Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [114]
Unnerving her dad was about the most fun Britney ever had.
I would give anything to have her leap out at me now.
She didn’t.
As I passed the refrigerator, I heard the clatter of plastic and knew I’d upset the cat’s bowl. It was all so normal. Under the scrim of smoke and heat, everything was the same as always.
Visibility was marginal in back of the house, growing worse as I moved forward under volumes of thick black smoke. The farther I moved toward the front of the house, the hotter the air grew. The flashlight in my hand didn’t help much. I couldn’t see it. Water streams pouring through the front windows produced hundreds of gallons of steam, which descended to the floor and burned me. From time to time I swiped the steam off my facepiece with my glove.
In my panic my inclination was to speed straight through to the bedrooms, but years of training took over and I searched each room as I came to it in an orderly manner. Hit-and-miss searches had been the precipitator of more than one civilian death. Especially with children, who tended to hide; it was too easy to scoot right past them and not know it.
My prayer was that my daughters were in their bedroom, door closed, rags stuffed around the cracks. That they were safe and waiting for me. Wouldn’t that be any father’s prayer?
Approached from the front, our house had an open floor scheme, the only sealable rooms the bathroom to the left of the front entrance and the two bedrooms, also to the left of the front entrance. If you went right, you came into the living room, where I was now, then the kitchen and the family room, both of which I’d just now searched.
Our living room was burning like the inside of a woodstove.
The interior walls had half-inch shiplap on them, knotty pine nailed over older shiplap also half an inch thick, both sides identical, two inches of wood to drill through for our TV cable. The guy who built this place must have been pilfering from a lumberyard at night. To make matters worse, one of the previous owners had varnished all the knotty pine with an oil-base sealant.
Cozy-looking house.
Total firetrap.
The girls and I might as well have been living inside a can of gasoline.
The water stream hadn’t knocked down much, if any, of the heat. The others should have been inside fighting the fire. Aggressive, up-close attacks worked best in a residential fire. Too many of our volunteers liked to keep their distance, and God knows we didn’t have many regulars left. Click and Clack, but I hadn’t seen them outside.
An interior attack was the game plan you wanted when searching for victims. But that’s not what they were doing.
Moving along the left wall, I reached out to my right, expecting to find one of my girls, inert, helpless, but all I found were familiar objects, the antique cedar chest Lorie had bought at an estate sale and refurbished, where we kept our old calendars, tax records, and school papers. The chest was charred on top but intact, feeding my hope that my daughters were still alive. I opened the lid and felt around inside.
“Britney? Allyson?” Nothing.
The fire in the attic space above me produced a dull roar. I’d never been below an attic that was going quite like this. The roof would cave in soon.
Again, the sound of the hose stream drowned out all other noise, alternately pounding outside on the roof, then slapping the walls through the windows. When the water hit it, the fire on the shiplap walls would go out momentarily, then spring back, growing steadily hotter all the while.
Through the open window I heard men shouting, the airy burp-burp of alarm bells on self-contained breathing apparatuses as firefighters activated them. People were getting ready to come inside and help.
Then, for whatever reason, whether they’d run their water tank dry or simply reversed strategies, the hose stream shut down. Immediately the atmosphere around me became hotter.
Using my gloved hands, I felt underneath the low coffee table in the living room just opposite the gas stove, touched something, a piece of clothing, a stray shoe. When