Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  “It stunk from the beginning,” said Stillman. “That’s why we’re being paid so exorbitantly. Exactly because it stinks to high heaven.”

  G. A. said, “And no guns. They find a firefighter with a bullet in him, the investigation will run into the next millennium.”

  “Only as a last resort,” Balitnikoff said.

  “Not at all,” said G. A. Then, as the others filed out the door, Stillman felt G. A.’s touch on his shoulder. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure.” Oscar was finger-combing his hair, staring at his warped reflection in the chrome on the refrigerator near the door. He wondered what a balding, aging gringo looked like to a seventeen-year-old señorita in Costa Rica. Probably not too bad.

  The others were out of earshot before he realized G. A. had slipped something around his neck, at the same time closing the door with his foot and pushing his shoulder into the middle of Oscar’s back so that Oscar bumped up into the corner behind the door. It wasn’t G. A.’s habit to wrestle for fun. Balitnikoff, sure. Or those damn brothers. But G. A. preserved the personal space around himself with a fierce self-regard.

  Oscar turned as far as G. A. would allow and saw a look in G. A.’s eyes that told him he wasn’t playing. Hell, he was strangling him. It was his necktie around Oscar’s neck. “I’m okay,” Oscar said. “I don’t—”

  The tie was being tightened from behind, tightened and pulled and tightened some more. Had G. A. gone mad? The idea was to go upstairs and get rid of Finney, not each other. Oscar wanted to speak, to reason this out, but his windpipe was closed off, his face squashed against the wall so hard his dental plate was twisting out of place. He tried to reach for the knot at the back of his neck, but G. A. was a large man, surprisingly strong, and he held him like a lion holding a young wildebeest.

  He began to see stars, and it was then that he remembered what he’d learned in his emergency medical training. Once the carotid artery was blocked, unconsciousness occurred in as little as fifteen seconds. Sometimes only seven or eight seconds. Sometimes . . . the last thing Oscar heard was a gurgling in the bottom of his own throat.

  71. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FIRE

  Norris was making a second call to his mother when one of the waiters who’d been loitering near the freight elevator burst into the men’s room and whispered loudly to his friends who were passing around a joint. Intrigued by their words, Norris slogged through a haze of marijuana smoke and followed them out of the john.

  It seemed a pair of waitresses had noticed that for no particular reason and without any fanfare the freight elevator had returned to seventy-four, empty. So far twelve waiters, one supervisor, eight waitresses, and three chefs knew about it, and word was spreading. Everybody knew the responsible thing would be to alert the firefighters in the other room, but nobody budged. Most had picked high numbers in the lottery.

  Since the building alarms had gone off, the staff had been more or less relegated to the back room like servants, and then just before the numbers were drawn, one of the wedding party, an older man with silver sideburns, had suggested the help not be included in the drawing. Although they eventually had been included, it was hard to ignore the underlying group arrogance and assumed superiority that led to his suggestion. Everybody in the back room had taken umbrage.

  The freight elevator was behind several tall wheeled carts, in an area that smelled of baked halibut and smoke from the fire that was climbing toward them from below.

  While the waitresses and kitchen staff debated whether or not to use it, Norris knew instinctively what needed to be done and, in one of the few truly decisive moments of his life, he returned to the main room and retrieved Patterson Cole and both briefcases. They brushed past the group of debaters to the rear of the car. Norris proceeded to unbuckle his belt and loop it around the waist-level metal bumper in case anybody tried to remove him forcibly. They might get Cole out, but he was strapped in.

  The stampede that took place next may have been provoked by the belt business or by the recognition of Patterson Cole. By now everyone on the floor knew Cole owned the building and that he’d been working his way around the room trying to purchase a lower lottery number than the one he’d drawn.

  For just a second, the area outside the freight elevator was silent. Then, like an implosion, people filled the car—waiters, chefs, waitresses. Several women shrieked as their feet were stepped on, and one chef began to look faint as his toque was knocked off and he was flattened up against a wall. As the car filled to capacity, the stronger men and some of the women in the forward part of the car began pushing latecomers back out. A shoving match ensued. Fists were doubled up, blows exchanged, and then a woman stopped the melee by saying, “The firemen! They’ll stop us if we don’t leave now.”

  A contract was entered into wherein the car would transport the first load down to the street and then quickly be sent back for the others. Norris did some rough calculations. Say they were taking twenty-five down at a time—that would be seven, no, eight trips.

  When the doors closed, Norris found it difficult to breathe. Men cursed. A woman giggled. Somebody passed gas. It would be intolerable if he didn’t realize the alternative was waiting to be burned to death.

  Norris found himself scrunched sideways, the wall on one side, a lanky waitress pressed up against the other. He began to smell body odor and bad breath. He was glad he had thought to fill his cheek with Tic-Tacs in the bathroom. He didn’t complain. They would soon be safe, while those left behind had nothing to look forward to but headaches from the smoke and whatever came after that.

  Somebody pushed a button and the car began a rapid descent. For a few moments Norris felt as if he were floating on sheer relief. In minutes they would be cooling off in the fog in the street.

  Somebody jokingly said, “I wonder what the weight limit on this baby is?”

  A man with a rich baritone voice said, “About four hundred pounds.”

  Muffled laughter broke out. They were headed toward freedom, and a feeling of conjoined euphoria was sweeping over them.

  Norris’s ears started to pop, but he stifled the yawn, wanting to savor the sensation of escape, of descent. They’d only been moving ten or twelve seconds when the elevator began to lose speed. One didn’t descend seventy-five floors in a few seconds. Everybody knew it was too soon. Norris had worried about a lot of things, about the sheet metal in the walls collapsing, about the elevator crashing into the basement, about not getting unbuckled before they sent it back up, but it hadn’t even crossed his mind that they might end up on the wrong floor. This was terrible. Now the firefighters would not be able to find them. Now they’d never get their spot in line back.

  When the car came to a halt, one woman who didn’t understand the implications of their abbreviated trip said, “Oh, goody, we’ll be home in time to watch The X-Files.”

  The doors opened, and a wave of heat engulfed them.

  Then came the crushing weight against the rear of the car, the screams, more heat. And more. Norris would have sworn he heard bones breaking. For many long seconds he couldn’t breathe or move or even think.

  He tried to squat, but there were too many people crushed up against him, and besides that, he was buckled to the rail. Suspended in place by the crush, the woman next to him lost consciousness. The pressure against Norris at the rear of the car became greater.

  Norris realized with a start that he smelled burning hair. For a few moments as the hot smoke rolled in and enveloped them, he had a flashback to his childhood. Once, while baking peanut butter cookies with his grandmother in Iowa, he’d stood too close to the oven, so that a blast of heat struck him in the face when the oven door opened, frizzing his eyebrows and causing him to cry out. He’d been seven, and his grandmother had spanked him for getting too close. He never forgot that searing heat. Even as an adult it defined hell for him.

  “Close the doors,” Norris whimpered. “Please close the doors.”

  He had no idea how long h
e remained upright, or how much heat he endured, or what the temperatures were, but after a time, maybe ten seconds, maybe a minute, the pressure began to moderate. Not a lot, but enough. The deafening screeches began to wither away, and Norris sensed a space under two women next to him. He tried to move but found himself hanging by his own belt on the railing. Burning his hands on the metal, he unbuckled himself and dove under the women. It wasn’t until then that he discovered the lower he got the cooler it was. He began burrowing.

  72. NEVER TAKE AN ELEVATOR IN A FIRE

  The building security man—the rock climber they’d dropped down the elevator shaft on a line—had been given several tasks, one of which was to check out floor sixty as he passed it. He radioed back with just a trace of a Bronx accent that there were still a few small fires on that floor and that everything was black and stinking. Nothing was intact. He didn’t see any people or bodies. Many of the outside windows were missing. Then he radioed that he could feel a slipstream of air coming at him from outside on that floor. Most of the heat seemed to be residual, not dynamic, if those were the right terms, he said, and he believed the floor was now habitable. What did they want him to do?

  “Stay there,” Finney said, on the radio. “Set up to start receiving people.” The fire wouldn’t revisit sixty; the fuel load had already been consumed. People might get burned if they touched hot metal or tried to walk barefoot over the smoldering carpets, but they weren’t going to die there. Also, there was a roof on sixty, and it would be airy.

  Even as Finney was speaking, three firefighters who’d been trapped on the lower floors showed up on sixty and offered to help. They would set up a receiving station that would, after the first wave descended, be staffed with rotating personnel self-selected from among the rescued.

  The first three civilians were outfitted in waist harnesses, secured to the main line at intervals, then sent down the ladder in the shaft. They soon had three more people headed down in harnesses, rope handlers selected from the security details. Kub was the rescue group leader.

  As he scouted seventy-four again, Finney confronted a dozen agitated workers in the space near the freight elevator. A perspiring man in a waiter’s outfit stepped forward and said, “They didn’t make it. We heard screaming in the shaft.” Others, nodding their heads and shivering, seconded his words.

  “They didn’t make what?” Finney asked. “Don’t tell me somebody used the elevator?”

  “A lot of somebodies,” said the waiter.

  “How long ago?”

  “Two minutes, maybe three. We heard the machinery stop, and there was all this screaming.”

  “Like a bunch of cats in a box,” somebody volunteered. Several people gave the speaker dirty looks.

  Finney keyed his portable radio and asked Columbia Command whether anybody had arrived in the freight elevator. Reese and company had been studiously ignoring his transmissions all night, so he wasn’t surprised when he received no answer now.

  “We heard screaming,” said the waiter. “I know we heard screaming.”

  “But it stopped,” said one of the waitresses, a ribbon of hope in her voice.

  “It took a while,” said a guest from the wedding party.

  “They must have stopped on a fire floor,” Diana said, glancing over her shoulder at Finney as she pried the doors open and peered down the shaft. “I see them. Our guys are on sixty. The elevator must be between us and them.”

  Some of the men and most of the women were crying. All of these people had fought to be on that first trip. One man kept repeating that his fiancé was in the elevator. “She’s not dead,” he sobbed. “She’s not.”

  “We’ll go down and check it out,” Diana said, looking at Finney.

  Finney gave her a grim look. They both knew the most dangerous thing you could do in a fire was ride an elevator. Once the doors opened on a fire floor, the electric eye wouldn’t allow them to close again.

  While the others followed, Finney and Diana walked back to where they’d left their bunking coats and MSA backpacks. Just before they pulled on their facepieces and stepped into stairwell B, Kub caught Finney’s eye and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Inside of thirty seconds the temperature in the stairwell siphoned off most of Finney’s remaining strength, fingers of heat stealing up under his suit to tickle his arms and legs. His burns throbbed. Already his legs were shaky.

  “Too hot?” he asked, half-hoping Diana would say yes.

  “No.”

  Finney led. “You think any of them are alive?”

  “No. But we need to check.”

  Standing in the elevator shaft, they’d both inhaled the distinctive odor of burned clothing, singed hair, roasted flesh.

  Physically, the descent was easier than the ascent, partly because they weren’t doing as much work, carrying no equipment except the Halligan and flathead axe, because they were descending instead of ascending, but mostly because the heat decreased with each floor.

  After descending ten flights, they used the Halligan to force a door on sixty-five and found heavy smoke down to their waists. They used the Halligan again to force the doors to the freight elevator and found smoke pouring out of the shaft. They heard talk coming from above, but nothing from the blackness below. Finney knew the car was maybe three floors down from here, certainly no farther.

  There had been no heat in the shaft they were using for the rescue operation, nor had there been much heat in this shaft when Diana had looked at it upstairs, yet now there was a great deal of heat and black smoke. The smoke stunk as bad as any Finney had ever tasted.

  Back in the stairs, they heard voices in the stairwell, masked firefighters. It was hard to tell how far away they were, or whether they were above or below. Whether they were approaching or retreating.

  Finney said, “Reese must have sent a team up.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  On sixty-three they pried the door and found heavy black smoke rolling at them like a series of huge black balls. They closed the door.

  “Ten minutes ago this wouldn’t have caused any screaming,” Finney said. “This is all new. They’ve got to be on the next one down. Sixty-two. Or sixty-one.”

  The door to sixty-two was hot enough that they decided there was fire behind it.

  On sixty-one, most of the fire had already passed through, blasting out the windows, gutting offices, leaving a desk melted into a lump on the carpeted floor, flame limply dancing off it. As they walked onto the floor, melting black plastic from overhead pipes oozed onto their helmets and shoulders until they began to look like leopards.

  “Look,” Diana said, “why don’t you go intercept the group in the stairs? We don’t dare miss them. I’ll go look for the elevator. We’ll meet back here. Any problems, we’ll call each other on the tactical channel.”

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “We don’t have enough air to do everything together.”

  “You’re right. Okay.” They switched their radios to channel seven, and he went back to the stairs. It was never a good idea to separate in a fire building, but they were depleting their bottles rapidly and lives were at stake.

  Finney thought he heard the distinctive clank of spare air bottles knocking together below. This group might be ten floors below, or fifteen. If they had instructions to do a search, they could vanish onto a floor at any moment.

  He inspected the gauge on his waist-belt. A fully charged bottle had 4,500 pounds of compressed air; he had 1,400, probably not even enough to get back to the wedding party.

  Carrying the Halligan/flathead axe combination in one hand, he descended slowly, stopping from time to time to quiet his breathing and to listen. He counted the landings, sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, and continued to hear sounds of movement and conversation below. The group climbed at what seemed like an excruciatingly slow pace.

  Wanting to be refreshed and able to make sense when they reached him, Finney paused on fifty-one and turned on his flashlight
. It occurred to him that his thoughts were growing fuzzier by the minute. He knew he was in the incipient stages of heat exhaustion, because his mind was beginning to wander. Logical connections from one idea to another didn’t seem to matter anymore. He went for long periods without thinking at all. Soon the hallucinations would begin.

  Judging by the sounds of their MSAs, there were either three or four firefighters.

  One was a floor ahead of the others, and as he approached fifty-one, Finney met him and peered into his facepiece. He wore an orange captain’s helmet. The face, what he could see of it, was familiar, but it took some seconds to place it. “Tony? What are you doing here?”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Upstairs. Boy, am I glad to see you.”

  Finney wanted to ask if Reese had sent them or if they’d come on their own, but he was too tired.

  Tony said, “Come on, let’s go.” Even as he spoke, the next man in line arrived. With his brother tugging on his arm, Finney shone his light on the next man: Marion Balitnikoff. He was carrying a pistol.

  A third firefighter came up the steps below Balitnikoff, and as he arrived, Balitnikoff said something over his shoulder. He was still talking as Finney shoved Balitnikoff, sending both firefighters sprawling backward.

  Finney turned and ran.

  Tony yelled, “No, wait.”

  A gunshot echoed in the stairwell.

  Another.

  73. TI-I-I-IME IS ON MY SI-IDE—SING IT

  Finney rounded the corner and sprinted up the half-flight, then swung himself around the next turnaround on the banister and raced up another. A second shot rang out, and he felt a dull thud against the air bottle on his back. The sounds of hurried movement behind him grew louder.

  Exhausted as he was, Finney never would have guessed he could move this rapidly. He knew the adrenaline propelling his speed wouldn’t last long. He’d been near the end of his rope when he met them. He counted the floors carefully to make sure he didn’t accidentally lead them to Diana.