Vertical Burn (23 page)

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 keep track of him. Heavy hose streams thrummed on the outside walls.

On their right was another door leading to what Finney assumed was the loading dock area where they’d originally seen fire. The golden rule in firefighting was to not pass up any fire, to put it out as you came to it, and through the crack in the door he could see a sheet of solid orange, the metal push-plate on the door hot to the touch. Should the fire breach these doors, it could cut off their escape. Going forward was risky, but going back for a line would mean depleting much if not all of their air. Finney would have gone back for a line, but he wasn’t making the decisions.

When they encountered a large, walk-in freezer, he was again assigned the task of doorkeeper. Gary was babying him, and Finney didn’t like it, in fact, was getting pissed off. Still, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He knew he was in better shape than Sadler, and he knew that if one of them was to stand and wait, it made more sense that it should be Sadler. As Finney waited, a pair of firefighters approached from the general direction in which he and Gary had been traveling.

They told him they’d found a pair of victims upstairs on a mezzanine not far away and their portable radios weren’t getting out of the building, that they were going for help. They gave Finney directions to the victims and said they would stay but they were almost out of air. As if to underscore their plight, one of their alarm bells began ringing. Before Finney could ask why they hadn’t simply brought the victims out with them, they vanished into the smoke.

It occurred to him that they hadn’t mentioned the condition of the victims. If they were unconscious or dead, they might have told him. He had to assume they were at least unconscious, or they would have followed them out of the building. If they were dead, it would have explained the lack of urgency in their demeanor. In a body recovery, the investigators usually wanted to see the corpses where they lay.

When Sadler came out of the freezer, Finney said, “Somebody came by and told me where they are.”

“Why didn’t they stick around?”

“Out of air.”

“Okay, let’s get going, man. I don’t want to be breathing through my T-shirt.”

“Me neither.” Finney felt his way through the smoke for another fifteen paces and, just as described by the firefighters, found a set of wooden steps running alongside a wall.

They were halfway up the stairs when the abandon building sequence went off on their portable radios. The
hi-lo
signal meant fire tactics were being switched from an interior to an exterior attack, that any and all firefighters inside the building were to exit forthwith.

“Jesus,” Sadler said. “They’re bailing out.” He grabbed his portable radio. “Marginal Command from Engine Twenty-six. We’re in what appears to be the east end of the factory. We have a confirmed report from other firefighters of victims. We’re going to complete our search.”

Seattle’s portable radios made a high-pitched clinking sound at the beginning of a successful transmission, a lower-pitched
bonk
to signal a blocked transmission, but Sadler’s radio had made no sound whatsoever. It was possible the concrete walls of the building were obstructing the signals. Or that the amount of fire traffic had made it difficult for the repeater tower to pick up their message and relay it. Sadler tried twice more with no better results.

“You want to keep on?” Sadler asked.

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t know why those assholes walked out. When I find out who they are, I’m going to break their balls.”

The higher they went on the stairs, the hotter the smoke. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, they were on their bellies.

Thrusting their feet and free arms toward the center of the room, they proceeded along the right-hand wall.

“You sure this is where they said?” Sadler asked.

Finney was about to reply when Sadler slapped at his arm, kicked his helmet hard, and then pulled on him. At first he thought he was being assaulted, but Sadler was thrashing about the way a drowning man thrashed about. In order to not be pulled off balance, Finney reached out and grabbed some smoke, then finally grasped a metal bar on the wall. He held onto the bar on one side, Sadler on the other. A few moments later Sadler regained his balance and let go.

“Jesus Christ!” Sadler said.

“What happened?”

“Look at this shit.”

Finney couldn’t see anything but smoke. He placed his face within a foot of his battle lantern and discovered they were on a balcony. Though he couldn’t see the ground floor in the smoke, the drop-off was fourteen or fifteen feet.

“I almost went off!” Sadler said. “There’s no goddamned rail! Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“What about the victims?”

“Fuck the victims! They’re dead. Hey, anybody here? Hey, you assholes? Where are you? See? There’s no people. We’re getting our butts kicked for nothing.”

Fueled by fear and adrenaline, Sadler turned and headed back the way they’d come.

“We can’t leave,” Finney said.

Sadler spoke clearly and succinctly. “I’m going out. You coming with me?”

“I’m coming.”

49. THOUSANDS OF PIGS’ FEET

Moving with a recklessness he hadn’t displayed earlier, Sadler plunged down the stairs, and then, instead of hugging the walls, he proceeded directly through the open space toward their entry point. Finney couldn’t decide whether Sadler was angry or scared. Maybe both. He didn’t have time to think about what he was feeling, but he knew he was some kind of upset. They’d just left at least two people to die up on that mezzanine.

In short order they passed the door that had fire behind it and ran headlong into the two doors they’d kicked in to get into this section of the plant.

“Sombitch,” Sadler said. “Goddamned stupid sombitch.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Look at this bullshit! Sombitch door’s jammed.”

“It can’t be. We broke the lock.”

“Yeah? You try it.” The doors were as solid as if they were anchored on the other side by a large truck.

“Maybe these are the wrong doors?” Finney said.

“Not a chance.”

Had he been riding a ladder company, Finney would have used the axe on his belt to chop through, but he didn’t have an axe. They were rapidly running out of air, fire was eating its way through a door thirty feet behind them, the space they were in was superheated, they couldn’t see anything, and their original entrance point was locked.

In another minute they would be trapped by fire in this corridor.

Sadler continued pulling at the doors.

Then they both kicked at them, their feeble efforts a testament to how much strength they’d lost in the heat. “What happened?” Finney asked.

“I don’t know,” Sadler said, gasping for breath. “Something locked them after we went through.”

Sadler tried his radio but couldn’t get through.

Arrows of flame were already darting out over the doors behind them. Instead of taking the left wall as they had before, Sadler said, “This way,” and took the right. Finney couldn’t get over how Gary was mothering him.

The fire leaked quickly through the doors behind them, and began riding the wall above their heads, moving in great, screwlike twists toward the ceiling. As the amount of flame in the area grew, visibility got better.

When Finney spotted an unlocked door to their right, they entered a thirty-by-forty-foot room with a ceiling almost as tall as the room was wide. Smoke filled the upper portions of the space, but from five feet above their heads to the floor it was surprisingly clear. They spotted an exit on the far side of the room, a single door set into a heavy brick wall, locked and nailed shut.

Finney found a small bar on a workbench and began prying. After he’d worked fifteen seconds, Sadler took the bar out of his hands, his impatience signaling a reservoir of anxiety he never would have admitted to. Finney decided right then and there he was not working with Sadler again. He would transfer out of Twenty-six’s—if it took an act of Congress, he would transfer out. Sooner or later Sadler was going to get him killed. The thought occurred to him that if he did transfer, he might do it directly to the King County Jail.

It took Sadler sixty seconds to pry open the door.

Finney assumed from the amount of smoke on the other side that they were returning to the main warehouse. It was hotter after the relative calm of the closed room, and once again they could hear water streams beating against the outer walls.

For a split second Finney glimpsed a door on the wall directly behind Sadler in the smoke.

“Over there,” Finney said, walking forward. As he proceeded, Sadler ran not for the door, but directly at him, reaching him in two large strides, knocking him backward.

Finney tumbled back through the doorway, his bottle clanking on the concrete floor, the wind knocked out of his lungs, his hip and one elbow numb with pain. For a moment he felt as if he’d been struck by a bus.

“Goddamn it, Gary!”

Rolling onto his hands and knees, he took a moment or two to regain his senses before he realized Sadler was under a pile of burning debris. He felt the heat on his wrists as he frantically pulled the burning materials off his partner.

Several boards and one timber had fallen from somewhere above. They might have killed an unsuspecting Finney if Sadler hadn’t knocked him out of the way. When he turned and saw a pile of burning lumber teetering on a mezzanine over their heads, he half-carried, half-dragged Sadler out of the way. A hose stream from outside burst through a high window, forcing steam down on them. As the heat came down, Finney slipped and fell beside Sadler.

He became aware that he was lying on something, a lot of little somethings. Like ball bearings. He felt around with his gloved hand and then turned on the small flashlight on his chest strap—pigs’ feet, hundreds, thousands of pigs’ feet.

“Come on,” Finney said, receiving no answer. “Lieutenant?”

There was nothing more cumbersome than a man in full bunkers carrying another man in full bunkers. Sadler weighed 230 plus his 50 pounds of equipment. Finney knew it would be hard to drag him, next to impossible to carry him, but still he knelt and pulled him to a sitting position. When he had him almost standing, he threw his shoulder under his hips and folded his limp body across one shoulder. For a moment he thought rising from this half-crouch wasn’t possible, but with a great effort, he finally succeeded.

Breathing like a racehorse, he walked slowly, shakily, toward the wall where he’d seen the exit. At each step his legs threatened to buckle. How the hell did I get in this fix, Finney thought, as he tried to calm his breathing. I go to a big fire, the world caves in on me. Is it just me? Even as he had these thoughts, things began to get better. As it happened, he walked almost in a direct line to the outside door.

After he’d put Sadler down, he looked up and saw two firefighters nearby, both wearing backpacks and masks. He made sure they saw Sadler against the doorjamb and waited until they were approaching. Just before they reached him, Finney stepped back inside and lost himself in the smoke.