Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  Oddly enough, the vacant house Monahan had put on the dangerous buildings list for Finney was two blocks away.

  Engine 26’s first-in district was small but tricky, bordered on the south by the city limits, bisected at odd angles by Highways 509 and 99. The Duwamish Waterway sliced through it, too, running between 26’s and the rest of the city, its muddy water spanned by drawbridges. Half a dozen streets and avenues dead-ended at the river and continued on the other side in Engine 27’s district, so that the drivers of both stations had to memorize dozens of individual addresses—or risk watching helplessly as a fire burned across the river.

  By seven he was back in the cab of his Pathfinder with the heater running. He’d seen only a handful of cars, none with red IAFF union stickers in the window. Finney was assuming from the way the caller used the street designators and military time that he was meeting with a firefighter.

  At 7:25 a pedestrian glided forward through the fog and tapped on his window. “They’re coming for you,” she said, as he rolled the window down. “The first thing they’re going to do is make us sterile. It’s only a matter of time before they get around to blowing up the Supreme Court, the Empire State Building, Graceland.”

  “You’re out early this morning, Annie.” The homeless woman’s knit cap and eyebrows were freighted with moisture. He wondered if she’d been roaming these streets all night.

  “The defenders of freedom are few and far between, but we don’t sleep in.”

  She gave him a blank look that made him think she hadn’t gotten much sleep, then she turned briskly and pulled her cart away into the murk.

  Finney was due at the station at 7:30, in less than five minutes, and it was obvious by now that last night’s caller wasn’t coming. Everyone in the department knew how to push Finney’s buttons, and the phone call the previous night was probably a practical joke. They were probably yukking it up in the beanery at this very moment over the thought of Finney out here in the fog waiting for secret information.

  When he got to the station, nobody paid any attention to him. He carried his personal protective equipment over to the engine in the apparatus bay, removed Peterson’s gear, and put his own equipment on the rig. He Velcroed his name tags onto the passport name card in the cab, inspected his mask to make sure it was in working order, and signed into the daybook in the watch office. He ran the daily checks on the PhysioControl Lifepak, changed batteries in the three portable radios, and looked inside every compartment door on the rig to ascertain each piece of equipment was in place and in working order.

  At 8:36, while he was mopping floors, 26’s big metal bell began clanging. The tones on the station speaker signified that it was an aid call, the address only a few blocks north of the station. As the doors rolled up, Monahan fired up the Spartan, turning on the emergency lights, and they rolled out onto Cloverdale and into the mid-morning Boeing traffic. Around the corner the residential streets were empty.

  After they stopped in front of the address, Finney procured the aid kit, O2 kit, and Lifepak and carried them into the house. Their ninety-two-year-old patient had flu symptoms. They called an ambulance, and ten minutes later, as Finney was wheeling the empty ambulance stretcher through the front entrance of the home, a fire call came in on his portable radio. Engine 26 received only two or three alarms a day, and it was rare to miss one because they were already out of service.

  “Engines Twenty-seven, Eleven, and Thirty-six; Ladders Seven and Eleven; Aid Fourteen, Medic Twenty-eight; Battalion Seven: Eight Avenue South and South Elmgrove Street. Smoke from the building.” The location was only a few blocks away, but they wouldn’t be included until Lieutenant Sadler radioed the dispatchers that Engine 26 was back in service. In all probability, Engine 27 would get there first.

  18. BLIND MEN TOSSING HORSESHOES

  Even though Lieutenant Sadler cautioned Monahan to slow down and keep an eye out for the other rigs responding in the fog, Monahan drove too fast and ended up skidding the 34,000-pound apparatus to a halt just inches shy of Engine 27’s tailboard. They were lucky he hadn’t killed anyone.

  Finney had been smelling smoke for blocks, and now it mingled with the odor of hot brakes and the back-of-the-throat tang of a week’s worth of big-city pollution suspended in the fog. Between the smoke and the fog, they would be like blind men tossing horseshoes.

  For a split second Finney glimpsed the roofline and a wind-blown chimney, dense black smoke pumping from a dormer at one end. Then the smoke and fog damped out his view.

  After conferring quickly with the driver of Engine 27, Lieutenant Sadler twisted around in his seat and spoke to Finney through the crew-cab window. “McKittrick says he thinks there’s a hydrant about a hundred yards down. I’m going to send Jerry. You and me are going to take a second line off Engine 27 and back them up.”

  “Right.”

  Finney couldn’t have been more pleased. They were taking a line inside. They were going to fight fire. He lived for times like this.

  The smoke was thick and acrid, and they coughed as they moved through it. Even Sadler, the hardened nicotine junkie. Even McKittrick, who operated Engine 27’s pump panel, his nostrils yielding a steady stream of snot after only a few minutes’ exposure to the smoke in the street.

  Air cylinder on his back, Finney climbed down off the rig and went around the back of Engine 27, where he pulled out the first hundred feet of inch-and-three-quarter hose load with the gated wye. By the time he got it on his shoulder, McKittrick had shouldered the second hundred feet. Ian McKittrick had almost twenty-five years in the department, fifteen of those behind the wheel of Engine 27. He was a fast talker and knew his job better than he knew his kids. Bald-headed and slack-jawed, McKittrick placed the gated wye and ten feet of line near a hose-port on the fire side of the rig—he would connect it later—then followed Finney through the fog, dropping dry hose flakes onto the ground behind them as they proceeded. Finney, unable to see the house, followed the first line on the ground.

  It wasn’t until Finney was on the front doorstep that he realized this was the vacant house they’d put on the dangerous buildings list.

  McKittrick hollered over his shoulder as he ran back to his rig. “Don’t waste any water. All I’ve got right now is that five hundred gallons in the tank.”

  The front door was half off its hinges, mute testimony to the rough passage of the earlier crew. Inside, Engine 27’s hose stream was being directed into a sheet of orange without any seeming effect, and Finney could see the boots of two firefighters on their stomachs in front of him. He could hear the crackle of burning wood. Even in the doorway he was forced to tip his helmet so that the brim shielded his face from the heat.

  Behind, over the roar of Engine 27’s pump, he could hear Lieutenant Sadler yelling, “You stupid shit!” He assumed the comment was addressed to Monahan; those sorts of expletives usually were. Later, he learned Sadler had anchored a piece of four-inch supply line in the street while Monahan drove away and recklessly overshot the hydrant, disappearing into the fog.

  Finney pulled his facepiece on, tightened the straps on the sides, opened the valve at his waist, and inhaled clean air; then he pulled his hood over the top of the facepiece, put his helmet back on, and knelt in the doorway waiting for his partner. A torrent of hot smoke surged out of the building into his face, but with this much cover, he barely felt the dirty heat.

  Sadler reached the porch at the same time as the hose at their feet stiffened, the water knocking the kinks out with the sound of a cardboard box being kicked. Finney worked the bale on the Task Force tip to bleed air off the line. A few seconds later Sadler finished masking up and tapped him on the shoulder.

  Finney crawled twelve feet inside before his helmet rapped against the green bottle on another man’s back. Even with every bit of skin covered by thick protective clothing, the heat had pinned Engine 27’s crew to the floor. Finney and Sadler were still on their hands and knees, but they would get lower as their clothing an
d equipment began to heat up. He heard the mellow, ripping sound of fire scratching at the structure.

  Not realizing Finney had run up against the other crew, Sadler bumped him from behind, hard. Like any other high-danger activity, firefighting could get addictive, and doing it better and quicker than others was addictive, too. Sadler said, “Come on! Let’s fight some fire! Let’s go, man!”

  It was always cooler behind. Finney knew of a man on Engine 6’s crew who’d been shoved into a burning basement from behind by an overeager officer. Sadler bumped Finney’s back again, harder. When Finney turned to complain, he reached out but felt only empty space and scarred hardwood flooring. For a split second he thought Sadler might have fallen into a hole in the floor or rolled down a stairwell.

  Retracing his path along the hose line, he groped his way to the doorway. Inexplicably, Sadler was standing on the porch, McKittrick alongside him. Sadler spoke through his facepiece without turning his gaze from McKittrick. “Ian says there’s a victim upstairs.”

  “This is the house I was in last shift. It’s vacant.”

  “He saw a victim.”

  Sadler, McKittrick, and Finney trotted through the tall, wet weeds in the yard, McKittrick stumbling on a coiled hose line. When they were almost to the road, McKittrick turned and pointed to a second-story window barely visible in the murk. Sadler gave a report on his portable radio. “Dispatch from Engine Twenty-six. We have a victim on the second floor. Repeat. Confirmed victim on the second floor. We’re going to initiate a rescue.”

  Finney glimpsed coils of black smoke belching out the broken windows, a tongue of flame. Then something upright darted past a window on the second story, something that resembled a human form.

  19. ABANDON YOUR PARTNER AND DO-SI-DO

  As the fog and smoke closed down visibility once more, Finney stepped to the middle of the street looking for another unit, perhaps a truck company, but there were no other companies, only Engine 27 and their own dry supply hose trailing along the center of the street into Jerry Monahan’s netherworld.

  Sadler had vanished.

  It was always a long wait for help down here in South Park, but other units should have been on the scene by now. Engine 11 from West Seattle. Ladder 7 from the industrial area south of downtown. He had no idea how much time had elapsed, but he didn’t hear sirens. He approached McKittrick at the pump panel. “Where is everybody?”

  “There’s an accident on the First South Bridge, and the Sixteenth South Bridge is stuck in the up position.”

  Finney went back to the front door and, under a scrim of boiling smoke, spotted Sadler’s size-thirteen boots just inside the entrance, Sadler on his stomach, trying to crawl through the worsening heat. As Finney crawled in behind him, he noticed the officer and tailboard man from Engine 27 hadn’t progressed an inch. Rarely had he seen a house fire this hot or this impervious to water.

  “Come on,” Sadler yelled. “They’re going to protect the stairs while we go up.”

  “There aren’t any stairs,” Finney said. “They’re burned out. And that fire doesn’t even know we’ve got a line on it.”

  “You and me are going up. Come on.”

  “If we go outside, we can get through a window.”

  “The stairs should be towards the back. Besides, you know the rule. Always a hose line between the fire and the victim.” When Sadler began edging around the crew of Engine 27, a pillow of steam from one of their nozzle bursts came down and forced them flat. From his facedown position on the floor, Sadler opened his line, but it went slack. It took a few moments to figure out Engine 27’s line had gone slack, too. The five-hundred-gallon tank on the pumper outside had run dry. Now everything would depend upon Monahan or McKittrick finding and opening a hydrant.

  It was hard to believe five hundred gallons less what was in the hose lines hadn’t made a dent in this fire, but it hadn’t.

  The rubber facepiece against Finney’s cheeks was slick with sweat. A pulse pounded in his temple.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” Sadler began pulling the dead hose line toward where he thought the stairs were. Finney watched Sadler wriggle along the floor until, a full body-length in front of the other crew, he was forced to stop, as Finney had known he would be. It was incredible how much heat Sadler could take. He was crawling into a virtual oven.

  “The stairs are gone,” Finney yelled. “And we don’t have any water, so how are we going to get a line between the fire and the victim?”

  It was pointless to argue. They could barely raise their heads, much less stand up to climb a staircase that didn’t exist. Again, Sadler inched forward.

  “We’ll never get there this way,” Finney yelled. “I’m going outside.”

  If Sadler heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  All professions have cardinal rules, and in modern firefighting there are few crimes as egregious as abandoning a partner. It was a fiat Finney knew better than anybody, yet he backed out on his hands and knees, backed out until he was on the porch by himself.

  As he ran through the yard and passed the pump panel on Engine 27, he pushed the throttle in and muffled the screaming of the now-dry pump. McKittrick was off somewhere finding a hydrant. Fed by reservoirs high on the hill, most of these hydrants in South Park carried 135 pounds of head pressure. When McKittrick opened the hydrant, the pressure, even without a boost from the pump’s impeller, would cycle through the pump housing and pressurize the hoses.

  Without taking his mask off, Finney unhooked the chrome latch mechanism on the heavy twenty-six-foot aluminum ladder on the officer’s side of Engine 27, lifted the ladder out of the holder, balanced it on his right shoulder, and ran with it. It was a lot heavier than he remembered. More than a minute had passed since he’d seen the figure in the window.

  When he reached the house, he tipped the spurs of the ladder into the soggy grass and muscled it up. Once he had the ladder vertical, he steadied it with his knee along one beam, tugged the halyard hand-over-hand until the sections were fully extended, and dropped it clanking against the house. He couldn’t see the tip, only fog and smoke.

  He raced up into the chaos.

  20. FIGHTING FOR AIR

  Finney scrambled up the rungs past a sagging gutter and, keeping a grip on the ladder’s beam, placed one boot on the steeply pitched roof. For a split second he inspected the roofline, and then a hood of black smoke enveloped him. All he could see was the heavy aluminum ladder in his hands—and a millisecond later not even that.

  Bouncing slightly, he tested the integrity of the roof and rafters as he made his way up the incline, crossing thick layers of moss-encrusted three-tab roofing. He was more than two stories above the ground and a fall could prove fatal.

  The figure he’d seen from below had been in the gable twenty feet to his right. When the smoke didn’t clear after a few moments, he moved higher, slipping on a patch of moss that felt like a balled-up sock, the misstep nudging a shot of adrenaline into his system. The roof was spongier here, and he could feel the fire brushing the rafters under his feet. Sheaves of smoke crept out through overlaps in the roofing material.

  He knew the roof was growing weaker, that it wouldn’t be long before he would drop into the house like a big yellow squalling Santa Claus.

  When he reached the edge of the first dormer, he grabbed the gutter and placed himself directly in front of the window. The glass was intact, though when he put his flashlight to it, he found the windowpane had a mottled, tarlike coating on the inside. Moving close, he squinted through the black film.

  It took a moment to realize he was staring at a face, a pair of wild gaping eyes only inches away.

  For a moment the eyes inside the window searched his. Then they vanished.

  When he broke the window with his gloved fist, heat traveled up his sleeve through the Nomex gauntlets sewn in to protect his wrists.

  “Fire department!” he yelled, leaning into the funnel of rapidly escaping heat and smoke. The only reply wa
s the sound of fire in the other room and a bottle popping dully somewhere in the heat. The room was all smoke, though he could see flame beyond the partially open door. “Over here. Come over here.”

  No reply.

  With great effort, he managed to wedge himself and his air bottle into the tiny opening. A moment later he was half in and half out. He remained stuck in that preposterous position, legs kicking, until he flopped inside and found himself in a small room devoid of furniture and knee-deep in debris. The smoke seemed to have the texture of hot pudding. Crouching under the worst of the heat, he worked his way around the room, the broken window now providing the fire with an abundant supply of oxygen. A blanket of flame began to spread across the ceiling like angry marmalade.

  “Hello. Anybody here?”

  Flame nosed around the top of the partially open door to his right. Beyond the door everything was aglow. Under different circumstances it would have been beautiful.

  Moving swiftly, he crawled around the perimeter of the room, one arm and leg brushing the wall, the other arm and leg stretched out toward the center of the room, searching the rubble but finding only knots of old clothes, a mattress, empty food packages, broken dresser drawers. Soon it would all burst into flame.

  As he passed the door, he tried to close it, but the half-burned wooden panels crumbled at the touch of his heavy gloves.

  He had no business being here without a hose line, but then, had he waited for a hose line, the victim’s remote prospect of rescue would have been reduced even further. They’d already wasted too much time.

  As he moved, the room grew noticeably hotter. His bunkers were fire resistant, but they weren’t fireproof, and like potatoes wrapped in foil, firefighters could be and had been cooked inside their protective Nomex layers. Cordifis had died that way, and Finney was beginning to think he might, too. He figured he had thirty seconds to find the victim and make an exit, forty-five seconds at the outside.