Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [147]
“Stay there,” Finney said, on the radio. “Set up to start receiving people.” The fire wouldn’t revisit sixty; the fuel load had already been consumed. People might get burned if they touched hot metal or tried to walk barefoot over the smoldering carpets, but they weren’t going to die there. Also, there was a roof on sixty, and it would be airy.
Even as Finney was speaking, three firefighters who’d been trapped on the lower floors showed up on sixty and offered to help. They would set up a receiving station that would, after the first wave descended, be staffed with rotating personnel self-selected from among the rescued.
The first three civilians were outfitted in waist harnesses, secured to the main line at intervals, then sent down the ladder in the shaft. They soon had three more people headed down in harnesses, rope handlers selected from the security details. Kub was the rescue group leader.
As he scouted seventy-four again, Finney confronted a dozen agitated workers in the space near the freight elevator. A perspiring man in a waiter’s outfit stepped forward and said, “They didn’t make it. We heard screaming in the shaft.” Others, nodding their heads and shivering, seconded his words.
“They didn’t make what?” Finney asked. “Don’t tell me somebody used the elevator?”
“A lot of somebodies,” said the waiter.
“How long ago?”
“Two minutes, maybe three. We heard the machinery stop, and there was all this screaming.”
“Like a bunch of cats in a box,” somebody volunteered. Several people gave the speaker dirty looks.
Finney keyed his portable radio and asked Columbia Command whether anybody had arrived in the freight elevator. Reese and company had been studiously ignoring his transmissions all night, so he wasn’t surprised when he received no answer now.
“We heard screaming,” said the waiter. “I know we heard screaming.”
“But it stopped,” said one of the waitresses, a ribbon of hope in her voice.
“It took a while,” said a guest from the wedding party.
“They must have stopped on a fire floor,” Diana said, glancing over her shoulder at Finney as she pried the doors open and peered down the shaft. “I see them. Our guys are on sixty. The elevator must be between us and them.”
Some of the men and most of the women were crying. All of these people had fought to be on that first trip. One man kept repeating that his fiancé was in the elevator. “She’s not dead,” he sobbed. “She’s not.”
“We’ll go down and check it out,” Diana said, looking at Finney.
Finney gave her a grim look. They both knew the most dangerous thing you could do in a fire was ride an elevator. Once the doors opened on a fire floor, the electric eye wouldn’t allow them to close again.
While the others followed, Finney and Diana walked back to where they’d left their bunking coats and MSA backpacks. Just before they pulled on their facepieces and stepped into stairwell B, Kub caught Finney’s eye and gave him a thumbs-up.
Inside of thirty seconds the temperature in the stairwell siphoned off most of Finney’s remaining strength, fingers of heat stealing up under his suit to tickle his arms and legs. His burns throbbed. Already his legs were shaky.
“Too hot?” he asked, half-hoping Diana would say yes.
“No.”
Finney led. “You think any of them are alive?”
“No. But we need to check.”
Standing in the elevator shaft, they’d both inhaled the distinctive odor of burned clothing, singed hair, roasted flesh.
Physically, the descent