Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [117]
Tears trickling down her face, Stephanie knelt beside me. “Are they in there? Are your girls inside?”
Viewing the conflagration the house had become, I refused to answer. My home was a mountain of flame now. Nothing could have survived. Not the sharpest firefighter in full bunkers on air. Not a dog. Not a flea on the ass end of a dog. Certainly not a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old in cotton shorty pajamas.
The house was a fireball. The roof had caved in over the living-room area. As we watched, another portion of the roof collapsed, sending up a shower of sparks thirty feet into the night. Angels going to heaven, I thought. Little angels going to wait for me.
There were now five hose lines shooting water into the building.
But it was too late.
My house was destroyed. Morgan was dead. Everything I owned or ever would own had been obliterated. Everyone I loved was gone.
“Allyson,” I said weakly. “Britney.” Once again, I tried to get to my feet. Whether I’d been injured in the melee, was half-dead from oxygen starvation, or had simply used up my reserves I had no way of knowing. But I couldn’t get up. I wondered if I’d been without oxygen long enough to incur brain damage. As if it made any difference.
In two days I’d be the all-American poster boy for brain damage.
“They might have gotten out,” Stephanie said. “Don’t you think there’s a chance?”
“Same chance as a Popsicle in hell.”
There is no way to estimate how long I wept. I cried a river, while the radiant heat from the fire warmed the left side of my body and dried my tears. Stephanie whispered to me, but I didn’t hear what she said. There was no consolation. Nobody could save me now.
I’d made my own hell.
I’d traded sex in a motel room for my daughters.
I’d swapped two innocent lives for fifteen minutes of lust.
I was still weeping when one of the volunteers came running around to the front of the house, exclaiming loudly, “I made a rescue. I got one!”
He was behind a cluster of people, moving quickly, a bundle in his arms.
I got up and began moving.
A moment later he was behind a pair of burly volunteers, and then I couldn’t see what he had in his arms because the stack of flame behind him was so bright I was blinded by it. The man who’d made the rescue was Gil Cuthousen, one of our volunteers. I was pretty sure Gil didn’t know I lived here. I also found it odd he’d made a rescue I couldn’t. He’d never been much of a firefighter. When I saw what he had cradled in his arms, I actually felt my heart beating behind my Adam’s apple.
Gil was laughing.
He held Eustace, our cat.
Dead and stiff. The hair on his back singed.
Black humor often took bizarre turns at a fire, and in the past I may have been guilty of similar insensitivities myself, though right now I hoped not.
Stepping close, I doubled up my gloved fist and coldcocked him. Cuthousen fell to the ground, as stiff as the dead cat, which landed on top of him.
This time nobody grabbed me.
In front of us one of my outer bedroom walls collapsed inward with a fiery roar. We all turned to the house, transfixed. Five minutes later, water streams began getting a toehold on the flames. Ten minutes after that, the rubble that had been my home was pretty much extinguished.
North Bend Fire and Rescue had saved another foundation.
I knew we wouldn’t find my daughters without digging through a significant amount of debris, just as I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stand to look at my girls when we finally found them—still, I could think of no way to stop myself. In fact, I would have a shovel in my hands when we went into the back bedroom. I felt as if I’d been repeatedly clubbed senseless and was about to have it happen again.
Analyzing the sequence of the fire, I knew they had probably been dead before we arrived, probably before we even left the motel. Death by smoke inhalation frequently occurred in the early stages of a fire.
I stumbled around the periphery of the house