3000 Degrees (18 page)

Linda turned on the TV a few minutes after seven o'clock, but only for background noise while she washed dishes in the sink. She was humming to herself, spiced with a dab of holiday cheer. After Joe had left for the station, she'd spent the late afternoon and early evening addressing Christmas cards, eighty-five of them. It was a splendid card, a photograph of Everett and Emily at Disney World, standing in front of oversize cartoon characters, Pluto, Goofy, Mickey, and Donald all cast in ice-white plastic. On her head, Emily had a pair of white mouse ears. They'd spent eight days there before Thanksgiving, ran through seven thousand dollars. Linda wasn't sure if they could afford it. Looking at the photo a few weeks later, she didn't care. “Wishing You Holiday Happiness,” the card read. “Love, Joe, Linda, Everett, and Emily.”

She took a break at about six to feed the kids, three of them because Everett's friend Dan was over. They were in the basement rumpus room, rumpusing. After she finished the dishes, Linda would put Emily to bed, address a few more cards, then ride herd on the boys, get them to settle down enough to go to sleep.

She wiped a sponge across a knife, cleaned specks of butter from the blade. Linda heard a voice over her shoulder, distant and tinny. A reporter on the television. The sentences sounded like fragments, phrases, her ears picking up scattered facts.
Four-alarm fire.
She wheeled toward the screen.
Worcester Cold Storage.
She saw a spectacular sight: a black square, the warehouse, dominated the screen. At the bottom, above the cab of a firetruck, a patch of tangerine light tumbled from the lower windows. More orange played across the top of the screen, but a different shade, muted, hidden by a mushroom of smoke. Embers, bright yellow that faded to white-hot ash, twirled in the sky.

Two firefighters missing.

Her hands went numb, then her arms. Her knees wobbled. Her chest seized, her insides calcified, brittle, waiting to shatter. Her heart beat once, twice. She felt it, the collapse, everything from her neck to her hips—her lungs, her stomach, her very soul—disintegrating, dropping, shards tearing and ripping.

Joe was dead. She knew it, believed it.

She thought of the brotherhood. Joe was always going on about the goddamned brotherhood. He was the youngest of ten, three girls and seven boys. “Like you don't have enough brothers already,” she used to tease him. “You had to go out and get a thousand more.” Joe would laugh. But he'd die for the brotherhood. He knew that. Linda knew that.

Her eyes stung, the picture blurry now through tears pooling in her eyes. Then Emily was at her side, reaching for her hand. “Mommy, what's wrong?”

Linda blinked, squeezed the tears back, wiped at her face. “Oh, there's just a big fire,” she said. She looked at her little girl for a moment. Reflexively, she snapped off the television. “Why don't you go brush your teeth,” she said. “C'mon, it's time to get ready for bed.”

She followed Emily up the stairs and steered her toward the bathroom. Linda went into her and Joe's bedroom and turned on the television. The images were surreal, the stuff of nightmares and Hollywood. The wide shots revealed the immensity of the blaze: the interstate underlining the
WORCESTER COLD STORAGE AND WAREHOUSE CO
. sign, giving the building scale, which in turn put the fire and smoke blowing out the top in awesome perspective. The flames leaped at least thirty feet above the roof, then tumbled over on themselves, balls of fire rolling into the night. Yet the tight shots were worse, the zooms in through the few open windows, the ones on the second floor where the fire was contained. There were sheets of flame, all of them oddly horizontal, luminous orange waves outlined by a golden brown. She couldn't see what was actually burning, no dark shapes, nothing from which the fire appeared to take root. It was as if the flames were independent entities, erupting only from air, a thousand of them, writhing together, fighting for space and fuel.

She pulled her knees into her chest. Her eyes began to sting again. She blinked. A tear dripped down her cheek.

She heard Emily in the hallway, then in the bedroom next to her. “Mommy …”

“Oh, Em …” Another tear fell. Emily had Joe's eyes, his mouth. Oh, he'd spoil her one of these days. His pretty princess. That was Emily's favorite game, Pretty, Pretty Princess. Joe would play it with her, put a tiara on his head, clip on earrings, wrench plastic rings onto his thick fingers and bright bangles onto his wrists, drape strings of big plastic beads around his neck and over his belly.

Linda swallowed hard, wiped her eyes. “There's a really bad fire, Em. A really, really bad fire.”

Emily crawled onto the bed with her mother, snuggled into her arms. Linda tried not to weep, watching the television, praying for a sign.

A fireman cut through the live shot. She recognized the face, the heavy eyebrows, the Victorian mustache. Sully. Her whole body twitched, a spasm of joyous relief. “Look, look,” she said, pointing at the screen.

“What?” There was worry in Emily's voice. Sully was gone from the shot.

“Oh, honey, it's not going to be Daddy. I saw his lieutenant. I just saw his lieutenant. And Daddy can't be in the building without his lieutenant. Daddy's going to be okay.”

T
he stairwell was sweltering, almost painfully hot, the smoke bubbling at more than 300 degrees. John Sullivan stood his ground on the fifth-floor landing, fought against the scorching draft that raced up from below, black gases rushing up through the open bulkhead. He yelled for five minutes, banged on the railing, made as much noise as he could, a sonic beacon to guide the men trapped inside.

When he'd gone up after Tom Spencer and Tim Jackson, he'd misheard the transmission. He thought men from Ladder 4 were lost. At eighteen minutes after seven, he got on the radio. “Engine 3 to Ladder 4, Captain Dolan.”

“Ladder 4 answering.”

“Chief, I'm in the doorway.” Wrong rank. Sully corrected himself. “I mean, Captain, I'm in the doorway on the fifth floor.”

Ten seconds passed. Captain Dolan was trying to decipher the message. “Chief,” he said, “who's in the doorway at the fifth floor? Command, they're calling Ladder 4. We're not … We're on the third floor.”

“Are you still looking for the door?” Sully asked. He wasn't sure if he should stay on the fifth or drop to the third. “Captain, are you still looking for the doorway out?”

Jack Fenton cut in, called Sully. “Command to Engine 3, Lieutenant Sullivan.”

“Chief, this is Engine 3. Ladder 4 was looking for someone in the doorway. Are they all set?”

Dolan got back on the air. “It was Ladder 2, not Ladder 4.”

“Okay, ten-four, Cap.” Damn. Did Ladder 2 get out? He hadn't heard any more broadcasts from Spencer, nothing to indicate he was either still in trouble or safely down. Sully knew he couldn't last much longer in those conditions. He was already running low on air. He had to retreat.

At 7:20, he started down the stairs. “Engine 3 is coming out,” he said into his radio. He wanted to make sure the brass knew where he was, didn't send anyone in looking for him.

He came out the Arctic Street side of the building. The heat from his gear rose into the December air, condensed, surrounded him in steam that looked like smoke, only colder and whiter. He turned the corner onto Franklin, passed in front of one of the television cameras recording the scene, walked briskly toward his truck parked under the highway for a fresh air tank. The cold night felt good on his face.

The air tanks were on the back of Engine 3. He grabbed one, then counted how many were left. All of them, except the first five his men had strapped on before they went in the first time. Jay and Joe hadn't come out for a second one. Sully realized he'd lost track of them, that he hadn't seen either one since he told Jay to shut down the truck.

His throat seized. Sully had been so focused on finding Paul and Jerry and then leading Ladder 2—what he thought was Ladder 4—to safety that he'd let his own men get away from him. He trusted Jay, because Jay was a damn good fireman. Jay would take care of Joe. But he was their lieutenant. A lieutenant is always supposed to know where his men are.

Sully lurched around the truck, jogged back toward the warehouse. He fixated on one thought: he had to find Jay and Joe. He had to see them, know they were all right.

T
he fire was winning, advancing, claiming the warehouse floor by floor. The flames were still pinned down, men with great streams of water beating them back, containing the worst of the inferno to the center of the building. But nothing could stop the heat, even slow it down. The sixth floor had been impenetrable for almost thirty minutes, a broiling black oven. The coats and pants firemen wore were heat-resistant, but nothing could protect a man from 400 degrees of damp heat. His skin would begin to roast, and his lungs would wheeze, gasping hot oxygen, his throat clutching with each scorching breath. Even for men desensitized to extreme temperatures, inured to the pain, functioning in such an environment was physically impossible. The body simply refused to respond to signals from the brain, which would be distorted by dehydration and disorientation anyway.

The fourth and fifth floors had been lost soon after the sixth. Men fought their way up the stairs, the now-opened windows offering only the slightest relief, making the journey possible if still excruciating. But they couldn't push more than a few feet past the doorways.

Bob Mansfield was back at the bottom of the stairs, a fresh tank strapped to his back, waiting to be rotated back up. Mike McNamee pointed at him, Charlie Gallagher from Ladder 5, Tom Dwyer from Rescue 1, and another man whose soot-smeared face he didn't recognize. “Go to the third floor,” Mike told them. He looked each man hard in the eye as he spoke, as if he were studying them, looking into their heads, making sure they understood. “Stay together and stay on the ropes. Get out before your low-air alarms go off.”

Bob let the chief probe his eyes. He was scared, knew what he was going into. But Mike's stare, the cool resolve in his voice, took the edge off Bob's nerves. “If he can be calm,” Bob told himself, “if he can get through this, so can I.”

Tommy Dwyer led. He slipped past Mike and into the stairwell, three men behind him. They could see at first, climbing the first flight of stairs. At the second floor, their heads disappeared into the smoke, the cloud banking down, swallowing them step by step. Just beyond the landing, the man in front of Bob vanished completely. He knew he was there only because he could feel him on the rope.

They regrouped at the third floor, double-checked that all four of them were together. Tommy felt for the rope, found it tied to the railing. He held it up, let each man behind him grab on. That was their lifeline, the thin strand that would save their lives. “All right,” he yelled. “Stay close. When I say go, we go.”

They stepped through the doorway and dropped to their knees. Bob felt the heat slam into him, like the concussion from a large bomb only steady, a constant push instead of a single pulse. The four of them edged forward. Bob thought he was melting or exploding or both. For a minute or maybe five—time was a blur—they shuffled along the floor. The temperature seemed to rise each inch farther in.

“We can't get in there,” Tommy yelled over his shoulder. “It's just too bad. Back it out, back it out.”

The four men bailed out, retreated down the stairs. At the bottom, Tommy began to brief Mike, tell him how much more territory they'd lost. Ten more men were gathered around him, jaws clenched, eyes grim. They were stacked up at the door, waiting to go back up, almost demanding to be let in.

Bob knew no one was going to make it up the stairs. He grabbed Charlie's arm, jerked his head toward the loading dock. “Let's go to the roof,” he said.

Charlie followed him to Ladder 5, which was parked on Arctic Street, its stick extended over the cab and up to the roof. They found a rope, climbed to the top, stepped on the roof. Black smoke blew out of the stairwell bulkhead. They ducked past it. Bob straightened the rope, tied it off to a post. He noticed Charlie staring at the parapet where the firewall poked up.

“Bob,” he said, “look at that.”

The roof was bubbling more violently now, the tar rising in boils, each bursting and settling back to the pitch. A bad sign. The heat below was intense, rising to the temperature at which metals are smelted. The roof was going to give out, melt away, let the flames burst through. They didn't have much time before they would have to get back to the ground.

“All right, Charlie,” Bob said. “Hang on to the rope. This is just like in diving, okay? Tug it once to ask if I'm okay. One tug means I am. Two tugs means send more rope. Three tugs means I'm in deep shit, come and get me.”

Charlie nodded that he understood. Bob fixed his mask to his face and walked into the smoke, felt for the stairs. The force of the fire was worse from this angle. The smoke came out like a hard wind, a hurricane of soot and ash and vaporized petroleum, and the sound was deafening. He thought of a locomotive, imagined an iron engine barreling up the stairs, no headlamp to tell him it was coming, taking dead aim to crush him.

Bob went slowly, feeling for the stairs, clinging to the rope with one hand, carrying a flathead ax in the other. He made it down one set of risers, turned ninety degrees to the next, then traversed the third to the landing. He felt his way around. The rope jerked in his hand. Not a tug, not Charlie checking on him. It was stuck, tangled somewhere behind him. Bob backtracked, following the rope until he found the snag. He loosened it, pulled some more rope down from above. He'd lost time. How much, he wasn't sure.

It took him precious more seconds to descend to the fifth floor. When he found the door, he swung his ax against the railing, steel against steel, a deep clanging. He stopped swinging, listened. He heard Charlie hollering, “Bob, keep doing that. They can hear you. Keep doing that!”

Bob wound up again and swung, got into a rythym.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
His pores were screaming, dumping sweat. His chest ached. He swung until the muscles in his arms screamed. “God, let someone hear this,” he whispered. “Let someone hear.”