Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [61]
“I’m going with my gut here,” I said.
Ben and Ian exchanged glances. I knew they were both wondering whether I’d lost my mind.
The radio traffic was atwitter, both from the dispatcher and from the units waiting half a mile down the road. Everybody wanted details.
It was at this point that Mayor Haston stormed over to us. I had a feeling if not for the fact that my girls were with me, he would have thrown a punch. He was that angry. I’d heard a rumor that when Newcastle fired him from the volunteers, they’d nearly come to blows, that Haston had a hair-trigger temper. This was the first time I’d faced it. I knew he blamed me for the fact that our wives had run off together.
“I don’t know much,” Haston said, standing over me, his helmet akimbo, “but I know that trailer’s burning like a box of kindling. It kind of makes me wonder about you, Swope.”
“You’re right, Steve. You don’t know much.”
“You got everybody into a lather at the meeting. Could be you’re just one of those people likes to run around crying wolf.”
It had been more than three minutes since we’d evacuated the property. “Steve, the way I figure it, this is a no-brainer for you. I’m right, you get to live. I’m wrong, you’ll look good for wanting to go back in.”
“Don’t hand me any of your bullshit. I want your people back in there. Now.”
“You’re not going to make much of a chief if you don’t know what ammonium nitrate and fuel oil do,” Ian said.
At that moment, in the midst of the withering look Haston gave Hjorth, the world around us altered in a manner that few people ever experience.
The ground rocked. The air pressure all around loaded down in an instant. Our ears popped. A great gust of hot air rocked the motor home, nearly tipping it. The tops of nearby trees bowed to the ground and then flew back up like whips. Half a dozen birds came crashing to the earth around us, as if they’d been shot.
Mayor Haston, who hadn’t been sheltered by the motor home with the rest of us, actually flew backward eight or ten feet and landed on his back.
In the eerie stillness immediately following the explosion, burning debris began sprinkling out of the sky. His face impregnated with tiny bits of blackened material resembling sand, Steve Haston slowly sat up on his elbows.
“That,” Ian Hjorth said, “is a cheap lesson in what happens when ammonium nitrate mixes with fuel oil.”
“What?” Haston was deaf now, at least temporarily.
“It means you just tried to murder about fifteen people,” Arden said. “It’s a good goddamned thing you weren’t in charge. You dumb bastard.”
“What?”
“He said you’re a dumbass because you’re on your keister while we’re all safe here behind this motor home,” Hjorth said, smiling. “Shit-fer-brains.”
“Why don’t you stand back up?” Arden said. “When the secondary blast comes you can do that little puppet dance again. Like Pinocchio jacking off. I kind of liked that.”
Karrie stepped over to her father and said, “Shut up, you two.”
I couldn’t help recalling that Ben had been on the pipe back at the trailer, Karrie’s rump wedged firmly in the doorway while Ben had been inside. It should have been the other way about, Karrie on the pipe, Ben backing her up. She needed to prove herself in the same manner as every other firefighter since time immemorial. And she needed to be aggressive about doing so.
27. FARTING NICKELS
“You okay?”
Allyson and Britney craned their necks up at me and nodded, their eyes like half dollars. I’d never seen them so frightened. Morgan had instinctively twined her arms around my neck when the blast hit, her body knocking us all up against the side of the motor home, and now she clung to me long after the danger was over. Embarrassed over our cheek-to-cheek position, she stood up and gave me a smile that was part chagrin and part conspiracy, as if we might have moved to a new level in our relationship. As if we had a relationship.
“You guys stay here,” I said. “There could be another blast.”
Morgan