Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [152]
He was as good as dead. They knew it. He knew it.
There were two large windows in the room, several metal file cabinets against the far wall, and a coat tree. Finney ran his light over the windows. On the nearer of the two down in a corner he found the two-inch white dot signaling a breakout window. He could break it out and jump. Or . . .
There might be a chance.
Several years ago somebody’d thought to put a small bag on the side of truckmen’s masks, fifty feet of nylon climber’s webbing stuffed inside, ostensibly to be used as a lead-in line, but the line was strong enough to be used as a lifeline. Because he’d appropriated this mask from Ladder 9, he had the bag with the fifty feet of webbing.
Yarding out the material, he put a loop around his waist under the MSA backpack. He doubled-up the webbing and grasped it in front of himself. Then he looked around the room for an anchor point, something to tie the other end to. He overturned one of the heavy file cabinets and dragged it toward the windows, then opened a locked drawer with the axe. He hit the cabinet with the pick on the Halligan and made a hole in the side, then tied the webbing through the hole and out the drawer.
He shattered the window with the Halligan and hurriedly cleaned out the remaining shards of glass on the sill.
As the fresh air from the window rushed into the room, the ceiling ignited with a soft, puffing sound like an old man sucking on a pipe. Flame began banking down the other side of the room, cloaking the door in a reddish-orange sheet. In another thirty seconds it would creep across the carpet and make a complete vertical sweep of the room.
Using half-hitches, Finney affixed both tools to the end of the nylon webbing and dropped them out the window. He tugged his thin, goat-skin climbing gloves on, then draped a leg over the sill.
He pulled tension on the line and worked his way over the sill, feeling the file cabinet begin sliding as his weight pulled the nylon webbing taut. His stomach started doing flip-flops. In the fog he could only see eight or ten stories, but he knew he was six hundred feet above the street.
At least it was cool out here.
Tools clanking against the building like a junkman’s chimes, he lowered himself so that only his head was above the sill, walking on his knees down the side of the building. Above, the room boiled with fire. One gloved hand kept the webbing together at his waist, the friction of the webbing wrapped around his butt slowing him down. He slowly let the webbing slide through his glove and began working himself down the face of the building. The file cabinet shifted again.
He lowered himself a few more feet. He was so dizzy he didn’t even know if he’d tied the webbing properly. Even if he had, it wouldn’t take much heat to melt nylon.
He dropped a few feet, a few more. All the white-dot windows in a high-rise would be in line above each other. He had to go down just far enough, because if he went too far he would not be able to climb back up on the half-inch nylon webbing.
When his rubber boots made contact with the next window, he saw through the glass that the room behind the window was fully involved.
He dropped down to the next floor and crab-walked to the center of the broken windowpane, held the webbing tight, and kicked at the remaining triangular-shaped plates of glass until they fell out. A hot stench exhaled into his face from inside the building. Below, swinging to and fro, his tools clanked against the building. Blades of flame shot out over his head into the grayness.
He kicked the remaining glass out of the sill, then found himself dangling, half-in and half-out. If he were to drop now, he’d slide down along the face of the building for hundreds of feet. Attempting to get some momentum, he pushed off the sill and swung out as far as he dared. Any second the webbing would melt through. He pushed out again, and on the second backswing, he managed to hook one leg inside the window, then pulled himself toward the building