Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [119]
The driver yelled, “Jesus Christ! We gotta get outta here, lady.”
Alice looked up, confused. Smoke poured through the windows of the club. People were shoving one another to get out at the revolving door, its panes shattering in the fray. They streamed out to the sidewalk, all of them yelling, crying.
Without thinking, she jumped out of the cab, unable to breathe. The driver sped off.
She scanned the sidewalk, praying that Mary had already come out.
Seconds seemed like hours, as she stood there. She felt cemented to the ground, unable to move. Sirens roared and then firemen pushed past Alice, trying to get inside.
“You’ve got to scram, honey,” one of them said. “You’re going to get hurt.”
“My sister’s in there!” she said, frantic. “You have to help her.”
“Just go on home,” he said. “Tell your parents. Your sister will be okay. Just go home.”
Alice watched them move toward the doors at the edges of the building, but they did not go in. They pushed and pushed until one firefighter screamed over his shoulder to a few others, who were unwinding a hose from the truck: “Christ, we can’t get in. They’re screaming bloody murder in there. The doors must be locked from inside.”
“Break ’em down,” someone yelled.
They took axes to the doors, but it was no use.
“There’s not enough time!” the first guy shouted.
Alice felt like she might pass out. She wanted to run inside and grab Mary’s hand, but the front entrance was already clogged with people, lying one atop another like fallen dominoes, some of them screaming for help in agonizing tones, some of them already trampled and dying. She was terrified, too afraid to be brave.
The firemen broke in through the windows as best they could, and a few people managed to get out that way. She watched them, her stomach a jumble of nerves. She prayed as she searched the faces for Mary’s.
The sidewalk, which had been quiet and near empty a few minutes earlier, was now swarming with chaos. Those who managed to get out screamed in horror for their loved ones still inside. Sailors and soldiers, all home on leave for Thanksgiving, just out having themselves a night, were suddenly thrown into rescue duty. They had escaped death in combat overseas, but now they were carrying people out like mad, running back into the fire five times, some of them never reemerging on the sixth.
“We can’t get to them all,” yelled a young boy with a heavy older woman in his arms.
Another moaned, “Oh Jesus, Jesus. When I went to pull her out, her arm came right off in my hands.”
Alice shouted at them: “You have to get a girl named Mary. Please! She’s wearing a green dress. Please!”
Flames burst through the roof of the club, and a huge crowd gathered in the street, seeming to come from all corners of the city, blocking the path of the fire trucks, until soldiers formed a human chain and pushed the throngs down Shawmut Avenue.
It had all happened so fast. Alice ran toward Broadway, thinking that perhaps she could find her brothers at the cinema. They’d be able to save Mary, she knew it. Before she could turn the corner, she saw a handful of people inside the club who had managed to break the small windowpanes along Piedmont Street, but had gotten stuck in the windows’ metal bars, their heads out, halfway to safety, their bodies burning as they screamed. A priest stood before them on the sidewalk, reading them their last rites.
Alice looked on and screamed her sister’s name. She could not move.
Injured people lay on the sidewalk and on the floor of the garage next door to the club, waiting for help. After a while, ambulances roared, rolling in from Lynn, Newton, Brookline, and the Charlestown Navy Yard, but there still weren’t enough of them. Taxicabs drove the overflow.
A newspaper delivery truck was allowed to come through, and Alice watched as the two men inside began to carelessly toss folks into the back. She raised her voice to protest before realizing that all of them were dead.
Alice vomited into a sewer grate. Her head throbbed.