Through the Fire (2 page)

This is how firemen die.

I looked at the rope bag, then ahead into the graphite abyss. Somewhere in that lay a woman and a child.

“All right,” I said. “Stick close. Let’s go.”

Rumbles and groans crescendoed. I quickened the pace, tapping my glove to feel the tile every dozen steps. The temperature elevated.

Two white lights swung through the haze. A pair of firefighters materialized in front of us, a woman’s limp body clutched between them.

“You guys Rescue One?”

The firefighter at the head moved backward, struggling.

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the kid?”

“What kid?”

I followed alongside. “We heard there was a mother and a child.”

“We . . . searched the whole . . . back there. Nobody else.”

I stopped. “No, we heard there was a kid—”

In my mind I saw a vision of a sudden bright flame.

Southeast corner.

Under the roof, by the wall. By McKinley’s crew.

I grabbed the radio from my jacket pocket.

“Engine Three, get—”

A tangerine flash filled the room.

I tackled Hartman to the floor. Rescue One scrambled beneath the searing heat, dragging the woman with one hand each. Hartman made his knees and scuttled after them. The store glowed like a volcanic cloud.

“Matt!” I yelled. “Matt!”

He turned.

I motioned toward the rear of the building. “This way.”

He stared at me and turned toward the front.

“Matt!”

He looked back again.

A transmission burst from my radio. “Battalion Two to all units, evacuate the building. Repeat, all units evacuate the structure. We are going defensive.”

Fire rolled overhead.

“Come on, Matt! We can still find the kid.”

He didn’t move.

“Matt, come on!”

He pointed to the front. “They’re calling us out!”

A thunderous bang hit ground not far from us.

“Now’s the time,” I said. “Let’s get back there.”

I turned and crawled toward the back, certain he would follow me.

I felt the frame of a doorway and swiveled my head to make sure I still had him. But he hadn’t moved. He knelt, frozen with indecision, as though his knees and gloves were affixed to the floor. There I saw in his face, through the clear curvature of his mask and the gold-lit reflections of fire, the simple look of a child, innocent and uncertain.

And then the roof collapsed.

CHAPTER
2

S
ometimes a thousand thoughts fill a second . . .

Hartman.

Rescue One.

The guys on the roof.

My fiancée. My father. My childhood.

All encapsulated in a simple pill.

. . . and then you swallow hard.

Steel framework swung like a pendulum from the ceiling. Debris dumped between us. I tucked tight up against the doorframe, hiding my hands in my helmet, coated by a thick rolling wave of smoke and ash. A large form hit my lower legs, pinning them. The roar continued with a series of objects hitting the floor in syncopated rhythm, slowing in progression until an aftermath of silence.

I groaned and tried to move my legs.

Three long air-horn blasts sounded outside, the emergency evacuation signal. Pallets of heat pressed in like a sauna. Visibility was zero. I fought and wiggled to free myself.

The wailing cry of a motion sensor pierced the air.

Hartman.

Working the handle of my axe between my legs and the debris, I found just enough purchase to create a space so I could slide out. I pulled free and dropped the axe head to the sound of metal and wood clacking.

“Matt!” My voice dissipated.

I scampered toward the cycling alarm from Hartman’s air pack. Raucous radio traffic spilled from the speaker in my jacket pocket. Broken transmissions cut short, voices walking on others.

I felt my way onto a small rubble pile. Plywood. Truss beams. A half-dome light fixture.

The wailing grew louder.

“Matt! Matt, can you hear me?”

My personal light melted into the smoke. I made out fragmented pieces of metal and wood. Then, finally, a glove.

I grasped it into mine. “Hartman. Matt!”

He didn’t move. His alarm continued.

I pulled out my radio. The traffic was incessant.

Would everyone just shut up!

Someone took a breath between sentences. I depressed the transmit button. “Mayday, mayday, mayday. Firefighter down.”

The radio fell silent.

I continued. “Command, Engine One Firefighter O’Neill with emergency traffic.”

Battalion Chief Mauvain came back, “Go ahead, Aidan.”

“Chief, I have a firefighter down, unconscious and trapped about two hundred feet inside the structure, toward the C side.”

“Copy that, Aidan. Do you have an ID on the downed firefighter?”

“Engine One Firefighter Hartman.”

“Copy. A rescue team is on their way now.”

I flung from the pile anything I could grasp. I lifted and tossed concrete and metal. Seconds lengthened like oxygen tubing, every moment stealing life from Hartman’s vital organs.

Minutes passed.
Where’s that rescue team?

Then I remembered.

We’d left our tag line.

There was no way for them to know where we were. They were wandering in the dark. They could be twenty feet away and still not see us.

“Over here!” I said. “Over here!” The room swallowed my words.

My low air pressure alarm sounded.

Five minutes left.

I had to work fast. I pushed and scooped at a frenzied pace. Every piece I removed replaced itself with another. I stood with a sheet of plywood and, while leveraging it, lost my balance, dropping it and falling open handed on a nail. It penetrated my leather glove, piercing my palm with a searing pain. I shouted and ripped a two-by-four block from my hand.

A distant voice cut through the cloud. “O’Neill, that you?”

On my knees, clutching my glove, I turned to see four spotlights floating like ships through a fog-blanketed harbor. “Yeah. Hey! Over here.”

“Hang tight, Aidan.”

“Hang on, buddy.”

“Command, rescue team has made patient contact.”

I waved them over. “Right here, guys, right here.”

They say many hands make light work. In less than a minute we cleared the remaining rubble off Hartman and shut off his alarm.

A fine veil of dust coated his facepiece, behind which bowed darkened eyelids and parted lips. I opened the bypass valve on his regulator, flooding his mask with positive pressure air.

“Is he breathing?” someone said.

“Get his bottle off his back.”

“Forget it. Just get him on the board.”

We logrolled him onto a backboard.

“Let’s four point him.”

I stumbled backward.

“Aidan, you all right?”

I waved my hand. “I’m fine. Go, go.” I moved to his feet.

Someone at the head counted off, “Ready, one, two, three.”

I grabbed onto the board, and we lifted and shuffled, bearing increased temperatures just a few feet off the floor. Hartman lay unconscious, and I had the surreal feeling that, as we marched for the door while he still faced the rubble, we were somehow moving his body from his spirit. As though the farther we fled from the spot he went down, the emptier his shell of a body became.

I saw it, with the backs of four turnout coats before me. At his feet I was witness.

Hot wetness soaked through my glove as I clenched the board.

And I knew . . .

His blood was on my hands.

The medics loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance, crimson draping the western sky. The paramedic at the head squeezed a purple bag attached to a tube sticking out of Hartman’s mouth. His chest rose and relaxed, lifting and ebbing like an ocean swell.

I watched, helmet in hand, as two firemen climbed in the back, as the doors closed, as the box lit up in a fury, wailing down the road with a police escort. A corkscrew twisted in my gut.

Voices spoke in low tones behind me. “All that weight on his chest . . .”

“He’s hypoxic.”

“Strong pulse though.”

“They taking him to County, like the woman?”

“Yeah.”

I turned and brushed shoulders between them. Butcher caught my eye and strode toward me. The acrid odor of smoke and fire wafted from my turnouts.

“You mind telling me exactly what that was, Aidan?”

I ignored him and walked toward the engine.

“Don’t you walk away. Hold up. That’s an order, Firefighter O’Neill. Hold up.”

I stopped and stared at the pavement.

Butcher angled himself in front of me. He spoke in quiet, controlled tones. “You listen to me. Your father was the best fireman I ever knew. And I put up with your reckless and arrogant attitude out of respect for him. I see a lot of him in you . . . but you know what I don’t see, Aidan?”

I brought my eyes up to his and set my chin.

“Respect. Your father came from a time when men understood the chain of command. They treated those who came before them with the respect they were due. You know what I see when I look at you?”

I looked away toward the road.

“I see contempt,” he said. “And now we got a one-week-old fireman riding unconscious in the back of the bus, intubated and all.” He pressed his lips together, his whiskers taut and trembling. He looked at the ground. Then, right to my face, he shouted, “I trusted you with him!”

It reverberated through my chest. Yellow helmets turned, stared, looked away.

Butcher brought his hand up between us, as if to dam up any further flow of indignation. His voice leveled. “Pack up your stuff.”

I did a double take between him and the building still spouting gray smoke. “There’s still fire—”

“I said pack it up.”

“What, are we being released? What about the kid? Are they still doing a search?”

“Aidan”—he pointed behind me—“the kid is sitting in the back of the battalion chief’s rig.”

Cuffed blue jeans covered dangling legs with Velcro-strapped tennis shoes in the open backseat of Chief Mauvain’s SUV.

My mouth hung open, searching for words. “But you said—”

“Things change in fires. We don’t always get the best information straight out. You know that. That’s why we follow the chain of command. And that’s why
we
are not packing up our stuff—
you
are.”

I creased my eyebrows and stared at him.

He filled his chest with air. “Pack it up. Everyone else made it out in time. Even the truck guys were off the roof when they were supposed to be. Only you stayed and went deeper in against orders. Hartman shouldn’t be in an ambulance right now. He has a wife and a new baby, Aidan.” He ran the back of his hand under his nose and glanced at the pavement. “You’re on leave without pay. This is straight from Mauvain, not just me. Expect a minimum of two weeks.”

I held his gaze in disbelief.

He shook his head. “Just go home, Aidan. You’ve done enough for today.”

CHAPTER
3

D
o not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

I actually caught a cab back to the station. I don’t remember the trip. It’s as if I woke from a stupor when I pulled out of Central’s parking lot in my ’83 Land Cruiser. Zeppelin strummed “That’s the Way” from the stereo speakers. Gold-tipped trails marked the paths of aspens following creeks down the Sierra’s eastern aspects. The day’s last silver-lit clouds hung on the horizon.

I crossed Virginia Street just south of the Reno Arch and the narrow corridor of flashing neon and high-rise hotel-casinos. I spun the wheel and crossed the Truckee River at the kayak park. Leaf-blanketed streets led me into the old southwest, past pre–World War II brick homes, thick-trunked oaks, and ailing elms. Ghoulishly clad children trekked from door to door, flashlights in hand, candy bags bulging and swung over shoulders.

My stomach twisted in a knot. I was hungry and wondered if my fiancée, Christine, was available for dinner. I reached into the front pants pocket that held my phone, the skin on my knuckles chafing against the denim. Her line rang seven times and switched to voice mail. I hung up.

Christine worked part time at a coffee shop while finishing up her master’s in literature. And though I welcomed the diversion, I wasn’t sure I would have been up to a long discussion about Hemingway or Kierkegaard. She dug my love for reading and my understanding of most literary and biblical allusions—thanks to my mother, who had fed me books as if they were milk—but I’d found that her disparaging existentialism inevitably degenerated into musings on the meaninglessness of everything under the sun. That was exactly what I didn’t need right then.

I tried to shake the vision of Hartman in my mind, lying in the ER, hooked to a ventilator, grim-faced white-coats standing over him. Part of me felt guilty for even wanting food.

I parked in front of the house and paced up a dark front path. A rotund pumpkin sat in the corner of the porch. I jiggled my key in the lock—up, down, up, down, side to side—until,
click
.

A flick of the front-hall switch spilled light onto honey-hued floorboards and a shadow-laden living room.

Beep.

Beep.

A red light flashed on the kitchen answering machine.

Beep.

Beep.

I sank into a chair by the breakfast table. One hundred and six hours straight. That’s how long I’d been at work.

Beep.

Beep.

I pushed the answering machine button. Its computer voice announced, “You have two new messages. First new message.”

Christine’s voice warbled, “Aidan, I’m in Denver. I’m flying out to New York to stay with my mom for a while. I don’t know how long or . . . It’s just . . . you have such a hard time saying no to work. I never see you. And when I do see you . . . I’m just fed up with waiting for you to grow up and figure out when you are going to get a real . . . You . . . you know what, just forget it. I don’t even know why I’m saying all of this. Don’t call me.”

I leaned my head back and rubbed my hands over my eyes.

Guess a dinner date is out of the question
.