Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [150]
Time was on his side, he thought. “Ti-i-i-ime is on my side,” he sang softly to himself. “Ti-i-i-”
After a few moments, his warning bell began clanking, and he realized he was an idiot. Time wasn’t on his side; it was on theirs. They had the air. All they had to do was wait outside the door until his was used up.
74. A SHORT PRAYER FOR THE FALLEN
2111 HOURS
Leaving her heavy firefighting gloves on, Diana waded into the mass of bodies. About half the party had spilled out of the elevator; the other half was a spaghetti snarl of bent limbs, scorched skin, and melted clothing. Trying not to step on any bodies, she searched for signs of life. As much as she wanted to avoid it, the melted mattress of humanity was too closely packed together for her to move without her boots crushing something. They were all dead. Everybody she saw.
Less than fifteen minutes ago she’d been upstairs talking to these same people. Against the wall was the short waitress who’d been chewing bubble gum. In the center sitting up, one side of his face burned black, was the heavyset chef.
In front of the elevator, she’d encountered the bodies of two males who’d made a run for the stairs. One almost gained the stairwell entrance but had apparently been cut off by flame and more or less barbecued in place. Judging by how much more progress he’d made than the others, his force of will must have been tremendous. She had to admire that. The second male was sprawled on his face forty feet from the elevator, one shoe still smoking, the sock melted onto his leg. All the other bodies were either in the elevator or within a dozen feet of it.
Diana said a short prayer, pleading with God to let her find someone alive. Anyone. Just one.
It was a large elevator, the walls half-metal, half-wood, scarred and dented from years of careless baggage handlers. Even though she knew it wasn’t the case, the scratches and indentations presented themselves as the work of a large animal trying to claw its way out in every direction but the door. The effect was disconcerting. Most of the clothing on the top of the pile had been melted or singed off. People didn’t realize how flammable modern synthetics were. Among the corpses, Diana recognized another waitress, a petite brunette with glasses who had expressed the intention of applying to become a firefighter. At the time Diana wondered how she could be strong enough, but she’d dispensed encouragement anyway and, in fact, had her phone number on a scrap of paper in her bunking coat pocket.
Working her way through the bodies, Diana spoke through her tears, “Anybody here? Anybody?”
After examining every corpse in the car, Diana found several near the bottom who might have escaped the worst of the heat but who had expired of smoke inhalation, nostrils and mouths ringed with soot, eyes staring, lungs wheezing when she moved their bodies.
There were two layers on top of him, which was the only reason he’d survived, that and the fact that his lips were pressed against a hole the size of a rivet-head on the floor of the car through which he had been able to suck clean air. A portion of his jacket collar had melted, and there were burns on the back of his head and on one leg, but other than that, little of the real force of the heat seemed to have bruised him.
He sobbed and fought when she tried to pull him away from the hole in the floor.
“Come with me,” she said. “There’s air out here.”
“Give me some from your bottle,” he said, without looking up.
“That won’t work. You come out or you die here. Your choice.”
He was wobbly and made a squeamish show of not touching the others with any part of himself or his clothing, even though it wasn’t possible to move without doing so. As he moved, he reached down and tried to pick up a briefcase off the floor.
“Come on,” Diana said, tugging his coat sleeve. “This isn’t an airline. We don’t stop for luggage.”
The briefcase blew apart, turds of blackened cash fluttering across the bodies. He stooped, picked up a single intact bill, stuffed it