Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [4]
“A little early to be up, isn’t it?” Finney followed Cordifis while Stillman tagged along behind him.
“I was coming back from my biannual Tuesday-night card game when I saw the smoke from Aurora. I was the first motherfucker on the scene.”
“You see any band members come out of there?”
“I ain’t seen nothing but this goddamn smoke. Thought maybe my first wife was in there cooking dinner.”
When Finney caught Cordifis, they donned their face masks and stepped into the building just as Baxter, Reidel, and Moore emerged, accompanied by ringing alarm bells. The trio told them they had searched along the left wall of the building and found only storage racks and empty rooms.
Diana Moore stepped up to Cordifis as he was pulling the straps tight on his blue rubber facepiece and said, “Sorry about the fans. The IC told me to put them back. I didn’t know what to do, so when I saw these guys through the smoke, I joined up.”
“Don’t worry about it, darlin’. You did right.” Finney thought he detected an amused twinkle in Diana’s eye at the word darlin’. He had to hand it to her. She had enough self-confidence to let things pass.
Finney was beginning to get a bad feeling about this building. Even though he could hear more units rolling up the street behind them now, he knew you didn’t find this much smoke in a building and then squander fifteen minutes without putting water on it. You found the seat of the fire as expeditiously as possible. You stormed in and you tapped it. Ninety seconds could make the difference between a tapped fire and a grounder. They’d already been here ten minutes. Engine 22’s pump was running, but the lines on the ground were not yet flowing water. So far, nobody had found the seat of the fire. Or any fire at all.
In a building this large there was too much space for superheated gases to accumulate. Finney knew that if those gases got hot enough and blended with oxygen in the proper ratio, they would ignite, and anyone luckless enough to be inside would be trapped in a flashover. In a house fire the rooms would go from two or three hundred degrees to twelve hundred in the time it takes to snap your fingers. In a place this big the higher temperatures would chop a man down where he stood. The body recovery team would find the soles of his rubber boots melted to the concrete floor.
3. REARRANGING DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC
Back inside, Finney and Captain Cordifis found the door to the basement they’d already searched and, using the east wall as a benchmark, they moved north from there. The building was filled with home furnishings shrink-wrapped in thick plastic and loaded onto wooden pallets, the pallets stacked on huge metal racks, the racks extending higher than they could see in the smoke.
They were moving faster now and they both knew they needed to cover as much ground as possible. The wall they were using as a reference point was mostly bare, as was the space nearby, and they moved almost without impediment.
Sooner than Finney thought possible, they arrived at the far right corner of the rear wall and worked their way along it, Cordifis an arm’s length from the wall, Finney an arm’s length from Cordifis. They were heading west, paralleling their original traverse across the front wall.
Finney was beginning to feel warm from the movement, so he knew Cordifis had probably been sweating profusely in his bunkers for some time. Although the manufacturers boasted of breathable fabrics in the liners, anyone who actually bothered to put on a set of bunking clothes and do any work knew that firefighters were sealed up like fresh-cooked muffins in a plastic bag. It could be like running a marathon in the desert, and some tolerated it better than others. Finney loved it. Cordifis sweated nearly to death each time they had a working fire.
“This way,” Cordifis said. “I got a door here.”
Finney stepped through the half-open door and for the first time in more than five minutes he could actually see his partner. Wrapped in a cocoon of smoke, the two men had been communicating by touch and