Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [98]
“Where?”
“Back. Way back.” He waved at the building. It was obvious he was too wound up to think clearly.
“That’s a big place. Where in the back? This end? Where?”
He stepped around in front of Engine 26 and stared at several hundred feet of blank concrete wall. “They’re in there,” he said, motioning hopelessly.
Together Finney and Sadler shouldered two hundred feet of line from the rear of Engine 11 and dropped a trail of zigzagging hose behind them up a short flight of concrete stairs opposite the loading dock. When Sadler used the heavy, rubber-tipped nozzle to break the glass out of a door, smoke enveloped them.
The smoke wasn’t particularly hot, which meant there would be a lot of survivable spaces inside.
48. NITWITS
Finney tightened the straps on his facepiece, opened the low-pressure valve at his waist, and felt the cool air wash over his face. Believing the fire was nowhere nearby, Gary Sadler dropped the nozzle in the doorway so they could search quickly and without the burden of dragging that heavy hose around corners; they would come back for it later.
Six people living in a factory, probably a family of immigrants, perhaps boat people from Southeast Asia. That hose could slow them down immeasurably, and Finney was glad they’d decided to leave it. A house fire would be one thing, but this place was huge. Their two hundred feet of hose line probably wasn’t even enough to reach the fire.
On a bulletin board in the hallway, leftover Halloween decorations had curled in the heat. The smoke quickly became so thick they couldn’t see the walls, much less the overhead lights. By rights they should have been crawling, but the building was immense, and if they were going to search it in time to do the inhabitants any good, they needed to move quickly.
“The witness said they were in the back of the building,” Finney said, probing the murk with a nine-volt battle lantern.
Intent on doing it room by room, Sadler ignored him. There was no point in quibbling. Sadler wasn’t going to listen, and Finney wasn’t going to break up their team. They quickly passed through several offices, a lunchroom, and what appeared to be a changing room with metal clothing lockers against the walls. The smoke was lighter in these rooms.
They searched a pair of small storage rooms, and when Sadler broke out two windows, the smoke didn’t dissipate.
On the main floor Sadler reached the door to another room and said, “You’re the outside man. I’m going in.”
Though they hadn’t discussed which search technique they would use, they both knew this one: the would-be rescuer posted a second firefighter in the doorway—the idea being that while he moved around in the room, he would maintain his orientation by the sound of his partner’s voice in the doorway. The protocol was that Finney would search the next room and Sadler would be the doorway man.
When Sadler came out of the first room, he shouldered Finney out of the way and proceeded into the next room—alone. For some reason he was bent on treating Finney like a recruit. “Shit!” Sadler yelled.
Finney stuck his head through the door, but he already knew what he would find. The hose line at his feet was a dead giveaway. They were at the door they’d used earlier to enter the building. They’d come full circle, and Sadler had stepped back outside. To make matters worse, another team had appropriated their nozzle and taken it inside.
Moving more quickly than ever, they followed the team that had their nozzle up a flight of stairs and into a loft area where a pair of helmet lights moved through the smoke on the far side of the room. Sadler turned around and headed down the stairs. “They’re jacking off. Let’s go.”
On the main floor they found a corridor that led toward the newer section and after a dozen yards encountered a set of locked doors. They took turns kicking them until they gave way.
It was smokier in this part of the building, and hotter, and after twenty feet it got so black Finney had to hold onto the back of Sadler’s bottle to