Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  Even after they told him his son was alive, he didn’t snap out of it.

  They ended up driving him home, Sadler and his crew sitting with Chief Finney in his living room, his wife beside him in a nightgown, none of them knowing quite what to do until the medics got there.

  Two weeks later, Chief Finney retired.

  47. THE LAUGHING FIREFIGHTER

  When the bell hit at twenty minutes before midnight on Monday, November 3, the overhead lights came on automatically with the alarm, just as they always did. Finney found himself laughing. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because he’d been awakened from the first truly deep slumber in recent memory, perhaps because he’d been dreaming about the good time he’d had with Diana the other day. They’d spoken on the phone at work, too, just before going to bed. As he pulled on his socks and stepped into his rubber boots and bunking trousers, the dispatcher’s urgent voice awakened him fully.

  “Time out: twenty-three forty hours. Engines Eleven, Twenty-six, Thirty-six, Twenty-seven; Ladders Seven and Eleven; Battalion Seven; Aid Fourteen, Medic Ten, Safety One; Air Twenty-six: West Marginal Way Southwest and Southwest Michigan Street. Channel one. Engines Eleven, Twenty-six . . .”

  After the dispatcher gave three rounds of response information, she added, “A large volume of smoke reported from Bowman Pork Products.”

  On the apparatus floor, Jerry Monahan wore a sleepy grin, his gray hair erupting from the sides of his head like whipped cream. They’d barely exchanged ten words all day—Monahan had been secreted away in the spare room working on his invention—and now this ingenuous grin. Finney couldn’t figure him.

  Finney climbed into the crew cab on Engine 26, buckled the snaps on his coat, turned on his portable radio, and switched it to channel one. Then he slid his arms into the straps of the self-contained breathing apparatus stored behind the seat. He couldn’t help it. He loved this shit. Getting up in the middle of the night to do who knows what. It was the most interesting job in the world. Anything could be out there waiting for him. Absolutely anything. As they pulled out of the station, he put the strap of his rubber face mask around his neck, screwed the low-pressure hose onto the regulator at his waist, then reached back with his right hand and opened the main valve. The warning bell chattered momentarily as air blew past and freshly energized the system.

  Two minutes later they arrived at the location next to the Duwamish Waterway, where the foul-tasting odor of smoke hung in the chill night air. They were definitely about to fight some fire. Good, Finney thought. Love it.

  The property was flat, as was all of the land for a couple of miles to the east. Behind them was a huge wooded hillside, West Marginal Way, a little-used four-lane road running along its base. Moments earlier the lieutenant on Engine 27 had taken charge on the radio, giving himself the title “Marginal Command,” an unfortunate choice of words. Engine 27’s driver worked the pump panel, and the third crew member occupied himself dragging a fifty-foot length of four-inch hose toward a hydrant.

  “Stick with me!” Sadler said, pointing a finger at Finney as he climbed off the rig.

  “Of course.”

  Sadler opened a side compartment and began slinging his mask while Finney surveyed the buildings. There were two main structures: an older, smaller building to their left, with concrete walls and a flat roof; a newer concrete structure to the right. There was nothing pretty about either building, and the situation was strangely reminiscent of Leary Way, though they weren’t going to be shorthanded here. There were already three engines on scene, and Finney could hear more sirens down the road.

  Between the buildings and almost directly in front of Engine 26 was a small parking area with a loading dock, two cab-over trucks parked inside the gate. It was in front of this loading area that Engine 11, Engine 27, and Engine 26 had clustered like bees around a concrete chrysanthemum.

  Flame licked the inside corner of the building on the loading dock, black smoke crawling up the walls. Like a paste-on eyebrow dangling off a drunken actor, one melted rain gutter hung loose. Two firefighters from one of the other units charged toward the building hauling a line that was rapidly filling with water and would soon slow their progress to a crawl.

  Around the eaves of the larger building, dense, black smoke puffed into the night sky. In places it crept out like a wraith, but in others it blew out under pressure as if from an exhaust pipe. It might have been coming from the fire near the loading dock, or it might have been indicative of something worse. “Bowman Pork Products,” Finney read off the side of one of the trucks. What could be burning except machinery and bacon fat?

  Followed by a small man in a puffy gray ski coat, Lieutenant Parkhurst strode over to them. He’d established himself as incident commander and would be giving orders and assignments until a chief arrived.

  “Gary,” Lieutenant Parkhurst said, stopping in front of Lieutenant Sadler, who was belting himself into his backpack, “this man says there’s a family inside.”

  “Back of the warehouse,” said the man, nodding briskly. He was on the underside of forty and wore baggy black trousers, his ski coat zipped low enough to reveal a bow tie. A tri-colored ski cap covered his brow. “Whole family. I haven’t seen them. Not since eight o’clock.”

  “Okay. Come on,” Sadler said, tapping Finney on the shoulder and walking in front of Parkhurst and the civilian. “Let’s go.”

  “How many?” Finney asked, turning to the civilian, who looked vaguely familiar.

  “Five. No.” He held up six fingers. “Six.” His mouth was dry. It sounded like sex.

  “Where?”

  “Back. Way back.” He waved at the building. It was obvious he was too wound up to think clearly.

  “That’s a big place. Where in the back? This end? Where?”

  He stepped around in front of Engine 26 and stared at several hundred feet of blank concrete wall. “They’re in there,” he said, motioning hopelessly.

  Together Finney and Sadler shouldered two hundred feet of line from the rear of Engine 11 and dropped a trail of zigzagging hose behind them up a short flight of concrete stairs opposite the loading dock. When Sadler used the heavy, rubber-tipped nozzle to break the glass out of a door, smoke enveloped them.

  The smoke wasn’t particularly hot, which meant there would be a lot of survivable spaces inside.

  48. NITWITS

  Finney tightened the straps on his facepiece, opened the low-pressure valve at his waist, and felt the cool air wash over his face. Believing the fire was nowhere nearby, Gary Sadler dropped the nozzle in the doorway so they could search quickly and without the burden of dragging that heavy hose around corners; they would come back for it later.

  Six people living in a factory, probably a family of immigrants, perhaps boat people from Southeast Asia. That hose could slow them down immeasurably, and Finney was glad they’d decided to leave it. A house fire would be one thing, but this place was huge. Their two hundred feet of hose line probably wasn’t even enough to reach the fire.

  On a bulletin board in the hallway, leftover Halloween decorations had curled in the heat. The smoke quickly became so thick they couldn’t see the walls, much less the overhead lights. By rights they should have been crawling, but the building was immense, and if they were going to search it in time to do the inhabitants any good, they needed to move quickly.

  “The witness said they were in the back of the building,” Finney said, probing the murk with a nine-volt battle lantern.

  Intent on doing it room by room, Sadler ignored him. There was no point in quibbling. Sadler wasn’t going to listen, and Finney wasn’t going to break up their team. They quickly passed through several offices, a lunchroom, and what appeared to be a changing room with metal clothing lockers against the walls. The smoke was lighter in these rooms.

  They searched a pair of small storage rooms, and when Sadler broke out two windows, the smoke didn’t dissipate.

  On the main floor Sadler reached the door to ano
ther room and said, “You’re the outside man. I’m going in.”

  Though they hadn’t discussed which search technique they would use, they both knew this one: the would-be rescuer posted a second firefighter in the doorway—the idea being that while he moved around in the room, he would maintain his orientation by the sound of his partner’s voice in the doorway. The protocol was that Finney would search the next room and Sadler would be the doorway man.

  When Sadler came out of the first room, he shouldered Finney out of the way and proceeded into the next room—alone. For some reason he was bent on treating Finney like a recruit. “Shit!” Sadler yelled.

  Finney stuck his head through the door, but he already knew what he would find. The hose line at his feet was a dead giveaway. They were at the door they’d used earlier to enter the building. They’d come full circle, and Sadler had stepped back outside. To make matters worse, another team had appropriated their nozzle and taken it inside.

  Moving more quickly than ever, they followed the team that had their nozzle up a flight of stairs and into a loft area where a pair of helmet lights moved through the smoke on the far side of the room. Sadler turned around and headed down the stairs. “They’re jacking off. Let’s go.”

  On the main floor they found a corridor that led toward the newer section and after a dozen yards encountered a set of locked doors. They took turns kicking them until they gave way.

  It was smokier in this part of the building, and hotter, and after twenty feet it got so black Finney had to hold onto the back of Sadler’s bottle to keep track of him. Heavy hose streams thrummed on the outside walls.

  On their right was another door leading to what Finney assumed was the loading dock area where they’d originally seen fire. The golden rule in firefighting was to not pass up any fire, to put it out as you came to it, and through the crack in the door he could see a sheet of solid orange, the metal push-plate on the door hot to the touch. Should the fire breach these doors, it could cut off their escape. Going forward was risky, but going back for a line would mean depleting much if not all of their air. Finney would have gone back for a line, but he wasn’t making the decisions.

  When they encountered a large, walk-in freezer, he was again assigned the task of doorkeeper. Gary was babying him, and Finney didn’t like it, in fact, was getting pissed off. Still, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He knew he was in better shape than Sadler, and he knew that if one of them was to stand and wait, it made more sense that it should be Sadler. As Finney waited, a pair of firefighters approached from the general direction in which he and Gary had been traveling.

  They told him they’d found a pair of victims upstairs on a mezzanine not far away and their portable radios weren’t getting out of the building, that they were going for help. They gave Finney directions to the victims and said they would stay but they were almost out of air. As if to underscore their plight, one of their alarm bells began ringing. Before Finney could ask why they hadn’t simply brought the victims out with them, they vanished into the smoke.

  It occurred to him that they hadn’t mentioned the condition of the victims. If they were unconscious or dead, they might have told him. He had to assume they were at least unconscious, or they would have followed them out of the building. If they were dead, it would have explained the lack of urgency in their demeanor. In a body recovery, the investigators usually wanted to see the corpses where they lay.

  When Sadler came out of the freezer, Finney said, “Somebody came by and told me where they are.”

  “Why didn’t they stick around?”

  “Out of air.”

  “Okay, let’s get going, man. I don’t want to be breathing through my T-shirt.”

  “Me neither.” Finney felt his way through the smoke for another fifteen paces and, just as described by the firefighters, found a set of wooden steps running alongside a wall.

  They were halfway up the stairs when the abandon building sequence went off on their portable radios. The hi-lo signal meant fire tactics were being switched from an interior to an exterior attack, that any and all firefighters inside the building were to exit forthwith.

  “Jesus,” Sadler said. “They’re bailing out.” He grabbed his portable radio. “Marginal Command from Engine Twenty-six. We’re in what appears to be the east end of the factory. We have a confirmed report from other firefighters of victims. We’re going to complete our search.”

  Seattle’s portable radios made a high-pitched clinking sound at the beginning of a successful transmission, a lower-pitched bonk to signal a blocked transmission, but Sadler’s radio had made no sound whatsoever. It was possible the concrete walls of the building were obstructing the signals. Or that the amount of fire traffic had made it difficult for the repeater tower to pick up their message and relay it. Sadler tried twice more with no better results.

  “You want to keep on?” Sadler asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t know why those assholes walked out. When I find out who they are, I’m going to break their balls.”

  The higher they went on the stairs, the hotter the smoke. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, they were on their bellies.

  Thrusting their feet and free arms toward the center of the room, they proceeded along the right-hand wall.

  “You sure this is where they said?” Sadler asked.

  Finney was about to reply when Sadler slapped at his arm, kicked his helmet hard, and then pulled on him. At first he thought he was being assaulted, but Sadler was thrashing about the way a drowning man thrashed about. In order to not be pulled off balance, Finney reached out and grabbed some smoke, then finally grasped a metal bar on the wall. He held onto the bar on one side, Sadler on the other. A few moments later Sadler regained his balance and let go.

  “Jesus Christ!” Sadler said.

  “What happened?”

  “Look at this shit.”

  Finney couldn’t see anything but smoke. He placed his face within a foot of his battle lantern and discovered they were on a balcony. Though he couldn’t see the ground floor in the smoke, the drop-off was fourteen or fifteen feet.

  “I almost went off!” Sadler said. “There’s no goddamned rail! Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “What about the victims?”

  “Fuck the victims! They’re dead. Hey, anybody here? Hey, you assholes? Where are you? See? There’s no people. We’re getting our butts kicked for nothing.”

  Fueled by fear and adrenaline, Sadler turned and headed back the way they’d come.

  “We can’t leave,” Finney said.

  Sadler spoke clearly and succinctly. “I’m going out. You coming with me?”

  “I’m coming.”

  49. THOUSANDS OF PIGS’ FEET

  Moving with a recklessness he hadn’t displayed earlier, Sadler plunged down the stairs, and then, instead of hugging the walls, he proceeded directly through the open space toward their entry point. Finney couldn’t decide whether Sadler was angry or scared. Maybe both. He didn’t have time to think about what he was feeling, but he knew he was some kind of upset. They’d just left at least two people to die up on that mezzanine.

  In short order they passed the door that had fire behind it and ran headlong into the two doors they’d kicked in to get into this section of the plant.

  “Sombitch,” Sadler said. “Goddamned stupid sombitch.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Look at this bullshit! Sombitch door’s jammed.”

  “It can’t be. We broke the lock.”

  “Yeah? You try it.” The doors were as solid as if they were anchored on the other side by a large truck.

  “Maybe these are the wrong doors?” Finney said.

  “Not a chance.”

  Had he been riding a ladder company, Finney would have used the axe on his belt to chop through, but he didn’t have an axe. They were rapidly running out of air, fire was eating its way through a door thirty feet behind
them, the space they were in was superheated, they couldn’t see anything, and their original entrance point was locked.

  In another minute they would be trapped by fire in this corridor.

  Sadler continued pulling at the doors.

  Then they both kicked at them, their feeble efforts a testament to how much strength they’d lost in the heat. “What happened?” Finney asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sadler said, gasping for breath. “Something locked them after we went through.”

  Sadler tried his radio but couldn’t get through.

  Arrows of flame were already darting out over the doors behind them. Instead of taking the left wall as they had before, Sadler said, “This way,” and took the right. Finney couldn’t get over how Gary was mothering him.

  The fire leaked quickly through the doors behind them, and began riding the wall above their heads, moving in great, screwlike twists toward the ceiling. As the amount of flame in the area grew, visibility got better.

  When Finney spotted an unlocked door to their right, they entered a thirty-by-forty-foot room with a ceiling almost as tall as the room was wide. Smoke filled the upper portions of the space, but from five feet above their heads to the floor it was surprisingly clear. They spotted an exit on the far side of the room, a single door set into a heavy brick wall, locked and nailed shut.

  Finney found a small bar on a workbench and began prying. After he’d worked fifteen seconds, Sadler took the bar out of his hands, his impatience signaling a reservoir of anxiety he never would have admitted to. Finney decided right then and there he was not working with Sadler again. He would transfer out of Twenty-six’s—if it took an act of Congress, he would transfer out. Sooner or later Sadler was going to get him killed. The thought occurred to him that if he did transfer, he might do it directly to the King County Jail.