Vertical Burn (32 page)

68. CORPSES THAT BITE

Finney must have seemed like a leprechaun coming out of a hole.

“Who the hell are you?” said the one with the portable radio.

“Just the sonofabitch who’s going to get you out of this,” Finney replied, calling down the shaft for slack on the rope, then stepping out of the shaft.

A small portable television was set up on a desk in the lobby area, tuned to the same channel Kub had been watching downstairs. Faces heavy with incredulity, the two men stared at Finney.

They were with building security. They’d been trapped since the beginning, had used phones and their radios, but nobody had been able to give them a prognostication of their outcome or even any advice. In the beginning they thought about making a run down the stairs, but they’d hesitated and now the stairs were too hot.

The two men looked at one another. The one with the radio said, “Buddy, if you were a woman, I’d propose. What do you want us to do?”

“First, don’t propose. Second, help me find a place to tie off this rope. There are two more coming up.”

“We been watchin’ the news,” said the second man, who had a thick southern drawl.
Fire
sounded like
fur
. “You know there’s fire below us. There’s fire down around eighteen or twenty, and there’s another fire above us on fifty-four or -five. It was just on the TV.” He pronounced it
teeee-ve
. “I don’t get it. Fire below and above. How does it skip so many floors?”

Veins on the side of his face bulging like beetles, the man with the radio said, “It goes up the toilet holes.” He looked at Finney. “Right?”

Finney said, “Not in this case. These were set.”

It took Finney a minute to work the kinks out of his arms and back and neck. He turned his coat inside out to let it dry and set up an anchor for the rope. Kub would come up using the second of their three waist harnesses, sliding a couple of simple prusik knots along the rope as he went, the prusik clipped to his harness with carabiners. If anything happened, the mechanism of the prusik would hold him.

While Kub was climbing, Finney found some bottled water and explored.

Not surprisingly, both stairwell doors were hot to the touch. When he put on his gloves and opened the door to B, a balloon of black smoke rolled in on him, so hot he wondered if he’d burned his scalp. Without his bunking coat and helmet it had been a foolish thing to do.

The design of the trap was clear in Finney’s mind. Disable the sprinkler and standpipe system. Immobilize the elevators. Turn both stairwells into chimneys. Cripple escape, hamper firefighting, stand next to the IC, and give tainted advice. The fog had been an unexpected bonus.

After Kub reached forty, they rigged a hauling system for the equipment and hoisted all of it. Diana climbed the sixteen stories on the end of the rope, stopping at each carabiner and collecting it and the webbing Finney had used to fasten it to the rung.

When she stepped onto the floor, the security man without the accent said, “You’re a woman!”

“No shit,” said Diana. Finney could see she was getting tired and irritable.

“No, I meant . . .”

“She knows what you meant,” Finney said.

“No, I just meant a woman firefighter. You know, that’s great. A woman doing a man’s job. That’s just great.”

“It’s not a man’s job,” Diana said.

“That’s what I meant.”

Drinking bottled water Finney had scavenged from an office, Robert Kub came back through the lobby after reconnoitering. “The stairs are clearing.”

“They can’t be,” said Finney. “I just checked.”

“I think we can make it.”

When they went back together and looked, he knew Kub was right. In bunkers and breathing from an MSA, the stairs might just be bearable. Still, the higher they went the hotter it would get.

They donned their masks, pulled on their facepieces, tugged the rubber cheek straps tight, and loaded all the equipment bags and spare bottles onto their shoulders.

“What about us?” asked the security guard with the southern drawl.

“We’ll be back,” Finney said.

“Promise?”

“Thirty-four floors,” Kub said. “It’s going to be a bitching climb.”

“You’ve got my word. Just keep the door closed. Closed but not locked. Somebody else might need to get in here.”

As they began the journey, Finney wondered why the air was suddenly clearing. Had the building engineers pressurized the stairs, or had somebody closed a door on a fire floor below? Or was somebody down there using gas-powered fans? The stairs weren’t clear of smoke, they were simply cooler than they had been—he couldn’t feel any breeze that indicated they were being ventilated. Unless the gases in the stairs had been vented at the top, the higher they went, the hotter it would get.

Six floors up, they stumbled over a pair of dead men. Kub took off his gloves and checked for life. “Ouch,” he said.

“What happened?” Finney asked. “He bite you?”

“His watch was hot.”

“Don’t touch the steel railing with your bare hand either.”

They were on fifty-seven before the warning bell on Kub’s air tank began ringing. After traveling another two flights, Finney’s went off, too. Hoping to squeeze them dry, they ran the bottles another couple of floors; then, as they were changing, Diana’s bell went off.

After the bottle change they climbed steadily to sixty-five without stopping. Though they were each seventeen pounds lighter, they’d inhaled plenty of smoke, had climbed fifty-eight stories, and were near the breaking point—Finney was going to be surprised if they made it. His limbs inside his bunking suit felt as if they’d been dipped in hot oil, his thighs wet and slippery, his arms sliding around inside the coat. His neck was cramping. He had a tick in one cheek, and his eyes stung from the salt.

Near seventy-four, Kub’s warning bell began ringing again.

The door to seventy-four was locked. Of course.

Before Finney could bang on it, the door opened and a small Asian woman in a simple black dress and too much mascara gave him a wide-eyed look and waved for him to enter. “Yes?” she said, as if afraid he wanted to sell her magazines.

Seventy-four was well-lit and relatively cool inside. Working their way out of their backpacks, helmets, and coats, the three were quickly besieged by a crowd, the men in suits or tuxedos, the women in dresses appropriate for a wedding party. Still breathing heavily, Kub slumped to the floor and onto his back. Finney and Diana followed suit. Finney felt as if he might not ever sit up again. The ceiling began spinning. He couldn’t catch his breath. His underwear was soaked, one ear stopped up with a constant flow of perspiration. The tick in his cheek felt like a small bird trying to hatch out of an egg. After a few moments, he felt as if he were glued to the floor. Diana lay next to him, Kub somewhere above his head.

“I’m beat,” Kub said.

“Me, too,” said Finney.

Diana sighed deeply.

For a while everybody clamored at once. When it calmed, one of the building security men leaned over Finney. He had wiry hair that had probably been red in his younger years but was mostly gray now, a lined face, and compelling brown eyes that wouldn’t let Finney look away. Long hairs grew out of his ears and nostrils. “What’s going on, partner?”

“How about you give me an update first?” Finney asked, his throat raw from smoke. He sounded like Tallulah Bankhead, cigarette larynx.

“Sure. According to the TV there’s a couple of fires down low. They got control of one and then went higher and found another. There’s a third one burning somewhere around fifty-five or sixty. The last half hour or so our air has been getting smokier.”

“You have a plan?” It was Patterson Cole peering over the security man’s shoulder. Cole was the last person Finney expected to see here.

“I have a plan,” Finney said, sitting up on his elbows. Cole looked like an actor, a look-alike playing the part of an old man. But it was Cole all right, his sidekick in the bow tie hovering beside him.

Finney explained that they’d brought ropes and three climbing harnesses and had been planning to lower people down the side of the building to the roof on sixty. Now they had decided they would try the elevator shafts instead. It would take time, but it could be done. They could lower people using a pulley and the brake rack they’d brought along. He and Diana could rig it in five minutes. The air in the elevator shafts was still breathable. It was probably better than the air outside the building.

Several minutes later, the three of them reluctantly climbed to their feet, groaning as they stretched damaged muscles and felt chafed skin where their loads had dug in and where they’d been burned. Finney’s wounds from the Bowman Pork fire were oozing.

With the assistance of the security people, they opened the elevator doors and set up a rope and anchor system. One of the guards had rock-climbing experience and volunteered to go first. Knowing he was fresher than they were, Finney agreed. With the help of his two friends on forty, he would set up a receiving system. Finney, Kub, and Moore would send people down in the three harnesses they’d brought up, recycling the harnesses back by rope. It wasn’t going to be particularly elegant, but once the system was running, they could refine it on the fly. There were, by head count, 189 people to lower, plus the two on forty. There might also be firefighters trapped somewhere, but if so, Finney hadn’t heard about them.

Finney used his portable radio to advise Columbia Command where they were and what they were doing. When he received no reply, he sent the transmission again. After a few moments he heard Reese asking the dispatcher, “Is there somebody on our channel? We’re getting some odd radio traffic. Who’s on channel one?”

Finney keyed his mike and said, “This is John Finney. We have a crew of three on floor seventy-four with ropes and harnesses. We’re going to send people down the elevator shaft to forty.”

“Do not be sending people down without ropes. Repeat. Do not be sending people down without ropes.”

“We have ropes.”

“Clear the channel,” Reese said. “We’ve got fire traffic here. Repeat. Clear the channel.” After their conversation, Reese called Division Sixteen and asked whether anybody had gone up the stairs. Division Sixteen, who may or may not have been the same captain they’d chanced upon earlier, replied, “Negative. It’s too hot in the stairwells for anybody to get past our level. Repeat. The stairwells are not usable at this time.”

They would be receiving no help from below.

69. THE BALLROOM DANCER

Almost immediately upon the arrival of the firefighters, the people on the floor separated into cliques, the family of the young bride in one corner, the family of the groom in another. Most of the staff and hired help congregated in the kitchen area in back by the freight elevator.

Off in a corner, the top of Patterson Cole’s head was visible over a couple of shorter security men he’d kept by his side.

His sidekick, a small, stumpy man with a soft neck that overflowed his collar, broke away from the group and towed the older man across the room, shadowing Finney.

They’d set up the rigging. Diana was managing the lowering operation, and Kub was getting people into harnesses, each teaching their job to others. Finney was examining the system, checking knots and trying to figure out if there was anything they’d missed. He’d given his speech; he didn’t know whether this was going to work or not, didn’t know if these people would make it all the way down to forty or not, didn’t know how tenable forty would be by now if they did. Should the security man they were lowering run into trouble, they would haul him back up.

“Sir? Sir?” It was Cole’s yes-man. His suit had been tailored to make his pear-shaped body look leaner. He had pale, wet skin and tiny silver eyes that were delicate and set too close together.

“What is it?”

“Norris Radford. My name’s Norris Radford. This is my boss, Patterson Cole. We need to talk. In private.”

“Right here is fine,” Finney said.

Nervously looking around, Radford said, “Some fool saw
The Towering Inferno
last week. They drew numbers in the movie to determine what order to go in, so we drew numbers. Mine is going to put me at the tail end of this Chinese dragon. Mr. Cole’s is even higher than mine. There’s no way we’re going to make it before the fire reaches here.”

“Things should move along pretty quickly,” Finney said.

“I don’t see how. The television people are saying it’s climbing at the rate of thirty minutes a floor. It’s on sixty now, and it’ll take twenty minutes to lower each of us . . . you can do the math.”

“First off, I doubt the fire is climbing at thirty minutes a floor. Second off, the first few people we lower will take longer than the rest, but nobody is going to take twenty minutes.”

“Whatever it takes, it won’t be fast enough.”

“Sure it will.” Finney made a point of sounding more certain than he was, if not for Radford, then for those bystanders listening in.

Finney knew this was like trying to swim a horse across a swift river. You might make it. You might not. Whatever you did, you didn’t stop in midstream to calculate the prospects. Once you launched out, you kept moving and you didn’t think about anything except the opposite shore. Besides, trapped or not, these two were part of the machine that had initiated this. He’d just that minute recognized Radford as the little bastard at Bowman Pork who’d told them there was a family in the warehouse. He wanted to beat the tar out of him, but there were too many witnesses and not enough time.

“You weren’t listening to the mathematics,” Radford said. “We’re not going to make it.”

“If you’re not, I’m not, because I’m not leaving until everyone’s down.”

“But you people have those oxygen tanks.”

“Compressed air. And they’re almost empty. If the rest of these people are willing to go with their numbers, you should be, too.”

“They don’t have a choice. We do.”

“Oh?”

Radford looked at his boss, who, until now, had been letting Radford do all the talking. Cole took a deep breath, scratched an ear with an arthritic finger, and said, “You take us down on the elevator. You’ll have to keep it on the QT. Otherwise we could cause a stampede.”

“Even if we could call a car to this floor, I wouldn’t get in an elevator under these conditions.”

“Why? It’s dangerous? What’s more dangerous than burning to death?”

“Mr. Cole, I think you started this fire. Or had it started.” He turned to Radford. “And you were at Bowman Pork. You’re the one who set us up. They gave you numbers? Keep the numbers. If it was up to me, I’d throw you both out the window.”

When Finney began to walk away, Radford tried to grip Finney’s bare shoulder, still slick with perspiration. Then he stepped ahead of Finney and danced backward, carefully wiping Finney’s sweat off his hand with an embroidered handkerchief. Finney had a feeling from his intricate foot movements that he was a fair ballroom dancer.

“Let’s make a trade. I’ll give you information, and you give us lower numbers. My eyes are already bloodshot. Can you see this?” Using his thumb, he pulled on his right eyelid.

Finney addressed his next statement to Patterson Cole, who was following them. “No trades. You killed my partner.”

Cole said, “How do you figure I killed your partner?”

“You had somebody set the fire at Leary Way. Bowman Pork, too.”

“You’ve lost two partners?” the old man asked.

“That’s right. And you’re responsible directly or indirectly for both.”

“I’ll pay them. The family. Whatever you think they need. I’ll write his wife a check right now. Both wives. I’ll write you a check. Thirty thousand each sound okay? No, that’s a little on the cheap side. A hundred? You’re looking at a man who still saves used tin foil in a drawer. Let me think. A widow. Lost her husband. Your friend. A million?”

“The price isn’t for the widow. The price is for your life, isn’t it?” Finney and the old man stared at each other. Finney didn’t think Cole and Radford were going to die up here, but he didn’t mind if they both believed they were. A little bit of hell was just what they needed. “Tell you what,” Finney said. “You go out to the cemetery and you dig up Bill and then you dig up Gary and you breathe life back into them. You do that and I’ll get you out of here before these others. A couple of walking, talking corpses would put you right at the head of the line. You like to play God. Go ahead. Bring ’em back.”

Finney turned and walked away.