Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [112]
What I did not see was either of my daughters.
Or Morgan Neumann.
Several hours earlier they’d gone to the movie in my truck, but the truck was back now, parked by the side of the house.
I touched Helen Neumann’s shoulder. “The girls, Helen? Where are they?”
She gave me a blank look and turned back to the fire building. An hour ago I thought going brain-dead was the worst thing that could happen.
I’d been wrong.
This was the worst thing that could happen.
Watching your family burn in the fires of hell.
Though we were sixty feet from my house, the heat on our faces was enough to make Helen wince. From the blackness and speed of the smoke I knew the interior was boiling over. As if to confirm my judgment, another living-room window cracked open, and sections of plate glass fell into the flower bed.
Things were moving in slow motion. I felt as if I were trapped in a dream. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I was still back at the Sunset Motel and this was a nightmare.
I grabbed Helen’s shoulders. “Helen? Where are the girls? Where is your daughter?”
“She’s . . . why . . . she’s baby-sitting for Mr. Swope.” Helen’s mind was always slow, but tonight it had stripped all its gears.
“Are they at your house? Have you seen them?”
Two couples from the other end of our small enclave stepped in front of me, the women in nightgowns and tennis shoes, the men with their shirts hurriedly thrown on, one of them barefoot. Nobody had seen my daughters. A car full of teenage girls was parked to one side, having driven up the lane to gawp at a stranger’s tragedy. People needed to see others in pain. It was like a circus act.
I’d wasted half a minute unmasking the obvious.
If my daughters had come out, they would have been next to Helen Neumann. They hadn’t and they weren’t.
I ran to the Lexus, popped the trunk, kicked off my shoes, pulled my bunking boots-trousers ensemble out, and stepped into the boots, pulling the suspenders up over my jeans and T-shirt. I slipped into the bunking coat and picked up the face piece and helmet as I walked. The helmet slipped out of my fingers. I’d never been this nervous at a fire. Not even my first.
I’d wasted too much precious time.
I ran to the engine, where two firefighters from the Snoqualmie department were dragging hose toward my house. I pulled a spare backpack out of the compartment and onto my shoulders, fastening the waist buckle and shoulder straps as I walked. I tugged my facepiece over my head, put on my helmet, and twisted the main air valve behind me on the bottle, all of this done on automatic pilot.
Two unmasked firefighters from Snoqualmie were in my front yard directing a hose stream through the broken-out front window. They were thirty feet away, but still, the heat was forcing them to duck low. It was pretty obvious everything in my front room was cooked.
Unless they were in one of the back bedrooms, my girls were gone.
“There are kids inside!” I yelled at the firefighters. “Get in there! Move up on it!” One of them glanced over his shoulder at me, but neither budged. I don’t think they heard me.
Masked up, flashlight in my gloved hands, I jogged toward the front door. Before I could go in, one of the firefighters on the hose line, a large, pale man with a black mustache and crooked teeth, grabbed my shoulder and held me back. “You’ll never make it. Let us knock it down from out here first.”
Their line was directed horizontally into the rolling ball of orange but was having almost no effect. Over two hundred gallons a minute making no dent in the heat. Failing to darken the flames.
I stepped close to the house, knelt, opened the front door—it should have been locked—and felt a searing blast of heat on my face.
I crawled into the house on my belly. “Allyson!” I called. “Britney! Where are you guys?”
In my mind they were