Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [148]
After descending ten flights, they used the Halligan to force a door on sixty-five and found heavy smoke down to their waists. They used the Halligan again to force the doors to the freight elevator and found smoke pouring out of the shaft. They heard talk coming from above, but nothing from the blackness below. Finney knew the car was maybe three floors down from here, certainly no farther.
There had been no heat in the shaft they were using for the rescue operation, nor had there been much heat in this shaft when Diana had looked at it upstairs, yet now there was a great deal of heat and black smoke. The smoke stunk as bad as any Finney had ever tasted.
Back in the stairs, they heard voices in the stairwell, masked firefighters. It was hard to tell how far away they were, or whether they were above or below. Whether they were approaching or retreating.
Finney said, “Reese must have sent a team up.”
“God, I hope so.”
On sixty-three they pried the door and found heavy black smoke rolling at them like a series of huge black balls. They closed the door.
“Ten minutes ago this wouldn’t have caused any screaming,” Finney said. “This is all new. They’ve got to be on the next one down. Sixty-two. Or sixty-one.”
The door to sixty-two was hot enough that they decided there was fire behind it.
On sixty-one, most of the fire had already passed through, blasting out the windows, gutting offices, leaving a desk melted into a lump on the carpeted floor, flame limply dancing off it. As they walked onto the floor, melting black plastic from overhead pipes oozed onto their helmets and shoulders until they began to look like leopards.
“Look,” Diana said, “why don’t you go intercept the group in the stairs? We don’t dare miss them. I’ll go look for the elevator. We’ll meet back here. Any problems, we’ll call each other on the tactical channel.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“We don’t have enough air to do everything together.”
“You’re right. Okay.” They switched their radios to channel seven, and he went back to the stairs. It was never a good idea to separate in a fire building, but they were depleting their bottles rapidly and lives were at stake.
Finney thought he heard the distinctive clank of spare air bottles knocking together below. This group might be ten floors below, or fifteen. If they had instructions to do a search, they could vanish onto a floor at any moment.
He inspected the gauge on his waist-belt. A fully charged bottle had 4,500 pounds of compressed air; he had 1,400, probably not even enough to get back to the wedding party.
Carrying the Halligan/flathead axe combination in one hand, he descended slowly, stopping from time to time to quiet his breathing and to listen. He counted the landings, sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, and continued to hear sounds of movement and conversation below. The group climbed at what seemed like an excruciatingly slow pace.
Wanting to be refreshed and able to make sense when they reached him, Finney paused on fifty-one and turned on his flashlight. It occurred to him that his thoughts were growing fuzzier by the minute. He knew he was in the incipient stages of heat exhaustion, because his mind was beginning to wander. Logical connections from one idea to another didn’t seem to matter anymore. He went for long periods without thinking at all. Soon the hallucinations would begin.
Judging by the sounds of their MSAs, there were either three or four firefighters.
One was a floor ahead of the others, and as he approached fifty-one, Finney met him and peered into his facepiece. He wore an orange captain’s helmet. The face, what he could see of it, was familiar, but it took some seconds to place it. “Tony? What are you doing here?”
“Where are the others?”
“Upstairs. Boy, am I glad to see you.”
Finney wanted to ask if Reese had sent them or if they