Vertical Burn (34 page)

72. NEVER TAKE AN ELEVATOR IN A FIRE

The building security man—the rock climber they’d dropped down the elevator shaft on a line—had been given several tasks, one of which was to check out floor sixty as he passed it. He radioed back with just a trace of a Bronx accent that there were still a few small fires on that floor and that everything was black and stinking. Nothing was intact. He didn’t see any people or bodies. Many of the outside windows were missing. Then he radioed that he could feel a slipstream of air coming at him from outside on that floor. Most of the heat seemed to be residual, not dynamic, if those were the right terms, he said, and he believed the floor was now habitable. What did they want him to do?

“Stay there,” Finney said, on the radio. “Set up to start receiving people.” The fire wouldn’t revisit sixty; the fuel load had already been consumed. People might get burned if they touched hot metal or tried to walk barefoot over the smoldering carpets, but they weren’t going to die there. Also, there was a roof on sixty, and it would be airy.

Even as Finney was speaking, three firefighters who’d been trapped on the lower floors showed up on sixty and offered to help. They would set up a receiving station that would, after the first wave descended, be staffed with rotating personnel self-selected from among the rescued.

The first three civilians were outfitted in waist harnesses, secured to the main line at intervals, then sent down the ladder in the shaft. They soon had three more people headed down in harnesses, rope handlers selected from the security details. Kub was the rescue group leader.

As he scouted seventy-four again, Finney confronted a dozen agitated workers in the space near the freight elevator. A perspiring man in a waiter’s outfit stepped forward and said, “They didn’t make it. We heard screaming in the shaft.” Others, nodding their heads and shivering, seconded his words.

“They didn’t make what?” Finney asked. “Don’t tell me somebody used the elevator?”

“A lot of somebodies,” said the waiter.

“How long ago?”

“Two minutes, maybe three. We heard the machinery stop, and there was all this screaming.”

“Like a bunch of cats in a box,” somebody volunteered. Several people gave the speaker dirty looks.

Finney keyed his portable radio and asked Columbia Command whether anybody had arrived in the freight elevator. Reese and company had been studiously ignoring his transmissions all night, so he wasn’t surprised when he received no answer now.

“We heard screaming,” said the waiter. “I know we heard screaming.”

“But it stopped,” said one of the waitresses, a ribbon of hope in her voice.

“It took a while,” said a guest from the wedding party.

“They must have stopped on a fire floor,” Diana said, glancing over her shoulder at Finney as she pried the doors open and peered down the shaft. “I see them. Our guys are on sixty. The elevator must be between us and them.”

Some of the men and most of the women were crying. All of these people had fought to be on that first trip. One man kept repeating that his fiancé was in the elevator. “She’s not dead,” he sobbed. “She’s not.”

“We’ll go down and check it out,” Diana said, looking at Finney.

Finney gave her a grim look. They both knew the most dangerous thing you could do in a fire was ride an elevator. Once the doors opened on a fire floor, the electric eye wouldn’t allow them to close again.

While the others followed, Finney and Diana walked back to where they’d left their bunking coats and MSA backpacks. Just before they pulled on their facepieces and stepped into stairwell B, Kub caught Finney’s eye and gave him a thumbs-up.

Inside of thirty seconds the temperature in the stairwell siphoned off most of Finney’s remaining strength, fingers of heat stealing up under his suit to tickle his arms and legs. His burns throbbed. Already his legs were shaky.

“Too hot?” he asked, half-hoping Diana would say yes.

“No.”

Finney led. “You think any of them are alive?”

“No. But we need to check.”

Standing in the elevator shaft, they’d both inhaled the distinctive odor of burned clothing, singed hair, roasted flesh.

Physically, the descent was easier than the ascent, partly because they weren’t doing as much work, carrying no equipment except the Halligan and flathead axe, because they were descending instead of ascending, but mostly because the heat decreased with each floor.

After descending ten flights, they used the Halligan to force a door on sixty-five and found heavy smoke down to their waists. They used the Halligan again to force the doors to the freight elevator and found smoke pouring out of the shaft. They heard talk coming from above, but nothing from the blackness below. Finney knew the car was maybe three floors down from here, certainly no farther.

There had been no heat in the shaft they were using for the rescue operation, nor had there been much heat in this shaft when Diana had looked at it upstairs, yet now there was a great deal of heat and black smoke. The smoke stunk as bad as any Finney had ever tasted.

Back in the stairs, they heard voices in the stairwell, masked firefighters. It was hard to tell how far away they were, or whether they were above or below. Whether they were approaching or retreating.

Finney said, “Reese must have sent a team up.”

“God, I hope so.”

On sixty-three they pried the door and found heavy black smoke rolling at them like a series of huge black balls. They closed the door.

“Ten minutes ago this wouldn’t have caused any screaming,” Finney said. “This is all new. They’ve got to be on the next one down. Sixty-two. Or sixty-one.”

The door to sixty-two was hot enough that they decided there was fire behind it.

On sixty-one, most of the fire had already passed through, blasting out the windows, gutting offices, leaving a desk melted into a lump on the carpeted floor, flame limply dancing off it. As they walked onto the floor, melting black plastic from overhead pipes oozed onto their helmets and shoulders until they began to look like leopards.

“Look,” Diana said, “why don’t you go intercept the group in the stairs? We don’t dare miss them. I’ll go look for the elevator. We’ll meet back here. Any problems, we’ll call each other on the tactical channel.”

“I can’t leave you.”

“We don’t have enough air to do everything together.”

“You’re right. Okay.” They switched their radios to channel seven, and he went back to the stairs. It was never a good idea to separate in a fire building, but they were depleting their bottles rapidly and lives were at stake.

Finney thought he heard the distinctive clank of spare air bottles knocking together below. This group might be ten floors below, or fifteen. If they had instructions to do a search, they could vanish onto a floor at any moment.

He inspected the gauge on his waist-belt. A fully charged bottle had 4,500 pounds of compressed air; he had 1,400, probably not even enough to get back to the wedding party.

Carrying the Halligan/flathead axe combination in one hand, he descended slowly, stopping from time to time to quiet his breathing and to listen. He counted the landings, sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, and continued to hear sounds of movement and conversation below. The group climbed at what seemed like an excruciatingly slow pace.

Wanting to be refreshed and able to make sense when they reached him, Finney paused on fifty-one and turned on his flashlight. It occurred to him that his thoughts were growing fuzzier by the minute. He knew he was in the incipient stages of heat exhaustion, because his mind was beginning to wander. Logical connections from one idea to another didn’t seem to matter anymore. He went for long periods without thinking at all. Soon the hallucinations would begin.

Judging by the sounds of their MSAs, there were either three or four firefighters.

One was a floor ahead of the others, and as he approached fifty-one, Finney met him and peered into his facepiece. He wore an orange captain’s helmet. The face, what he could see of it, was familiar, but it took some seconds to place it. “Tony? What are you doing here?”

“Where are the others?”

“Upstairs. Boy, am I glad to see you.”

Finney wanted to ask if Reese had sent them or if they’d come on their own, but he was too tired.

Tony said, “Come on, let’s go.” Even as he spoke, the next man in line arrived. With his brother tugging on his arm, Finney shone his light on the next man: Marion Balitnikoff. He was carrying a pistol.

A third firefighter came up the steps below Balitnikoff, and as he arrived, Balitnikoff said something over his shoulder. He was still talking as Finney shoved Balitnikoff, sending both firefighters sprawling backward.

Finney turned and ran.

Tony yelled, “No, wait.”

A gunshot echoed in the stairwell.

Another.

73. TI-I-I-IME IS ON MY SI-IDE—SING IT

Finney rounded the corner and sprinted up the half-flight, then swung himself around the next turnaround on the banister and raced up another. A second shot rang out, and he felt a dull thud against the air bottle on his back. The sounds of hurried movement behind him grew louder.

Exhausted as he was, Finney never would have guessed he could move this rapidly. He knew the adrenaline propelling his speed wouldn’t last long. He’d been near the end of his rope when he met them. He counted the floors carefully to make sure he didn’t accidentally lead them to Diana.

The sounds of their boots, the steel of Balitnikoff’s pistol on the railing, the heavy breathing, all these sounds in a stairwell that had been tomblike minutes earlier, combined to spook Finney.

Though he was gaining a couple of steps each floor, his thighs were rapidly losing strength and felt hollow and trembly. It wouldn’t be long before his legs gave out entirely.

He’d met them on fifty-one. And he’d gone two floors, three . . . He was on fifty-four and gaining. They had to be almost an entire floor behind now.

By fifty-six he found himself using the railing, working his arm and shoulder muscles as much as possible, trying to distribute the workload among various muscle groups, lest one fail before the others. He wanted to drop the axe and Halligan, but that would only give them encouragement. He felt as if his lungs were on fire.

Each floor seemed to take forever, and each time he reached the top of a half-flight, he expected to be shot.

For a few moments he considered stopping and setting up an ambush, but the masks were loud, and his sounded like a megaphone. If he stopped, they would easily home in on his breathing and shoot him in the smoke.

On fifty-nine, he began to slow involuntarily. He’d reached some sort of maximum overdrive, and no matter what was behind, he couldn’t maintain the tempo. On sixty he slowed even more. They were now one full flight behind.

He bypassed sixty-one; Diana was not on the landing.

He bypassed sixty-two and went through the door he’d jimmied earlier on sixty-three. Most of the doors were locked, but he and Diana had pried this one.

His five-minute warning bell hadn’t begun ringing yet, but once it did, he’d be the belled cat.

He’d gone thirty feet beyond the door on sixty-three before he realized that the fire had progressed significantly since he and Diana were there; the smoke that had been boiling around on the ceiling had become flame, an orange cloud sweeping across the upper portion of the lobby area from the direction Finney figured was the Fifth Avenue side of the building. Keeping low, he crawled toward it.

Most of the doors were locked, each office another buffer to the fire.

Rolling onto his side, he kicked open the door on a nearby suite of offices, scrambled through the doorway on his belly, and closed it. It was cooler in here. There was smoke, lots of it, but as yet no fire. He still couldn’t understand what Tony was doing with Balitnikoff. Behind, in the lobby, he heard voices. Surely his brother wasn’t going to let these bastards kill him. He listened as they moved around in the heat, speaking to each other in low tones.

He was in a reception area. Dense black smoke had banked up on the ceiling to a depth of five or six feet. A calendar on the wall had rolled into twelve separate tongues. The windows were black with smoke tar. Kneeling, he waited with the axe—his plan to peg the first one who came through the door and try for a gun.

Time was on his side, he thought. “Ti-i-i-ime is on my side,” he sang softly to himself. “Ti-i-i-”

After a few moments, his warning bell began clanking, and he realized he was an idiot. Time wasn’t on his side; it was on theirs. They had the air. All they had to do was wait outside the door until his was used up.

74. A SHORT PRAYER FOR THE FALLEN

2111 HOURS

Leaving her heavy firefighting gloves on, Diana waded into the mass of bodies. About half the party had spilled out of the elevator; the other half was a spaghetti snarl of bent limbs, scorched skin, and melted clothing. Trying not to step on any bodies, she searched for signs of life. As much as she wanted to avoid it, the melted mattress of humanity was too closely packed together for her to move without her boots crushing something. They were all dead. Everybody she saw.

Less than fifteen minutes ago she’d been upstairs talking to these same people. Against the wall was the short waitress who’d been chewing bubble gum. In the center sitting up, one side of his face burned black, was the heavyset chef.

In front of the elevator, she’d encountered the bodies of two males who’d made a run for the stairs. One almost gained the stairwell entrance but had apparently been cut off by flame and more or less barbecued in place. Judging by how much more progress he’d made than the others, his force of will must have been tremendous. She had to admire that. The second male was sprawled on his face forty feet from the elevator, one shoe still smoking, the sock melted onto his leg. All the other bodies were either in the elevator or within a dozen feet of it.

Diana said a short prayer, pleading with God to let her find someone alive. Anyone. Just one.

It was a large elevator, the walls half-metal, half-wood, scarred and dented from years of careless baggage handlers. Even though she knew it wasn’t the case, the scratches and indentations presented themselves as the work of a large animal trying to claw its way out in every direction but the door. The effect was disconcerting. Most of the clothing on the top of the pile had been melted or singed off. People didn’t realize how flammable modern synthetics were. Among the corpses, Diana recognized another waitress, a petite brunette with glasses who had expressed the intention of applying to become a firefighter. At the time Diana wondered how she could be strong enough, but she’d dispensed encouragement anyway and, in fact, had her phone number on a scrap of paper in her bunking coat pocket.

Working her way through the bodies, Diana spoke through her tears, “Anybody here? Anybody?”

After examining every corpse in the car, Diana found several near the bottom who might have escaped the worst of the heat but who had expired of smoke inhalation, nostrils and mouths ringed with soot, eyes staring, lungs wheezing when she moved their bodies.

There were two layers on top of him, which was the only reason he’d survived, that and the fact that his lips were pressed against a hole the size of a rivet-head on the floor of the car through which he had been able to suck clean air. A portion of his jacket collar had melted, and there were burns on the back of his head and on one leg, but other than that, little of the real force of the heat seemed to have bruised him.

He sobbed and fought when she tried to pull him away from the hole in the floor.

“Come with me,” she said. “There’s air out here.”

“Give me some from your bottle,” he said, without looking up.

“That won’t work. You come out or you die here. Your choice.”

He was wobbly and made a squeamish show of not touching the others with any part of himself or his clothing, even though it wasn’t possible to move without doing so. As he moved, he reached down and tried to pick up a briefcase off the floor.

“Come on,” Diana said, tugging his coat sleeve. “This isn’t an airline. We don’t stop for luggage.”

The briefcase blew apart, turds of blackened cash fluttering across the bodies. He stooped, picked up a single intact bill, stuffed it into his pocket and said, “Christ. That’s a shame. All that money.”

“Isn’t it, though?” she mocked, as she escorted him to the stairwell.

“Don’t look at me. It sure wasn’t my idea to take the elevator. I told them not to.”

“I’m sure you did.”

She marched him down the smoky stairs.

Sixty was cooler, a burnt-out hulk of a floor, the steel girders of the building showing through like a bra strap through a torn dress, everything else filigreed with tendrils of smoke as if somebody had just that second snuffed out a million candles. There was fresh air from broken-out windows on this floor. She could hear the rope-handling team deep inside the floor. Her victim would recuperate here and join the others coming down the elevator shaft on ropes.

Diana went back to the stairs to look for Finney.