It was the coolest place in the building but the floor was radiating heat upward through his turnout pants and coat as he stretched forward a gloved right hand and dragged his body forward another few inches. His left arm swung out, fully extended, fingers sweeping the floor searching for contact with something soft, something unmoving, anything but the dust and grit in which his fingertips drew sweeping arcs. He stretched, angling his body to the left and swept his arm back, all the way to twelve o'clock position in front of his head. And then he dragged himself a few inches forward and swung out his right arm.
The smoke layer was just above his head in what was left of a room after it had flashed; the heat hadn't seemingly dissipated at all. In the all-pervasive darkness, he squinted his eyes but he couldn't make out even the inside of his facemask as he searched the room with his hands and body, straining his ears and every sense, physical or otherwise. His ears were filled with the fire's consumptive roar of triumph over the puny streams of water that had done little but create pockets of steam barring entry.
His right hand connected with something solid, narrow, tubular and stretching vertically upward. Fingers curled around a pattern in a stick or pole, or perhaps the leg of some piece of furniture and traced upward, jarring against a hard platform about a foot above the floor. He pushed his palm around the top, a blistering surface of what felt as if it had been an upholstered chair, jerking his hand back down to the ground when it became intolerably hot.
People had been known to climb into furniture or lean against it, in their exhaustion as they crawled toward safety. This chair was unoccupied.
His knees were burning where they pressed against red-hot floorboards and he slithered forward and swung out his left arm in the firefighters' breaststroke. The smoke hid every possible feature that might identify the room, and excepting his recent contact with an upholstered chair, he could be anywhere in the home. The chair narrowed it down only slightly, to a living room or maybe bedroom. He'd expect to have bumped up against one or more table legs and multiple chairs if he were in a dining room.
Those he sought had been on their way out when it'd flashed so they couldn't be all that much further inside, he knew that much. The first rescue team had pulled out one pulseless, non-breathing firefighter and were still frantically trying to change that condition as he crawled into the mouth of hell in search of the other firefighter, and in search of the homeowner who'd been the initial target of the search that had gone bad. There was a hose team on his heels, almost literally, or there had been, but he couldn't see them or hear them and it felt as if he'd left them behind as he crawled further, each arm sweeping the area in front and to the side as he worked a right-handed search of the room.
He found table legs, but of narrow diameter and as his hand roamed upwards to gage the height of the table, it moved, tumbling downward and even inside the roar of the fire, he heard something shatter, and felt small fragments of something clatter off the outside of his mask and his outstretched arm. A side table, then.
There was a much louder crashing sound somewhere ahead, in the direction he was facing, battering at his ears and reverberating through the floor on which he'd momentarily paused.
'Get the hell out, now, while you still can."
Current circumstances wouldn't carry the sound of those words from anywhere other than inside his head, he knew that, but they weren't his words.
He scooted forward another few inches, tracing his progression with fingers following shoe molding into the sharp right angle of a corner. Those fingers traced the turn to the left, touching the wall and pushing aside the broken pieces of whatever had crashed to the ground from that side table into the corner, the corner where no one was sitting, or lying, or propped up waiting for rescue.
The brim of his helmet bumped up against the wall and he flung out his left arm, finding the space where the wall ended and opened up into an entry into the next room. There were waves of heat buffeting at his outer shells of protection, at his gloves, coat sleeves, mask and a helmet that seemed to be trapping the heat inside as much as it was keeping it out and away.
He knew two facts simultaneously: the first was that there was nothing alive in that room and the second was that he would still have to search it, both because it was his job and because he could not return to his crew or to those other firefighters waiting anxiously outside, those architecting the attack and eventual suppression of this fire and those frantically trying to reverse the fate of the one man already carried from the house; he could not return without the missing firefighter or the homeowner.
There was nothing to do but keep moving, forward and to the side, heart thudding and weighted heavily with dread, his breaths rasping against the mask in shorter and faster bursts of expelled air.
The air temperature drew blisters from skin underneath the protection of his fire-resistant turnouts and each movement was a scream as he arced to the left, passing in front of the opening to the other room, the room that he knew in his heart was where the missing would be found. He had this room to finish, the other right side of the room to search.
He heard voices again, heard a hoarse cry from the missing firefighter and another, possibly the voice of the homeowner but the voices came from no direction and every direction. He blinked back tears from the heat as his right hand finally landed on the shoe molding of the far wall. Creeping forward, he gathered the fraying strands of his focus and mentally manhandled them back to finishing the room he was in, fighting back against the desperation that shuddered along his nerve endings with a tenuous thread of hope that they'd made it into this room before being overcome.
Nothing and no one was alive in that other room.
He needed to move faster; if they were here they were either running out or already out of time and so he slid another foot along this right wall, his right hand holding position on the shoe molding and his left swinging wildly, inches above the flooring. His right shoulder made abrupt contact with something hard and unforgiving. His right hand slipped from the wall, across the floor and up the object, extending above his head without reaching a platform or end point as his left hand sought the horizontal end point of whatever it was.
Please don't be a bookcase.
The words echoed around the inside walls of his skull, slithering around his brain which helpfully envisioned a top heavy set of shelves crashing downward, burying him in heavy hardcovers, knocking his helmet askew, his facemask from his head and pinning him to the floor as his oxygen tank bled out, giving hissing sustenance to the fire beckoning from that other room.
It was square, or rectangular and slightly over a foot deep, when measured from the wall. He slid outward, away from the wall and traced the front of the object, heart thuddering in alarm as his fingers rubbed up the spine of something two inches in diameter, about ten inches tall, with another, nearly identical shape next to it. He made his touch light, a ghost touch that should not unbalance the deadly bookcase booby-trap that he needed to pass.
As he navigated in front and past it, he held his right arm angled in a cross block to deflect falling books, shelves or the threatening and truly dangerous falling bookcase itself. The toes of his boots dug into the floor for traction and forward progress and as he slid forward, he was grateful that the room wasn't carpeted.
He cleared the death trap bookcase and angled back towards the wall, pushing with his left hand and reaching out with his right hand, craning forward until he made contact with the wall. Anchored back to the reality and dimensions of his search, he used his elbows to drag himself forward, wincing as each pressed into the increasingly hot floor. The tank and his coat protected his back from the blast furnace in the next room but the sole of his boots were poor insulation and the sweat-soaked socks were far too conductive for comfort.
Left swing, fully extended, sweeping from twelve o'clock to six, a momentary pause and then a backward sweep that smacked into something hard and low to the ground at about ten o'clock.
He edged toward it, gloved hands testing its shape – horizontally tubular – and dimensions. He patted the familiar and comforting bulk of a charged hose, wondering how the hell the nozzle man had crawled past him in the dark blur of the room without him knowing that anyone was that near, only a foot or two away.
In the seconds he took to decide whether to follow the hose towards the nozzle man or continue his search, the hose opened up from a position low to the ground and angled upward as it poured water into the next room. Transfixed, he watched as swirling steam billowed, lightening the density and impenetrable darkness of the smoke enough to briefly outline the crouched figure at the right edge of the doorway, and another crouched figure slightly behind him, hauling hose.
It was too late to shout a warning that the missing were very probably in that room, not this one. As a blend of steam and smoke filled the mouth of that room, his stomach churned and his heart clenched as their last chance evaporated before he'd found them.
A hard clap against his right shoulder brought him around just as his tank alarm went off. He couldn't see the person whose hand had a firm grip on him but he leaned his head forward until the brim of his helmet bumped up against another. He turned his head slightly so that he could angle his facemask up against the other mask.
"They're out; everyone's out. Go swap your tank."
He sagged, relief warring with exhaustion after his broiled brain finally deciphered the garbled worlds his captain had shouted.
"What about…?"
Stanley wasn't finished, and their words tumbled over each other. It took a few more harshly echoing breaths before he finally deciphered the noise into language.
"He had a pulse when Gage and DeSoto took him in."
"How did….?"
Stanley swatted him on the left shoulder, tugging none too gently in a signal that clearly ordered, 'get moving.' And then he crawled away into the dark, towards the crew on the line, his messages conveyed.
Released from his right-handed anchor to the wall, he followed the hose, on hands and knees, towards daylight, towards the coolness of the eighty-five degrees afternoon that the weather forecaster had called a record high for Los Angeles in June. He crawled through the door, blinking in the transition to the outdoors, to the blinding brightness of full daylight, and he automatically accepted the gloved hand extended to him that pulled him to his feet.
He wrestled his helmet back, and his mask off, stepping carefully over the tangle of hoses stretching into the California ranch style house and spared a quick glance of thanks and acknowledgement to the man from 29's who'd helped him up.
"Bad in there?" the other firefighter asked, squinted eyes tracing the charged lines, looking for kinks.
Chet didn't really need to think about his answer. The disorienting effects of working in total darkness while crawling below blistering heat in a desperate search for people in trouble was still more real to him than the scene he looked at now: the organized chaos as companies deployed and attacked this fire.
He shrugged and answered honestly. "No worse than usual."
He headed towards his Engine. Cap may have only ordered him to swap out his air bottle but that wasn't what he'd really meant. He'd swap out the tank and rehydrate so that he'd be ready to go back inside when those guys on the line inside needed to be relieved. This job wasn't done yet.
Finis
A/N: This snippet (I can't in all honesty call it a full story) was written for the Emergency! 2013 Labor Day Challenge prompt, with very grateful thanks to TDT who read the early drafts and helped coax forth the ending details.
For details on this Challenge prompt, please go to Nine Miles North's profile. The challenge details are posted right above her list of stories (you should read them too!) and honors the heroes who don't always get a lot of story space in fanfic and as befits Labor Day, celebrates those on whom our society depends.