first-responders, an occassional call for Rescue 1, but no fires. Not in the northern half of the city, anyway. The southern district had had a couple of minor flare-ups—Main South had always burned with more frequency and intensity than the other neighborhoods—but that was District Chief Randy Chavoor's turf. And even his men hadn't seen any major action in weeks. The way things were going, nothing would catch fire until Group III came on the next night, Saturday.
For Mike, the quiet shifts weren't such a bad thing. Gave him time to catch up on his bureaucratic chores. Christmas was three weeks away, guys were looking for a few days off. At about five-thirty, Mike had gotten into his Ford Expedition to make the rounds of the northern stations, picking up the written requests for vacation time. His aide, George Zinkus, a small, wiry man with thinning hair and a choirboy's face, went with him.
At the Central Street station, Robert A. was busy with dinner, twenty-five pounds of roast beef roasting in shallow pans in the industrial oven at one end of the kitchen. Robert A. cooked for the men most nights, a skill he honed in the military and at one of his moonlight jobs, feeding the downtrodden at the PIP shelter, which he used to manage. And most nights, someone complained. If he made chowder or linguini with clams, Bert Davis would wrinkle his upper lip. “Bait,” he'd say. “You're feedin’me fucking bait. And why do you gotta put celery in everything?” Paul Brotherton appreciated Robert A.'s pricing, though. Another guy cooked hot dogs and beans one night and jacked each man for $5.50. The next night, Robert A. grilled steaks for four bucks a head. “Christ,” Paul mockingly groused. “For an extra buck-fifty we could've had franks and beans.”
Dinner would be ready a few minutes after six. By the time the dishes were washed and put away, it would be going on seven o'clock, which left five hours to kill before bunking down. Paul figured he'd spend them in front of the television, settled onto one of the hand-me-down couches upstairs. The lounge was a square room in the middle of the building with a TV and VCR on a tall cart in one corner and two sofas arranged in front of it. A half-dozen more were warehoused against one wall, a graveyard of faded fabrics and ripped upholstery, old couches dumped there whenever one of the guys bought a new one for his house. When one near the TV finally deteriorated into rags, the men would haul it down to the trash and move one from the wall into its place.
If it had been a day shift, Paul could have flipped around until he tuned in Jerry Springer or Montel Williams, Paul and Tommy Dwyer cracking jokes at the screen, laughing themselves silly. Drove the other guys nuts. But there wasn't much on Friday night. Paul thought about running out to
the video store.
“Go on, you've got time,” Mike Coakley told him.
It was a few minutes after six o'clock. Paul, Tommy, and the captain were standing at the bottom of the back stairway, just outside the kitchen. A streetlight shone through the window.
“Nah, fuck it. I'll go after dinner,” Paul said.
“Just go now. You'll be back in fifteen minutes.”
“So it'll take me fifteen minutes after dinner. I want to eat first.”
Coakley shrugged. “Whatever.”
They heard the oven door open with a metallic squeak. Robert A. was stooped over, poking the meat with a fork. Satisfied that the beef had been roasted to a proper shade of pink, he draped a towel across his hands, grabbed the pan, and carried it to the table. The aroma of seared fat and warm meat filled the kitchen, wafted out to the apparatus floor. Men lifted their heads, scuffed their chairs against the cement as they stood up and headed toward the kitchen.
Paul ducked in the door at the far end and weaved through the bodies crowding the narrow room. He grabbed a knife from the rack above the sink and announced that he'd be doing the carving. For Paul, a routine kitchen chore could be the most dangerous part of his shift. In sixteen years on the job, five on Rescue 1 pulling people and, once, a parrot out of burning buildings, he hadn't so much as twisted an ankle. Send him into a maw of smoke and fire and he'd march out grinning. Around the station, though, he could bust himself up good. Surgeons had to sew his hand back together once after he lost control of a chopping knife in the kitchen. And he almost tanked his career two winters earlier when he slipped on a patch of ice in the back parking lot, landing so awkwardly and hard that he tore his thumb clean out of the socket. The doctor told him that without a small miracle of physical therapy, he'd have to retire. “No way,” Paul said. “I'm a fireman. I'm too young to retire.” He rehabilitated himself playing video games with his boys, got back to 100 percent before his first therapy session.
Now he had Yogi growling at him. He was leaning over Paul's shoulder, inspecting the neat, thin pieces Paul sliced from the roast.
“What the fuck, Brotherton,” Yogi said. His walrusy mustache curled with his lip.
Paul stopped carving, looked up at him. If he'd been standing straight he would have been eye to eye with Yogi. “What?”
“What's with the fucking woman's portions? C'mon, cut it like a man, will ya?”
“What are you, the fucking portion police?”
“Yeah, if you're gonna cut it like a pussy, I'm the fucking portion police. I'm just saying, cut it—”
The first tone from the speaker interrupted him. The kitchen fell silent. Paul glanced at the clock on the wall: 6:13. A second tone, then a third. Paul put the knife down before the dispatcher spoke. Rescue always rolls on three tones.
“Striking Box 1438, Franklin and Arctic,” dispatch said. The intersection was close, a quarter mile from the station. All three trucks from Central would be ordered out. The kitchen emptied, fifteen men moving toward their trucks, as dispatch read off the assignments: “Engine 1, Engine 6, Engine 12, Engine 13, Ladder 1, Ladder 5, Rescue 1, Car 3”
Most of the men had their bunker pants arranged near their spots on the truck, the legs rolled down and stuffed into their boots. In four quick motions—step through one leg, then the other, pull up the trousers, bring suspenders over the shoulders—each man was half-dressed for battle. The guys who rode in the back, behind the cab, left their coats on the seat, the sleeves threaded through the harness of a tank filled with forty-five hundred pounds of compressed air, enough for thirty minutes of relaxed breathing, fifteen of heavy panting. The drivers—Bert Davis on the ladder, Tom Dwyer on the Rescue, Charlie Murphy on the engine—would wait until they got to the scene to strap on a tank.
Twenty-five seconds after the first squawk of the alarm, the trucks were ready to go. Three diesel engines roared in synch. Bert stepped on the gas as soon as the aluminum overhead doors lifted clear of the bays. The front wheels edged onto the driveway. Mike Coakley sounded two blasts on the horn as Bert steered Ladder 1 into a wide left turn, aiming east on Central Street. Rescue 1 followed a dozen yards behind, with Engine 1 bringing up the rear, a convoy of screaming red steel and chrome.
Two blocks down Central, the caravan banked right onto Summer Street and charged into the rotary at Washington Square. Robert A., riding shotgun on Engine 1, saw a plume of smoke rising from the warehouses behind the interstate. At 6:14, he pressed the talk button on his radio, trying to raise Mike Mc-Namee. “Engine 1 to Car 3,” he said. “Heavy smoke showing.”
Dispatch answered, confirmed the transmission. “Engine 1, you are reporting heavy smoke showing at 18:14”
The engine followed the other two trucks under Interstate 290, then groaned to a stop in front of Worcester Cold Storage. Robert A. jumped down from the cab directly in front of the building and turned his head toward the sky. There was nothing but clear night air above him. The stream of black smoke he'd seen from a short distance away had vanished. Maybe his perspective was off, staring up a wall of bricks too steep to bring the smoke into view. Or maybe the wind had shifted, blowing everything over the back side. Or maybe the old warehouse had sucked the whole cloud inside, as if it was holding back a secret.
“What the fuck,” he muttered to no one in particular. “Hey— which fuckin’ building's on fire?”
Randy Chavoor left South Station, the base of operations for his district, at six o'clock to take care of some niggling matters at headquarters on Grove Street. His aide, Franny Baldino, drove him in Car 4, the Expedition assigned to the district chief commanding the southern end of the city. On the way, they passed Worcester Cold Storage, which lies just north of the line dividing the two fire districts. From the street in front of the warehouse just after six, neither fireman noticed anything unusual about the building.
The drive to Grove Street took less than ten minutes. Randy got out of the Expedition and entered through the garage, greeting a few of the guys as he crossed the apparatus floor, and cut through a back passageway into the complex of administrative offices. At 6:12, he heard Maggie, one of the women who works in the alarm center, calling him on the radio. She wanted to know if Box 1438, Franklin and Arctic, was in the southern district.
He knew it wasn't, but it was close enough to steal the call. He knew his buddy Mike McNamee would do the same thing, grab an alarm from him if he had half a chance. His pulse quickened as he reached for his radio, and an impish smirk creased his cheek. He pushed the talk button. “Uh, yeah, Maggie, I'm on it.”
No answer, as if she didn't even hear him. He fiddled with his radio, gave it a closer look, clicked the button a couple times. He realized the battery was dead. She hadn't heard him. Damn it. He glanced around, spotted a phone, took two steps toward it. Maggie came back on the air. “Car 4, disregard.”
Randy let out an exasperated sigh. “Ah, shit.”
Mike NcNamee and George Zinkus were on the far edge of their district, near the Greendale Station three miles north of Central Street, when the alarm went off. As the third tone sounded, Mike cocked his head toward the radio, listening for the address. “Striking Box 1438 …”
He turned toward George, lowered his brow, looked at him over the top of his glasses. Mike knew the address from memory, knew exactly which building rang 1438. “Bad building,” he said.
George nodded, repeated it with him. “Bad building”
“Is that Randy's or ours?” Mike asked. “I think that's ours. Is that our last box?”
George grinned. “Ah, Randy'll take it.”
Then dispatch read the truck assignments. All of Central Street. Definitely northern district. Mike hit the lights and siren, and George punched the gas. He slowed at the edge of Knight Square, then accelerated down Burncoat Street to the ramp for I-290. Mike estimated they'd be on scene two minutes after the first units. With any luck, they could clear out within an hour. “Please let this be a little shit fire,” he whispe
red to himself. “Just a shitty little fire, please.”
The radio caught his attention. “Fire Alarm to Car 3”
“Car 3”
“Chief, be advised that an off-duty P.O. states smoke coming from the building. He is up on the highway and sees smoke coming from the top of the building.”
“Received.”
Eleven seconds later, four blocks from the highway entrance, Mike heard Robert A. radio that he, too, saw heavy smoke showing. Mike's stomach tightened. He grabbed the radio. “Fire Alarm, be aware that Car 3 is responding from Greendale.”
“Fire Alarm has that.”
George wheeled onto the interstate and squashed the pedal to the floor. Two minutes later, at the spot where the highway rises above downtown, Mike got his first look at the warehouse, an aerial view, his line of sight almost even with the top of the building. A column of charcoal smoke curled from the roof. He felt another pinch in his gut. From that angle, the fire didn't appear to be particularly menacing. But it had gotten at least a short head start on his men, staked a claim somewhere in that massive edifice. From the outside it was impossible to guess how bad the inside might be. The first alarm had come in only four minutes ago, but Mike didn't want to risk being caught short of men and equipment.
“Car 3 to Fire Alarm.”
“Fire Alarm answering Car 3.”
“We're just getting off I-290 right now,” Mike said. “Strike the second alarm. We're going to have the second alarm companies stage until we have a place for them.”
“Fire Alarm has that.”
Three more tones sounded in stations across the city. Three more trucks—Engine 16 out of Grove Street, and Engine 2 and Aerial Scope 2 from South Division—were on the road in less than a minute. All three were understaffed: between them, they carried only ten men, a third short of a full complement. But having ten more able bodies waiting on the sidelines gave Mike a small measure of comfort.