Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [115]
Pulling the table out of the way and feeling with my gloved hand, I knew I’d found someone. Not either of my daughters. Too big.
Morgan!
She wasn’t moving, nor did she react when I touched her.
I felt around on either side to see whether my girls were nearby but came upon bare hardwood floors and nothing else. Morgan must have been sleeping on the sofa when the fire started, must have slept through the initial phase. Why the smoke detectors didn’t arouse her was another matter. They weren’t beeping now, but they must have been before they melted.
Too often civilians woke up, smelled smoke, jumped up out of bed, and dropped dead right there because they’d inhaled a lungful of air so hot it cauterized their lungs. Had Morgan rolled off the sofa and kept her face near the floor, she would have been out of the worst of the heat and able to suck up enough oxygen at floor level to get out of the building. Even during the late stages of a fire, there was almost always an inch or two of breathable air on the floor.
For a split second I contemplated leaving Morgan where she lay, going after my girls. But I couldn’t do that.
I could only hope the men outside with the hose lines would get their act together and tap the fire, that my daughters were in their room with the door closed.
At night, closed bedroom doors were standard policy in our house, as they were in most firefighters’ homes, yet a bedroom door didn’t hold off a fire for long. Theirs was a standard hollow-core interior door rated for twenty minutes in a fire. Worse yet, it may have been open or partially open, because when my daughters were upset they wanted their door open, Allyson as a rule more claustrophobic than Britney. Morgan would have given in to their request in a heartbeat.
Tortured by doubts, I dragged Morgan’s body back through the house, through the kitchen, awkwardly around the corner into the family room, then out through the utility room door to the back porch. I might have taken her through the front, a shorter trip, but I chose the route I knew to be safe.
Morgan was a delicate creature. So precise in everything she did. Always with that awkward grace of a yearling. So thin. Pulling her along the floor was like pulling a stick doll.
When I reached the back porch, nobody was there to assist me. It was still too early in the fire for the legions of volunteers who generally helped out in the yard.
I got to my feet, picked her up, carried her away from the structure and out onto the cool grass of our backyard. I was still looking around for somebody to take over when I realized she wasn’t breathing.
She had no hair. No recognizable face. Her clothes either had burned off or were melted beyond recognition. Char everywhere on her body. No identifying marks, just a stiff, doll-like figure, arms clenched in front of herself in the classic pugilistic burn victim pose. The only color anywhere was on patches of clothing that had been against the floor. This was an obscene and grotesque caricature of the sweet young woman Morgan had been. The body on the ground in front of me looked more like a Hiroshima bomb victim than my baby-sitter.
When I returned to the back porch, I found my pathway blocked by one of the firefighters I’d seen in front, Christi, who stood deliberately in the doorway, black smoke pouring out over his head.
“Good work,” he said. “You got her out.”
“Move!” I was still “on air,” breathing through my face mask, clean compressed air instead of hot, filthy smoke.
“Don’t chance it again, Lieut. Anyone else in there is dead.”
“My daughters are in there.”
It wasn’t clear whether he heard me or not. “Nobody could do it now. We didn’t think you were going to make it out the first time.”
“Move.”
“I can’t let you do that. You’ll be burned.”
“I’m already burned, you stupid bastard.”
I tried to push past him, wrestled with him for a moment, and then found myself on the ground next to the porch. Whether he’d pushed me or I’d tripped, I had no idea. As I climbed to my feet,