Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [116]
I sprinted around the other side of the house to my daughters’ room. The window was intact, but the inside shades were burned off, the space beyond that filled with boiling flame. Jesus Christ, I thought. The fire’s consumed my babies.
I’d been a damn fool to waste time searching for them in the main rooms of the house.
The canniest tactic would have been for fire teams to have taken their line through this window; had they done it soon enough, they might have been able to protect my kids from the flames, which, as far as I could tell, had been largely in the main section of the house. We might have gotten my kids out this window.
Had I come to this window first thing, I might have rescued them.
The front yard was filled with neighbors, police, volunteers, a news photographer I recognized from the local paper, even old Fred Bagwell, standing off to one side as if we were all contagious. Another engine was wedged into the drive behind the Lexus, a tanker farther back in the trees. Yellow helmets everywhere.
A hose team worked bravely on my front porch, even though everybody involved could see flame leaping out over their heads like huge farts from Satan himself. A moment later the interior gave off a low, rumbling sound and a torrent of smoke and flame belched out the doorway, knocking both firefighters off the porch and into the yard. Another hose team cooled them off with a water stream.
As I stared in disbelief, part of the ceiling in the living room dropped, splashing a million hot embers into the interior. My experience and survival instincts told me anything I did now would only get me killed.
My heart told me to go in.
Crouching low, working along the floor, I began to fight my way through the wall of flame. Even as I tried to move forward, something or somebody grabbed my boots and began dragging me backward. I was sliding out of the house on my face, inexorably moving away from the flames as if on a conveyor belt. I was being yarded out by a team of firefighters.
I struggled, but they knelt on my arms and chest and legs, pinning me to the earth.
“You bastards!” I yelled through my facepiece. “You’re killing my girls!”
I twisted and kicked and fought, but there was half a ton on me. My alarm bell had been ringing for some time now, but nobody paid any attention to it. The bell signaled I had five minutes of air remaining. Maybe. Moments later the ringing stopped, along with my air supply.
I began choking on the rubber facepiece, unable to get my arms free to disengage the mask. I was suffocating. Like a madman, I jerked and thrashed, trying to reach the facepiece so I could release the rubber straps holding it against my face, fighting to get the smothering rubber seal away from my nose and mouth. They wouldn’t let me up. I’d never been in a worse panic. Thrashing my head from side to side, I knocked the facepiece against my tormentors, hoping to dislodge it, anything to keep from suffocating.
There were six men on me now, nailing me down the way you’d nail down a tent.
The facepiece was fogged over from the inside. I couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see me.
And then my girls and I were at the playground where I was explaining the syndrome had been a mistake, that I wasn’t going to leave, that everything would be as it always had been. I was no longer on the fire ground. In fact, I probably wasn’t even on earth. Sure. This had to be heaven. I was dead and united with my daughters.
Who were dead, too.
And we were all weeping with joy. We were dead, but we were joyous. Who would have thought?
Of all the damnable luck.
49. THINK AGAIN
“They came close to killing you.”
I took a deep breath, my first conscious inhalation in some time. A nasal cannula was dangling off my ears, the prongs in my nose. I felt the compressed