Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [38]
Sadler had vanished.
It was always a long wait for help down here in South Park, but other units should have been on the scene by now. Engine 11 from West Seattle. Ladder 7 from the industrial area south of downtown. He had no idea how much time had elapsed, but he didn’t hear sirens. He approached McKittrick at the pump panel. “Where is everybody?”
“There’s an accident on the First South Bridge, and the Sixteenth South Bridge is stuck in the up position.”
Finney went back to the front door and, under a scrim of boiling smoke, spotted Sadler’s size-thirteen boots just inside the entrance, Sadler on his stomach, trying to crawl through the worsening heat. As Finney crawled in behind him, he noticed the officer and tailboard man from Engine 27 hadn’t progressed an inch. Rarely had he seen a house fire this hot or this impervious to water.
“Come on,” Sadler yelled. “They’re going to protect the stairs while we go up.”
“There aren’t any stairs,” Finney said. “They’re burned out. And that fire doesn’t even know we’ve got a line on it.”
“You and me are going up. Come on.”
“If we go outside, we can get through a window.”
“The stairs should be towards the back. Besides, you know the rule. Always a hose line between the fire and the victim.” When Sadler began edging around the crew of Engine 27, a pillow of steam from one of their nozzle bursts came down and forced them flat. From his facedown position on the floor, Sadler opened his line, but it went slack. It took a few moments to figure out Engine 27’s line had gone slack, too. The five-hundred-gallon tank on the pumper outside had run dry. Now everything would depend upon Monahan or McKittrick finding and opening a hydrant.
It was hard to believe five hundred gallons less what was in the hose lines hadn’t made a dent in this fire, but it hadn’t.
The rubber facepiece against Finney’s cheeks was slick with sweat. A pulse pounded in his temple.
“Okay. Let’s go.” Sadler began pulling the dead hose line toward where he thought the stairs were. Finney watched Sadler wriggle along the floor until, a full body-length in front of the other crew, he was forced to stop, as Finney had known he would be. It was incredible how much heat Sadler could take. He was crawling into a virtual oven.
“The stairs are gone,” Finney yelled. “And we don’t have any water, so how are we going to get a line between the fire and the victim?”
It was pointless to argue. They could barely raise their heads, much less stand up to climb a staircase that didn’t exist. Again, Sadler inched forward.
“We’ll never get there this way,” Finney yelled. “I’m going outside.”
If Sadler heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it.
All professions have cardinal rules, and in modern firefighting there are few crimes as egregious as abandoning a partner. It was a fiat Finney knew better than anybody, yet he backed out on his hands and knees, backed out until he was on the porch by himself.
As he ran through the yard and passed the pump panel on Engine 27, he pushed the throttle in and muffled the screaming of the now-dry pump. McKittrick was off somewhere finding a hydrant. Fed by reservoirs high on the hill, most of these hydrants in South Park carried 135 pounds of head pressure. When McKittrick opened the hydrant, the pressure, even without a boost from the pump’s impeller, would cycle through the pump housing and pressurize the hoses.
Without taking his mask off, Finney unhooked the chrome latch mechanism on the heavy twenty-six-foot aluminum ladder on the officer’s side of Engine 27, lifted the ladder out of the holder, balanced it on his right shoulder, and ran with it. It was a lot heavier than he remembered. More than a minute had passed since he’d seen the figure in the window.
When he reached the house, he tipped the spurs of the ladder into the soggy grass and muscled it up. Once he had the ladder vertical, he steadied it with his knee along one beam, tugged the halyard hand-over-hand until the sections were fully extended, and dropped it clanking against the house. He couldn