Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [149]
Tony said, “Come on, let’s go.” Even as he spoke, the next man in line arrived. With his brother tugging on his arm, Finney shone his light on the next man: Marion Balitnikoff. He was carrying a pistol.
A third firefighter came up the steps below Balitnikoff, and as he arrived, Balitnikoff said something over his shoulder. He was still talking as Finney shoved Balitnikoff, sending both firefighters sprawling backward.
Finney turned and ran.
Tony yelled, “No, wait.”
A gunshot echoed in the stairwell.
Another.
73. TI-I-I-IME IS ON MY SI-IDE—SING IT
Finney rounded the corner and sprinted up the half-flight, then swung himself around the next turnaround on the banister and raced up another. A second shot rang out, and he felt a dull thud against the air bottle on his back. The sounds of hurried movement behind him grew louder.
Exhausted as he was, Finney never would have guessed he could move this rapidly. He knew the adrenaline propelling his speed wouldn’t last long. He’d been near the end of his rope when he met them. He counted the floors carefully to make sure he didn’t accidentally lead them to Diana.
The sounds of their boots, the steel of Balitnikoff’s pistol on the railing, the heavy breathing, all these sounds in a stairwell that had been tomblike minutes earlier, combined to spook Finney.
Though he was gaining a couple of steps each floor, his thighs were rapidly losing strength and felt hollow and trembly. It wouldn’t be long before his legs gave out entirely.
He’d met them on fifty-one. And he’d gone two floors, three . . . He was on fifty-four and gaining. They had to be almost an entire floor behind now.
By fifty-six he found himself using the railing, working his arm and shoulder muscles as much as possible, trying to distribute the workload among various muscle groups, lest one fail before the others. He wanted to drop the axe and Halligan, but that would only give them encouragement. He felt as if his lungs were on fire.
Each floor seemed to take forever, and each time he reached the top of a half-flight, he expected to be shot.
For a few moments he considered stopping and setting up an ambush, but the masks were loud, and his sounded like a megaphone. If he stopped, they would easily home in on his breathing and shoot him in the smoke.
On fifty-nine, he began to slow involuntarily. He’d reached some sort of maximum overdrive, and no matter what was behind, he couldn’t maintain the tempo. On sixty he slowed even more. They were now one full flight behind.
He bypassed sixty-one; Diana was not on the landing.
He bypassed sixty-two and went through the door he’d jimmied earlier on sixty-three. Most of the doors were locked, but he and Diana had pried this one.
His five-minute warning bell hadn’t begun ringing yet, but once it did, he’d be the belled cat.
He’d gone thirty feet beyond the door on sixty-three before he realized that the fire had progressed significantly since he and Diana were there; the smoke that had been boiling around on the ceiling had become flame, an orange cloud sweeping across the upper portion of the lobby area from the direction Finney figured was the Fifth Avenue side of the building. Keeping low, he crawled toward it.
Most of the doors were locked, each office another buffer to the fire.
Rolling onto his side, he kicked open the door on a nearby suite of offices, scrambled through the doorway on his belly, and closed it. It was cooler in here. There was smoke, lots of it, but as yet no fire. He still couldn’t understand what Tony was doing with Balitnikoff. Behind, in the lobby, he heard voices. Surely his brother wasn’t going to let these bastards kill him. He listened as they moved around in the heat, speaking to each other in low tones.
He was in a reception area. Dense black smoke had banked up on the ceiling to a depth of five or six feet. A calendar on the wall had rolled into twelve separate tongues. The windows were black with smoke tar. Kneeling, he waited with the axe—his plan to peg the first one who came