Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [14]
When they were a mile away, the dispatcher fed them an update. “Engine Twenty-six, we have a report of smoke on floor seven.”
Facing backward in the crew cab, Finney was already in his tall, rubber bunking boots and multilayered bunking trousers. He’d put on his coat and slipped his arms through the straps of the MSA backpack and air cylinder stored behind the seat. As they approached the address, he saw people spilling out the main entrance onto the sidewalk. This should have been routine for him, the Downtowner, but these days, all he could think about when they went to an alarm was not screwing up.
“Jesus Christ, stop here,” Sadler yelled at Monahan, who had bypassed the front entrance and was rolling toward the northwest corner of the building. “What the hell’s wrong with you? You should have parked at the front door.”
Meek as a kitten, Monahan said, “Aren’t we going to charge the standpipe? It’s a fire call, right? A high-rise . . . I charge the standpipe at a high-rise, right?”
“You stop in front when I tell you to stop in front, goddamn it!”
These two had been going at each other for the past week. It was hard for Finney to keep from laughing. He’d never worked on a crew quite like this.
Sadler gave his radio report and then he and Finney jostled their way through the crowd at the front entrance, Finney carrying a heavy dry-chemical extinguisher, Sadler a pressurized pump can. Inside, the alarm bell was deafening.
When a high-rise went into fire mode, elevator cars were supposed to return automatically to the lobby, but the elevator wasn’t there. “Where the hell’s that car?” Sadler yelled to no one in particular.
A man with several missing teeth approached through the pack of evacuating citizens covering their ears with their hands. Like Sadler and Finney, he was a head taller than everyone else in the lobby and probably one of the few people in the building who spoke English. “The manager took it up to check on the fire.”
“To floor seven?” Sadler asked.
“I guess so. The way I—”
Finney and Sadler ran to the narrow stairs leading from the back of the lobby and began climbing. In their cumbersome gear they left little room for nervous civilians, who flattened out against the walls when they saw them coming.
“Cuidado!” Sadler shouted at the descending citizens, his voice echoing in the marble staircase. Finney realized Sadler didn’t know much Spanish, but he liked to flaunt what he did know. “Cuidado!”
Before they’d gone two flights, Finney could hear Sadler’s heavy breathing, the tax for a lifetime of smoking. Including the weight of the extinguishers, they were each carrying more than eighty pounds of protective equipment. If nothing else, Finney knew he was still one of the fittest firefighters in the department. He would run Sadler into the ground and pretend it was easy. He could do that.
By floor three Finney was breathing hard, too. By four he felt as if the dry building air was scarring his lungs. Three floors left. Two left. As he approached seven, his legs grew noticeably wobbly. Still, he was far ahead of Sadler.
Finney waited for Sadler on the seventh-floor landing, breathing deeply. When he finally caught up with Finney, Sadler banged his pump can noisily onto the landing, dropped to his knees, and tried to catch his breath.
Finney took a few more deep breaths and said, “You all right?”
“Hell, no, I’m not all right.”
“Want me to go back and get the Lifepak?”
“Why don’t you go look around if you have so much extra energy?”
“Sure it’s not your heart?”
“Get out of here!”
Smiling, Finney left Sadler in the stairwell while he went onto the floor, passing two Hispanic men who were punching the elevator buttons as if playing a video game. Unlike the old days when firefighters left their masks outside on the rigs and braved the smoke on their own, now the only time a Seattle firefighter was permitted into a fire building without an SCBA—a self-contained