by Earl Emerson
“It’s too hot,” Diana said, dropping her load in the water on the floor at Finney’s feet. “It’s way too hot.”
Finney stood, and when he did, the sweat inside his bunkers scalded him in a half-dozen places.
He found the wall and felt along it until he had the door. “We’ll go in and cool off.”
Not only was the door locked, but it was hot to the touch, which usually meant there was fire on the other side. In this situation Finney couldn’t be sure. It was a metal door, and convection from the stairwell might be responsible. As he thought about it, the dispatchers announced on the radio that Columbia Command had been on scene sixty minutes, plenty long enough to warm the door from the outside.
“Give me the Halligan,” Finney said.
A pry bar about three feet long with a simple straight claw on one end and a set of short, right-angle levers on the other, the Halligan was designed so that, in combination with a flathead axe or a sledge, the right-angle levers could be pounded into the crack in a door, which then made it relatively easy for someone on the long end to lever the door open.
Finney inserted the end of the Halligan, then reached out until he found Diana. “Hold this,” he said. “Keep your hands back.”
Working blind in the smoke, he struck several blows with the back of the flathead axe until the Halligan was securely in the crack in the door. Metal screeched as Diana pried the door open. A tongue of flame shot out. Together, they shouldered the door closed.
In the brief light from the flames, Finney caught a glimpse of Diana and Kub both. Neither looked happy about the situation. Kub was kneeling in the running water. “What do you want to do? We can go up and try another floor. We can go down and quit.”
“How many floors have fire on them?” Kub asked. “What floor is this?”
“Twenty-three,” said Diana, who’d been counting as painstakingly as Finney.
“It couldn’t have spread that far,” Kub said. “The next couple have to be free.”
“So we’re going up?” Finney asked. No answer. “If you’re nodding, I can’t see you.”
They both mumbled yes.
At the turnback midway between twenty-three and twenty-four Finney was again burned inside his bunkers. It was not possible, he realized, to endure this kind of heat without burns, no matter what he wore. He tried to stop on twenty-four to open the door, but Kub nudged him in the smoke and said, “One more. This might not be any good.”
Finney didn’t think anybody could climb one more set of stairs. But if Kub could, he could. They forced themselves to twenty-five and pried the door, pulling it open against the rushing water on the stairwell landing. There was something else, too, something on the floor.
Except for a small, nasty cloud that followed them in from the stairs, there wasn’t much smoke on this floor. The fluorescent lights were on. Kub closed the door behind them. They dropped their gear and tried to cool off. After he’d thought about it awhile, Finney went back and opened the door, curious as to what the obstruction in the stairwell had been.
It was a woman in her fifties dressed in jeans, deck shoes, and a gray uniform shirt with the name “Alma” stitched across the breast pocket. Finney dragged her inside.
Diana took her mask off and knelt beside the woman, feeling for a carotid pulse. She looked up at Finney and Kub and shook her head.
Hoping to find safer passage, they checked stairwell A, but found it as hot as the one they’d come up.
“What are we going to do?” Diana asked.
“Let’s check the elevators,” Finney said.
“Even if they work, we’d be crazy to use them,” Kub said.
“We wouldn’t be crazy to use the shaft.”
67. ROGUE PENNY
All three took off their MSAs and dropped the cylinders and backpacks onto the floor near the elevators. They took off their helmets and hoods and opened their coats. Diana’s hair was plastered to her head with sweat, her bare shoulders sleek and tawny. Though his torso was lean and muscular, Kub’s face looked haggard and drawn.
Finney opened the hardware bag and began rigging carabiners on a sling that he draped over his shoulder, clipping a small loop of webbing onto each carabiner. “See if you can scrounge up a coat hanger, anything we can use for an elevator key.”
He took out a pulley and extra webbing of various lengths. He got out a pair of thin, leather gloves he kept in his inside coat pocket for rope rescues, stepped into a waist harness, and cinched up the leg and waist straps. He put a carabiner through the ring on the front of his belt, tied a figure eight in the end of a six-hundred-foot rope, and clipped himself in.
“Let’s see if this’ll work.” Diana went to the elevator and inserted a long elevator key into the small hole on the upper right side of the door.
“Where’d you find that?” Finney asked.
“In the box.” She nodded at a small, red box on the wall next to his head.
Elevators had two sets of doors, the inside door was attached to the elevator car and traveled up and down the shaft with the car. It was generally finished on the inside, innards exposed when viewed from the outside. In addition, each landing had its own door that was finished on the tenant side.
From inside the car, the doors could be opened with hand pressure. From the landings, the outer door required a special key consisting of a piece of steel tubing, the end of which flopped down on a hinge. The key was inserted into a pencil-size hole in the door, placed just far enough inside for the shorter portion to flop parallel with the door, so that when twisted the end fell across a latch mechanism and released the door lock.
Working together, it took Diana and Finney thirty seconds to open the door.
It was perfect. The shaft was four cars wide and there was a ladder on the wall.
Out of a perverse whimsy, Finney found a rogue penny in the thigh pocket of his bunking pants and tossed it into the shaft. For a second he thought he’d lost the coin, but then he heard it ping far below.
“I’ll string up a lead line. One of you can follow, and then we’ll haul up the equipment. Then the last one can come up.”
“Sure you’re strong enough?” Diana asked. “Those stairs were no picnic, and you’ve had a rough week.”
More like a rough year, he thought, and no, he wasn’t sure. But there were two reasons why he needed to go himself. The first was that Kub wasn’t a truckman and didn’t know how to rig ropes. The second was that (and he hoped this wasn’t only male vanity) even in a weakened state his upper body strength was greater than Diana’s. “I’ll manage.”
“What if fire breaks through the elevator doors on one of the lower floors?” Kub asked.
“Then you two go back down and be safe.”
“John,” Diana said. “We’re on twenty-four. You’re not planning to climb all the way to seventy-six? That’s got to be over five hundred feet.”
“If I remember the prefire for this building, these elevators only go to forty. We’ll regroup there.”
Finney couldn’t shake the feeling that he was asleep and he would awaken in a hospital bed. Or a box. After all, it had happened before—the hospital bed. The box was yet to come. Far in the future he hoped. Though it could easily be tonight. For some time now he had the feeling he was going to die, and as he readied himself to step into the elevator shaft, the feeling intensified.
“You okay, John?” Diana touched his face with a bare hand.
“Double-check my rigging. I’m going to put a carabiner on every floor. You two belay me. Find an anchor point down here, and we’ll feed the rope through a couple of prusiks. That way if I fall, I won’t go far.”
“Already done.”
Kub found a portable television in one of the offices and brought it out to the elevator lobby, set it on the floor, and plugged it in with an extension cord he’d bootlegged. He was soon watching television pictures shot in the street a block from the building, and then from the lobby, where Reese was chatt
ing with a reporter. Reese felt confident that the fire teams would extricate everybody from the building. No, he could give no time line.
“Sure is weird to watch this on TV,” Kub said.
By jamming a desk into a nearby doorway and throwing webbing around it, Diana had managed to set up an anchor that was both close to the shaft and stable. She had rigged up the anchor with the webbing, a carabiner and two cords tied onto the main rope with prusiks. They clipped the two loops onto the carabiner and then looped the prusiks onto the rope. The prusiks created enough friction to easily hold the rope and Finney’s weight should he fall, yet when the person controlling the prusiks gripped them, the rope passed through, allowing him to climb.
When Finney stepped into the shaft, Kub was in the doorway monitoring his progress. Diana would be forty feet away on the floor, her gloved hands tending the prusiks, Finney’s rope sliding through as she allowed it. Should anything happen to her, the prusiks would hold him.
Finney was tethered to the end of a six-hundred-foot rope, most of which, after being fed through the prusiks, would remain in the bag near Diana’s boots. He had nineteen floors to climb in his bunkers. As he stepped into the shaft and reached with his left arm for the steel ladder on the wall, he felt a frisson of fear.
He began climbing, reached the next floor and stopped to wrap a short loop of webbing around a ladder rung, clipped a carabiner to that, and slipped the rope through the carabiner.
His pulse was pounding, first in his ears, then his temples. Normally he wasn’t afraid of heights, but he was so shaky from the climb and from the heat he didn’t trust himself. It helped that he could not see either up or down. In fact, with his flashlight bobbing from the clip on his coat, what he saw mostly was wall.
After four stories, he began resting briefly at each floor.
Midway through the trip, his hands began trembling. When he rested at each floor, he looped his elbows through the ladder and worked his fingers to pump blood into them. He was dehydrated. He knew it, and there was nothing he could do about it now. All he could do was climb one floor at a time.
It seemed like it took a week to reach forty. When he got there, he attached a carabiner high over his head and clipped his rope through it. His arms were shakier than ever. As he stepped from the dark ladder to the elevator door ledge, he found the latch, and released the door.
Forty was almost entirely free of smoke.
The lights were on. The lights didn’t surprise him.
What surprised him were the two men pointing guns at him.
68. CORPSES THAT BITE
Finney must have seemed like a leprechaun coming out of a hole.
“Who the hell are you?” said the one with the portable radio.
“Just the sonofabitch who’s going to get you out of this,” Finney replied, calling down the shaft for slack on the rope, then stepping out of the shaft.
A small portable television was set up on a desk in the lobby area, tuned to the same channel Kub had been watching downstairs. Faces heavy with incredulity, the two men stared at Finney.
They were with building security. They’d been trapped since the beginning, had used phones and their radios, but nobody had been able to give them a prognostication of their outcome or even any advice. In the beginning they thought about making a run down the stairs, but they’d hesitated and now the stairs were too hot.
The two men looked at one another. The one with the radio said, “Buddy, if you were a woman, I’d propose. What do you want us to do?”
“First, don’t propose. Second, help me find a place to tie off this rope. There are two more coming up.”
“We been watchin’ the news,” said the second man, who had a thick southern drawl. Fire sounded like fur. “You know there’s fire below us. There’s fire down around eighteen or twenty, and there’s another fire above us on fifty-four or -five. It was just on the TV.” He pronounced it teeee-ve. “I don’t get it. Fire below and above. How does it skip so many floors?”
Veins on the side of his face bulging like beetles, the man with the radio said, “It goes up the toilet holes.” He looked at Finney. “Right?”
Finney said, “Not in this case. These were set.”
It took Finney a minute to work the kinks out of his arms and back and neck. He turned his coat inside out to let it dry and set up an anchor for the rope. Kub would come up using the second of their three waist harnesses, sliding a couple of simple prusik knots along the rope as he went, the prusik clipped to his harness with carabiners. If anything happened, the mechanism of the prusik would hold him.
While Kub was climbing, Finney found some bottled water and explored.
Not surprisingly, both stairwell doors were hot to the touch. When he put on his gloves and opened the door to B, a balloon of black smoke rolled in on him, so hot he wondered if he’d burned his scalp. Without his bunking coat and helmet it had been a foolish thing to do.
The design of the trap was clear in Finney’s mind. Disable the sprinkler and standpipe system. Immobilize the elevators. Turn both stairwells into chimneys. Cripple escape, hamper firefighting, stand next to the IC, and give tainted advice. The fog had been an unexpected bonus.
After Kub reached forty, they rigged a hauling system for the equipment and hoisted all of it. Diana climbed the sixteen stories on the end of the rope, stopping at each carabiner and collecting it and the webbing Finney had used to fasten it to the rung.
When she stepped onto the floor, the security man without the accent said, “You’re a woman!”
“No shit,” said Diana. Finney could see she was getting tired and irritable.
“No, I meant . . .”
“She knows what you meant,” Finney said.
“No, I just meant a woman firefighter. You know, that’s great. A woman doing a man’s job. That’s just great.”
“It’s not a man’s job,” Diana said.
“That’s what I meant.”
Drinking bottled water Finney had scavenged from an office, Robert Kub came back through the lobby after reconnoitering. “The stairs are clearing.”
“They can’t be,” said Finney. “I just checked.”
“I think we can make it.”
When they went back together and looked, he knew Kub was right. In bunkers and breathing from an MSA, the stairs might just be bearable. Still, the higher they went the hotter it would get.
They donned their masks, pulled on their facepieces, tugged the rubber cheek straps tight, and loaded all the equipment bags and spare bottles onto their shoulders.
“What about us?” asked the security guard with the southern drawl.
“We’ll be back,” Finney said.
“Promise?”
“Thirty-four floors,” Kub said. “It’s going to be a bitching climb.”
“You’ve got my word. Just keep the door closed. Closed but not locked. Somebody else might need to get in here.”
As they began the journey, Finney wondered why the air was suddenly clearing. Had the building engineers pressurized the stairs, or had somebody closed a door on a fire floor below? Or was somebody down there using gas-powered fans? The stairs weren’t clear of smoke, they were simply cooler than they had been—he couldn’t feel any breeze that indicated they were being ventilated. Unless the gases in the stairs had been vented at the top, the higher they went, the hotter it would get.
Six floors up, they stumbled over a pair of dead men. Kub took off his gloves and checked for life. “Ouch,” he said.
“What happened?” Finney asked. “He bite you?”
“His watch was hot.”
“Don’t touch the steel railing with your bare hand either.”
They were on fifty-seven before the warning bell on Kub’s air tank began ringing. After traveling another two flights, Finney’s went off, too. Hoping to squeeze them dry, they ran the bottles another couple of floors; then, as they were changing, Diana’s bell went off.
After the bottle c
hange they climbed steadily to sixty-five without stopping. Though they were each seventeen pounds lighter, they’d inhaled plenty of smoke, had climbed fifty-eight stories, and were near the breaking point—Finney was going to be surprised if they made it. His limbs inside his bunking suit felt as if they’d been dipped in hot oil, his thighs wet and slippery, his arms sliding around inside the coat. His neck was cramping. He had a tick in one cheek, and his eyes stung from the salt.
Near seventy-four, Kub’s warning bell began ringing again.
The door to seventy-four was locked. Of course.
Before Finney could bang on it, the door opened and a small Asian woman in a simple black dress and too much mascara gave him a wide-eyed look and waved for him to enter. “Yes?” she said, as if afraid he wanted to sell her magazines.
Seventy-four was well-lit and relatively cool inside. Working their way out of their backpacks, helmets, and coats, the three were quickly besieged by a crowd, the men in suits or tuxedos, the women in dresses appropriate for a wedding party. Still breathing heavily, Kub slumped to the floor and onto his back. Finney and Diana followed suit. Finney felt as if he might not ever sit up again. The ceiling began spinning. He couldn’t catch his breath. His underwear was soaked, one ear stopped up with a constant flow of perspiration. The tick in his cheek felt like a small bird trying to hatch out of an egg. After a few moments, he felt as if he were glued to the floor. Diana lay next to him, Kub somewhere above his head.
“I’m beat,” Kub said.
“Me, too,” said Finney.
Diana sighed deeply.
For a while everybody clamored at once. When it calmed, one of the building security men leaned over Finney. He had wiry hair that had probably been red in his younger years but was mostly gray now, a lined face, and compelling brown eyes that wouldn’t let Finney look away. Long hairs grew out of his ears and nostrils. “What’s going on, partner?”
“How about you give me an update first?” Finney asked, his throat raw from smoke. He sounded like Tallulah Bankhead, cigarette larynx.