Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  The sounds of their boots, the steel of Balitnikoff’s pistol on the railing, the heavy breathing, all these sounds in a stairwell that had been tomblike minutes earlier, combined to spook Finney.

  Though he was gaining a couple of steps each floor, his thighs were rapidly losing strength and felt hollow and trembly. It wouldn’t be long before his legs gave out entirely.

  He’d met them on fifty-one. And he’d gone two floors, three . . . He was on fifty-four and gaining. They had to be almost an entire floor behind now.

  By fifty-six he found himself using the railing, working his arm and shoulder muscles as much as possible, trying to distribute the workload among various muscle groups, lest one fail before the others. He wanted to drop the axe and Halligan, but that would only give them encouragement. He felt as if his lungs were on fire.

  Each floor seemed to take forever, and each time he reached the top of a half-flight, he expected to be shot.

  For a few moments he considered stopping and setting up an ambush, but the masks were loud, and his sounded like a megaphone. If he stopped, they would easily home in on his breathing and shoot him in the smoke.

  On fifty-nine, he began to slow involuntarily. He’d reached some sort of maximum overdrive, and no matter what was behind, he couldn’t maintain the tempo. On sixty he slowed even more. They were now one full flight behind.

  He bypassed sixty-one; Diana was not on the landing.

  He bypassed sixty-two and went through the door he’d jimmied earlier on sixty-three. Most of the doors were locked, but he and Diana had pried this one.

  His five-minute warning bell hadn’t begun ringing yet, but once it did, he’d be the belled cat.

  He’d gone thirty feet beyond the door on sixty-three before he realized that the fire had progressed significantly since he and Diana were there; the smoke that had been boiling around on the ceiling had become flame, an orange cloud sweeping across the upper portion of the lobby area from the direction Finney figured was the Fifth Avenue side of the building. Keeping low, he crawled toward it.

  Most of the doors were locked, each office another buffer to the fire.

  Rolling onto his side, he kicked open the door on a nearby suite of offices, scrambled through the doorway on his belly, and closed it. It was cooler in here. There was smoke, lots of it, but as yet no fire. He still couldn’t understand what Tony was doing with Balitnikoff. Behind, in the lobby, he heard voices. Surely his brother wasn’t going to let these bastards kill him. He listened as they moved around in the heat, speaking to each other in low tones.

  He was in a reception area. Dense black smoke had banked up on the ceiling to a depth of five or six feet. A calendar on the wall had rolled into twelve separate tongues. The windows were black with smoke tar. Kneeling, he waited with the axe—his plan to peg the first one who came through the door and try for a gun.

  Time was on his side, he thought. “Ti-i-i-ime is on my side,” he sang softly to himself. “Ti-i-i-”

  After a few moments, his warning bell began clanking, and he realized he was an idiot. Time wasn’t on his side; it was on theirs. They had the air. All they had to do was wait outside the door until his was used up.

  74. A SHORT PRAYER FOR THE FALLEN

  2111 HOURS

  Leaving her heavy firefighting gloves on, Diana waded into the mass of bodies. About half the party had spilled out of the elevator; the other half was a spaghetti snarl of bent limbs, scorched skin, and melted clothing. Trying not to step on any bodies, she searched for signs of life. As much as she wanted to avoid it, the melted mattress of humanity was too closely packed together for her to move without her boots crushing something. They were all dead. Everybody she saw.

  Less than fifteen minutes ago she’d been upstairs talking to these same people. Against the wall was the short waitress who’d been chewing bubble gum. In the center sitting up, one side of his face burned black, was the heavyset chef.

  In front of the elevator, she’d encountered the bodies of two males who’d made a run for the stairs. One almost gained the stairwell entrance but had apparently been cut off by flame and more or less barbecued in place. Judging by how much more progress he’d made than the others, his force of will must have been tremendous. She had to admire that. The second male was sprawled on his face forty feet from the elevator, one shoe still smoking, the sock melted onto his leg. All the other bodies were either in the elevator or within a dozen feet of it.

  Diana said a short prayer, pleading with God to let her find someone alive. Anyone. Just one.

  It was a large elevator, the walls half-metal, half-wood, scarred and dented from years of careless baggage handlers. Even though she knew it wasn’t the case, the scratches and indentations presented themselves as the work of a large animal trying to claw its way out in every direction but the door. The effect was disconcerting. Most of the clothing on the top of the pile had been melted or singed off. People didn’t realize how flammable modern synthetics were. Among the corpses, Diana recognized another waitress, a petite brunette with glasses who had expressed the intention of applying to become a firefighter. At the time Diana wondered how she could be strong enough, but she’d dispensed encouragement anyway and, in fact, had her phone number on a scrap of paper in her bunking coat pocket.

  Working her way through the bodies, Diana spoke through her tears, “Anybody here? Anybody?”

  After examining every corpse in the car, Diana found several near the bottom who might have escaped the worst of the heat but who had expired of smoke inhalation, nostrils and mouths ringed with soot, eyes staring, lungs wheezing when she moved their bodies.

  There were two layers on top of him, which was the only reason he’d survived, that and the fact that his lips were pressed against a hole the size of a rivet-head on the floor of the car through which he had been able to suck clean air. A portion of his jacket collar had melted, and there were burns on the back of his head and on one leg, but other than that, little of the real force of the heat seemed to have bruised him.

  He sobbed and fought when she tried to pull him away from the hole in the floor.

  “Come with me,” she said. “There’s air out here.”

  “Give me some from your bottle,” he said, without looking up.

  “That won’t work. You come out or you die here. Your choice.”

  He was wobbly and made a squeamish show of not touching the others with any part of himself or his clothing, even though it wasn’t possible to move without doing so. As he moved, he reached down and tried to pick up a briefcase off the floor.

  “Come on,” Diana said, tugging his coat sleeve. “This isn’t an airline. We don’t stop for luggage.”

  The briefcase blew apart, turds of blackened cash fluttering across the bodies. He stooped, picked up a single intact bill, stuffed it into his pocket and said, “Christ. That’s a shame. All that money.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” she mocked, as she escorted him to the stairwell.

  “Don’t look at me. It sure wasn’t my idea to take the elevator. I told them not to.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  She marched him down the smoky stairs.

  Sixty was cooler, a burnt-out hulk of a floor, the steel girders of the building showing through like a bra strap through a torn dress, everything else filigreed with tendrils of smoke as if somebody had just that second snuffed out a million candles. There was fresh air from broken-out windows on this floor. She could hear the rope-handling team deep inside the floor. Her victim would recuperate here and join the others coming down the elevator shaft on ropes.

  Diana went back to the stairs to look for Finney.

  75. STANDING IN THE BACK ROW AT YOUR OWN EXECUTION

  2130 HOURS

  Too late, Finney reached around and muffled the bell on his backpack with his gloved fist. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot through the lower quarter panel of the door, for surely they were crouching under the heat and flame just outside
the door.

  But he didn’t have a gun, and his only option was to run. Scuttling through the reception area and down a long corridor, he kicked in the last door on the right and crawled in. Too late, it occurred to him that by going right he’d taken just one more turn into a dead end. His only compensation was a paucity of smoke in this office, little enough so he could stand up and cross the room on his feet. When he swept the flashlight beam behind him, he noticed his boots had left black marks on the carpeting like a dance pattern on the floor of a school gym.

  The smoke on the ceiling was three feet thick, curling in on itself, a collection of gases waiting for ignition. When these rooms took off, they would go in a burst. Even crouched low on the rug in his bunking clothes, the heat in such an enclosed space would broil him alive.

  Then, unaccountably, the sounds in the outer office grew weaker. When he heard his pursuers moving to the far end of the corridor, it became clear that their job wasn’t to kill him.

  Their job was to keep him pinned down. To make certain he didn’t leave.

  In not too many minutes the fire would kill him, and his demise would look like that of any other luckless firefighter who’d become separated from his companions.

  Knowing he had a few moments to think, Finney went around the desk and sat in a plush office swivel chair. It was awkward with the bottle still on his back. His flashlight played across a silver-framed photo on the desk, a man, a woman, and three little girls with ribbons in their hair. He tried to think the problem through, but for the first time tonight he found himself beginning to panic. He’d been moving quickly earlier, fighting for his life, but he hadn’t been panicked. Not till now.

  He knew if he treated this as a logistical problem rather than the last five minutes of his life, he’d have a better chance, but how could he not think about these as the last minutes of his life when that’s exactly what they were? In minutes the fire would gallop through this dead end he’d fashioned for himself.

  He did his best to slow his breathing. To conserve what little air remained in his bottle.

  He tried to contact the dispatcher via radio. No answer. He attempted to raise Diana, but there was no reply on the tactical channel either. The telephone on the desk was dead.

  At the same moment his air bottle gave out, a whoosh outside the office door signified flames had flared up in the corridor. Already, long fingers of orange crept over the top of the partition separating this room from the next. Lazily, flame crept across the ceiling toward him. He ripped off his facepiece so he could breathe. Surprisingly, the air wasn’t too bad in here.

  Should he make a dash for the stairs, the inferno outside the door would eat him alive, and even if he made it, he’d be burned horribly when he faced down the three men with guns.

  He couldn’t help reminiscing over all the stories he’d heard about firefighters who’d ended their lives trapped in small rooms such as this.

  He was as good as dead. They knew it. He knew it.

  There were two large windows in the room, several metal file cabinets against the far wall, and a coat tree. Finney ran his light over the windows. On the nearer of the two down in a corner he found the two-inch white dot signaling a breakout window. He could break it out and jump. Or . . .

  There might be a chance.

  Several years ago somebody’d thought to put a small bag on the side of truckmen’s masks, fifty feet of nylon climber’s webbing stuffed inside, ostensibly to be used as a lead-in line, but the line was strong enough to be used as a lifeline. Because he’d appropriated this mask from Ladder 9, he had the bag with the fifty feet of webbing.

  Yarding out the material, he put a loop around his waist under the MSA backpack. He doubled-up the webbing and grasped it in front of himself. Then he looked around the room for an anchor point, something to tie the other end to. He overturned one of the heavy file cabinets and dragged it toward the windows, then opened a locked drawer with the axe. He hit the cabinet with the pick on the Halligan and made a hole in the side, then tied the webbing through the hole and out the drawer.

  He shattered the window with the Halligan and hurriedly cleaned out the remaining shards of glass on the sill.

  As the fresh air from the window rushed into the room, the ceiling ignited with a soft, puffing sound like an old man sucking on a pipe. Flame began banking down the other side of the room, cloaking the door in a reddish-orange sheet. In another thirty seconds it would creep across the carpet and make a complete vertical sweep of the room.

  Using half-hitches, Finney affixed both tools to the end of the nylon webbing and dropped them out the window. He tugged his thin, goat-skin climbing gloves on, then draped a leg over the sill.

  He pulled tension on the line and worked his way over the sill, feeling the file cabinet begin sliding as his weight pulled the nylon webbing taut. His stomach started doing flip-flops. In the fog he could only see eight or ten stories, but he knew he was six hundred feet above the street.

  At least it was cool out here.

  Tools clanking against the building like a junkman’s chimes, he lowered himself so that only his head was above the sill, walking on his knees down the side of the building. Above, the room boiled with fire. One gloved hand kept the webbing together at his waist, the friction of the webbing wrapped around his butt slowing him down. He slowly let the webbing slide through his glove and began working himself down the face of the building. The file cabinet shifted again.

  He lowered himself a few more feet. He was so dizzy he didn’t even know if he’d tied the webbing properly. Even if he had, it wouldn’t take much heat to melt nylon.

  He dropped a few feet, a few more. All the white-dot windows in a high-rise would be in line above each other. He had to go down just far enough, because if he went too far he would not be able to climb back up on the half-inch nylon webbing.

  When his rubber boots made contact with the next window, he saw through the glass that the room behind the window was fully involved.

  He dropped down to the next floor and crab-walked to the center of the broken windowpane, held the webbing tight, and kicked at the remaining triangular-shaped plates of glass until they fell out. A hot stench exhaled into his face from inside the building. Below, swinging to and fro, his tools clanked against the building. Blades of flame shot out over his head into the grayness.

  He kicked the remaining glass out of the sill, then found himself dangling, half-in and half-out. If he were to drop now, he’d slide down along the face of the building for hundreds of feet. Attempting to get some momentum, he pushed off the sill and swung out as far as he dared. Any second the webbing would melt through. He pushed out again, and on the second backswing, he managed to hook one leg inside the window, then pulled himself toward the building and slowly lowered himself.

  As he settled his weight on the sill, a burning loop of nylon slapped his shoulder from above. He’d avoided a free fall into the fog by seconds.

  He hauled his tools up, then rolled onto the blackened floor.

  Near the window a current of foggy air allowed him to breathe almost as freely as if he were downstairs in the street. Wisps of dark smoke snaked up from various objects in the room. Even though he wanted to stay and revel in the fact that he hadn’t plummeted sixty stories or been burned to death, he knew if he loitered here for any length of time, he’d become too lethargic to do what he had to.

  This was the floor where he’d last seen Diana.

  Carrying the axe and Halligan over his shoulder, he made his way to the freight elevator and found it filled with bodies like junked manikins at a going-out-of-business sale. There were lighter spots on the blackened clothing of some of the victims that indicated they’d been moved after death. Diana had come and gone.

  He walked toward Stairwell B on legs that felt wooden. In the stairwell, from above, he could hear the Darth Vader sounds of three masks as the men wearing them waited for him to burn to death. It was like standing in the back row at hi
s own execution. In a moment, he’d be in the front row.

  76. FREE FALL

  2133 HOURS

  Finney caught the first man completely off guard, grabbed the bottle on his back and jerked him down hard. The man flew past him in the smoke. There was a series of thuds and muffled yelps before he came to rest out of sight in the smoke on the next half-landing.

  With barely a pause, Finney turned back and swung the flathead axe at ankle level, blade leading.

  A man screamed into his facepiece and collapsed on top of Finney, who quickly lifted the heavy body off his shoulders, flipping it down the stairs to join the first man. He knew by their voices neither was his brother.

  “What’s going on? Can’t you morons keep your balance in the smoke?” barked Lieutenant Balitnikoff.

  Finney raised the axe over his head and swung downward. But the blade bounced off the concrete with a jolt that went through the axe handle and into his arms like an electric current. He must have misjudged the distance.

  An instant after the axe hit the concrete, something small and metallic clattered to the floor. It took Finney a second to realize he’d missed Balitnikoff but had nicked the gun out of his hand.

  “Hey, who is that?”

  “The ghost of Christmas past, big boy.”

  “Who?”

  “Next time you kill a man, do it face-to-face.” Finney’s voice was hoarse.

  When Balitnikoff ran up the stairs, Finney tried to give chase, stumbling to his knees just as a gunshot rang out from below. A bullet ricocheted against the wall next to his face, and chips of concrete spattered his cheek. He groped around on the floor, picked up the Halligan, then raced up to sixty-four, where the door was just closing on its pneumatic closer. At least one of the men behind had a gun, and though he believed Balitnikoff had lost his, he couldn’t be certain.