Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [139]
Veins on the side of his face bulging like beetles, the man with the radio said, “It goes up the toilet holes.” He looked at Finney. “Right?”
Finney said, “Not in this case. These were set.”
It took Finney a minute to work the kinks out of his arms and back and neck. He turned his coat inside out to let it dry and set up an anchor for the rope. Kub would come up using the second of their three waist harnesses, sliding a couple of simple prusik knots along the rope as he went, the prusik clipped to his harness with carabiners. If anything happened, the mechanism of the prusik would hold him.
While Kub was climbing, Finney found some bottled water and explored.
Not surprisingly, both stairwell doors were hot to the touch. When he put on his gloves and opened the door to B, a balloon of black smoke rolled in on him, so hot he wondered if he’d burned his scalp. Without his bunking coat and helmet it had been a foolish thing to do.
The design of the trap was clear in Finney’s mind. Disable the sprinkler and standpipe system. Immobilize the elevators. Turn both stairwells into chimneys. Cripple escape, hamper firefighting, stand next to the IC, and give tainted advice. The fog had been an unexpected bonus.
After Kub reached forty, they rigged a hauling system for the equipment and hoisted all of it. Diana climbed the sixteen stories on the end of the rope, stopping at each carabiner and collecting it and the webbing Finney had used to fasten it to the rung.
When she stepped onto the floor, the security man without the accent said, “You’re a woman!”
“No shit,” said Diana. Finney could see she was getting tired and irritable.
“No, I meant . . .”
“She knows what you meant,” Finney said.
“No, I just meant a woman firefighter. You know, that’s great. A woman doing a man’s job. That’s just great.”
“It’s not a man’s job,” Diana said.
“That’s what I meant.”
Drinking bottled water Finney had scavenged from an office, Robert Kub came back through the lobby after reconnoitering. “The stairs are clearing.”
“They can’t be,” said Finney. “I just checked.”
“I think we can make it.”
When they went back together and looked, he knew Kub was right. In bunkers and breathing from an MSA, the stairs might just be bearable. Still, the higher they went the hotter it would get.
They donned their masks, pulled on their facepieces, tugged the rubber cheek straps tight, and loaded all the equipment bags and spare bottles onto their shoulders.
“What about us?” asked the security guard with the southern drawl.
“We’ll be back,” Finney said.
“Promise?”
“Thirty-four floors,” Kub said. “It’s going to be a bitching climb.”
“You’ve got my word. Just keep the door closed. Closed but not locked. Somebody else might need to get in here.”
As they began the journey, Finney wondered why the air was suddenly clearing. Had the building engineers pressurized the stairs, or had somebody closed a door on a fire floor below? Or was somebody down there using gas-powered fans? The stairs weren’t clear of smoke, they were simply cooler than they had been—he couldn’t feel any breeze that indicated they were being ventilated. Unless the gases in the stairs had been vented at the top, the higher they went, the hotter it would get.
Six floors up, they stumbled over a pair of dead men. Kub took off his gloves and checked for life. “Ouch,” he said.
“What happened?” Finney asked. “He bite you?”
“His watch was hot.”
“Don’t touch the steel railing with your bare hand either.”
They were on fifty-seven before the warning bell on Kub’s air tank began ringing. After traveling another two flights, Finney’s went off, too. Hoping to squeeze them dry, they ran the bottles another couple of floors; then, as they were changing, Diana’s bell went off.
After the