Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [136]
By the time they reached twenty-three, it was hotter than anything Finney had ever known.
Waiting for the others, who had slipped back, he dropped to one knee.
He sensed rather than felt Diana making her way up the last half-flight, but Kub stopped below on the turnaround landing and said, “I’m on fire! Goddamn, I’m on fire. Damn, my neck. Goddamn!”
Finney could hear him splashing water from the floor onto himself. He grabbed handfuls of water himself and splashed it around his own facepiece.
“It’s too hot,” Diana said, dropping her load in the water on the floor at Finney’s feet. “It’s way too hot.”
Finney stood, and when he did, the sweat inside his bunkers scalded him in a half-dozen places.
He found the wall and felt along it until he had the door. “We’ll go in and cool off.”
Not only was the door locked, but it was hot to the touch, which usually meant there was fire on the other side. In this situation Finney couldn’t be sure. It was a metal door, and convection from the stairwell might be responsible. As he thought about it, the dispatchers announced on the radio that Columbia Command had been on scene sixty minutes, plenty long enough to warm the door from the outside.
“Give me the Halligan,” Finney said.
A pry bar about three feet long with a simple straight claw on one end and a set of short, right-angle levers on the other, the Halligan was designed so that, in combination with a flathead axe or a sledge, the right-angle levers could be pounded into the crack in a door, which then made it relatively easy for someone on the long end to lever the door open.
Finney inserted the end of the Halligan, then reached out until he found Diana. “Hold this,” he said. “Keep your hands back.”
Working blind in the smoke, he struck several blows with the back of the flathead axe until the Halligan was securely in the crack in the door. Metal screeched as Diana pried the door open. A tongue of flame shot out. Together, they shouldered the door closed.
In the brief light from the flames, Finney caught a glimpse of Diana and Kub both. Neither looked happy about the situation. Kub was kneeling in the running water. “What do you want to do? We can go up and try another floor. We can go down and quit.”
“How many floors have fire on them?” Kub asked. “What floor is this?”
“Twenty-three,” said Diana, who’d been counting as painstakingly as Finney.
“It couldn’t have spread that far,” Kub said. “The next couple have to be free.”
“So we’re going up?” Finney asked. No answer. “If you’re nodding, I can’t see you.”
They both mumbled yes.
At the turnback midway between twenty-three and twenty-four Finney was again burned inside his bunkers. It was not possible, he realized, to endure this kind of heat without burns, no matter what he wore. He tried to stop on twenty-four to open the door, but Kub nudged him in the smoke and said, “One more. This might not be any good.”
Finney didn’t think anybody could climb one more set of stairs. But if Kub could, he could. They forced themselves to twenty-five and pried the door, pulling it open against the rushing water on the stairwell landing. There was something else, too, something on the floor.
Except for a small, nasty cloud that followed them in from the stairs, there wasn’t much smoke on this floor. The fluorescent lights were on. Kub closed the door behind them. They dropped their gear and tried to cool off. After he’d thought about it awhile, Finney went back and opened the door, curious as to what the obstruction in the stairwell had been.
It was a woman in her fifties dressed in jeans, deck shoes, and a gray uniform shirt with the name “Alma” stitched across the breast pocket. Finney dragged her inside.
Diana took her mask off and knelt beside the woman, feeling for a carotid pulse. She looked up at Finney and Kub and shook her head.
Hoping to find safer passage, they checked stairwell A, but found it as hot as the one they’d come up.
“What are we going