Part 33 (1/2)

He tried to squat, but there were too many people crushed up against him, and besides that, he was buckled to the rail. Suspended in place by the crush, the woman next to him lost consciousness. The pressure against Norris at the rear of the car became greater.

Norris realized with a start that he smelled burning hair. For a few moments as the hot smoke rolled in and enveloped them, he had a flashback to his childhood. Once, while baking peanut b.u.t.ter cookies with his grandmother in Iowa, he'd stood too close to the oven, so that a blast of heat struck him in the face when the oven door opened, frizzing his eyebrows and causing him to cry out. He'd been seven, and his grandmother had spanked him for getting too close. He never forgot that searing heat. Even as an adult it defined h.e.l.l for him.

”Close the doors,” Norris whimpered. ”Please close the doors.”

He had no idea how long he remained upright, or how much heat he endured, or what the temperatures were, but after a time, maybe ten seconds, maybe a minute, the pressure began to moderate. Not a lot, but enough. The deafening screeches began to wither away, and Norris sensed a s.p.a.ce under two women next to him. He tried to move but found himself hanging by his own belt on the railing. Burning his hands on the metal, he unbuckled himself and dove under the women. It wasn't until then that he discovered the lower he got the cooler it was. He began burrowing.

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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+vering, 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 fiance 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.”

”G.o.d, I hope so.”

On sixty-three they pried the door and found heavy black smoke rolling at them like a series of huge black b.a.l.l.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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.