Vertical Burn (9 page)

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 was 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.

He made one complete circuit of the small room without success. As he came around a second time, something moved under him in the debris.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a firefighter. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Now flames were crawling across the ceiling and banking down along the outer wall toward the window, sealing off their escape. It might already be too late.

The victim, whom he initially took to be a child, swatted at his facepiece and shrieked just once before going limp. This was no child. Too large. Too strong. It was a woman.

Half-carrying, half-dragging her limp body across the room to the window, Finney saw that the entire wall was now blocked by flame that had banked down from the ceiling. Fire lapped at his helmet, scalding his ears through the Nomex hood, roasting the back of his neck.

“Stay calm,” he said. “I’m getting you out of here.”

Then, as he gripped the windowsill with his gloved hand, he felt a water stream rush past his helmet from outside. He was instantly engulfed in it, the room boiling. A gallon of water produced 550 cubic feet of steam. It smothered the fire, but it also scalded his wrists and his cheeks around the edges of his facepiece. Even the helmeted figure outside backed away. Lord only knew what it was doing to the victim.

Finney did his best to shield her with his own body, but he knew his bunkers were hot enough that a mere touch would burn her. Moments later, as the heat from the steam subsided, he got up off the floor, picked up the victim, and passed her through the window. As her limp body plugged the tiny window, he knew that should the fire come back on him now he would be trapped. In rescues, the rule of thumb was to keep the victim from blocking the rescuer’s egress, yet it was a difficult rule to follow in the field. He’d violated that rule and now his exit was blocked.

A hot, wet heat tightened the room down around him.

And then the victim was outside, taken away by the other firefighter. As soon as she had cleared the opening, he wedged his head and one shoulder through the tiny space. He could feel flame creeping up the trousers of his bunking pants. For twenty seconds he twisted and tried to swim through the aperture. Then, like a chunk of Crisco on a hot skillet, he began skidding on his stomach down the steep roof.

He thought surely something would arrest his slide, somebody would come to his aid, because if not, he was going to drop into the yard on his face. But he continued to skid with agonizing slowness, and then, just as the free fall was about to begin, his outstretched hands caught the gutter in front of him. The gutter creaked and he could hear the screeching of nails. Though he couldn’t see the ground through the fog and smoke, he knew he was inches from a twenty-foot drop. Slowly, carefully, he turned around and got to his feet.

Traversing the roof, he reached the ladder a body-length ahead of the other firefighter, who was now struggling to carry the victim. Finney stepped onto the rungs and together they carefully transferred the weight of the still-unconscious victim onto his shoulder.

A minute later she was lying on a heavy canvas tarp at the edge of the yard.

When Finney set his helmet in the grass, tiny droplets of moisture on individual grass blades sizzled as they brushed up against it.

By the time he got his bottle off, he realized only one other rig had arrived. Ladder 1.

The firefighter who’d been on the roof with him was now in the yard, facing away, removing helmet, hood, gloves, facepiece. It wasn’t until a mass of hair shook loose that he realized she was a woman. She turned around and met his eyes. Diana Moore. She’d obviously left her partner and gone to the roof by herself, the same as he’d done. She’d scrambled up the ladder and across the precarious roof lugging a charged hose line, no easy feat. She’d saved the victim and she’d saved Finney, too.

“That was kind of close,” she said.

“Ooooh, yeah. Thanks for showing up. You saved my behind.”

“McKittrick told me you were up there, but when I got up and saw all that flame, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t even get close to that window.”

“It didn’t feel so wonderful from inside either.”

She smiled and they continued to look at each other for a few moments. Without preamble, they both burst into laughter. Finney had had similar giddy communal moments throughout his career, yet now that he thought about it, always with men. She was good. She was damn good.

Except for disheveled knee socks and a sturdy pair of brown leather shoes that hadn’t been touched by the ordeal, all the victim’s clothing had been either burned off or melted to her skin. Her chest and torso were blackened and cracked, and other areas of skin were as pale as parchment, blood vessels visible underneath. Her charred face was burned into a grimace—long, crooked teeth exposed. Her hair had burned off, except for a wispy scrap that clung to the nape of her neck. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were gone.

Nothing moved except her eyes, which darted about the group, appraising each of them in turn. She seemed as horrified by the firefighters as they were by her. When her look fell on Finney, he felt as if he were being stared at by a mummy in a museum.

At least she was alive, he thought, as she continued to stare at him.

Sadler glanced at Finney but spoke to the others, as if he had another, private message to be delivered to Finney later. “How far away is that medic unit?”

“Medic Ten’s delayed at the Sixteenth South Bridge with everybody else,” said McKittrick. “There’s an accident on the First South Bridge.”

“Somebody put some O-two on her,” said Diana.

Sadler used his portable radio to ask Medic 10 for an ETA. The reply: another ten minutes.

The driver of Engine 11, a short, stocky firefighter with a plug of tobacco under his lip, a man who’d been in long enough to have an attitude, put together a Laerdahl bag mask, connected oxygen to the mask, placed the mask over the victim’s face, and began squeezing the bag.

She should have been breathing deeply now, with their help, but she continued to gulp like a landlocked fish. Engine 11’s driver peered inside her mouth and down her throat with a flashlight. He tried again. Finney knew what was wrong. So did Sadler. The circumferential burns on her torso had contracted and hardened so that her lungs could not expand. They could pump in all the oxygen they wanted, but if her diaphragm wouldn’t expand, they couldn’t get air into her.

Sadler glanced at the others. “The medics won’t be here in time.”

“What do the medics do when this happens?” McKittrick asked.

Sadler held up his Buck knife.

Six minutes without oxygen and she would be brain dead. There was no telling where she was in the countdown.

“She ain’t gonna make it,” McKittrick said.

Finney could see the victim’s eyes widen and react to the pronouncement. It was clear from the flicker of alarm that she didn’t want to die in that yard any more than any of them did. It was also clear that she hadn’t lost her cognition, not completely.

Sadler offered McKittrick the knife. “Uh-uh. I’m not trained.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Sadler. “I’m no longer certified.”

“You’re a better choice than any of us,” Finney said. As far as he was concerned, Sadler’s refusal to do the deed was an act of cowardice. Until five years earlier Sadler had been a paramedic, but he knew, as did the others, that any time a public servant exceeded his or her area of certification, a personal lawsuit could result. On the other hand, it was obvious that if they continued to do nothing, she was going to die. Sadler stepped back, as if the problem were somebody else’s.

Finney hadn’t been trained in this, but he took the knife and knelt beside her. He didn’t know how clean the blade was, but right now infection was the least of her worries. He carefully pressed the blade into her burned flesh and made a cut in the shape of a seven on her upper right chest, a reverse seven on her left. It was like cutting charred steak. If she felt it, she didn’t respond, didn’t open her eyes, didn’t call out.

Once again Engine 11’s driver placed the Laerdahl bag mask over her face and began squeezing the air bulb. For the first time since they’d removed her from the building her diaphragm rose and fell. Half a minute later she came awake and attempted to speak through the mask. Finney, who hadn’t moved from his position beside her, motioned for the facepiece to be removed and leaned close enough to smell the sweet, sickening odor of cooked flesh.

“Water,” she gasped. “For the love of God give me some water.”

They gave her water and covered her with a burn sheet.

By the time the rest of the units arrived, the fire had punched a hole in the morning, flames jetting fifty feet into the fog. Standing in the yard in a daze, watching as the medics placed the victim on a stretcher and administered morphine, Finney felt dry heat from the fire. It wasn’t long after Chief Smith arrived that the walls began collapsing inward.

Monahan was the one who found the two-wheeled cart near the back door, the handle melted, the cargo transformed to turds of char.

“Annie? Hey, was that her cart?” Sadler asked, when Monahan brought it around to the front.

“That was definitely her cart,” said Monahan.

“It couldn’t be Annie,” said Finney.

“Yeah.” Monahan held up the cart with one hand. “That was her all right.”