"I Never Said That"
Chapter Two
By the time Kelly reached the platform rig, the paramedic had already completed initial patient surveys on both fall victims.
One workman had sustained injuries incompatible with life.
Amazingly, the other man still had a palpable pulse.
Gage raised his grim gaze to the roof. "Send down the O2, the Trauma box, a backboard, and the first Stokes!" he called up to his Captain.
Less than a minute later, the requested equipment was lowered to their position, strapped inside a wire mesh stretcher.
Just a measly three minutes more and the pair had the trauma patient ventilated, splinted, completely immobilized and all set to be transported topside.
John tipped his helmeted head back, pointed his right index finger skyward and twirled it around in circles a few times, in the universal sign for 'Okay, take 'er away!'
Kelly manned the stretcher's anchor line and their packaged patient was hoisted up to the staging platform.
Seconds later, their Captain's helmeted head reappeared.
"Send down the other Stokes, Cap!" Kelly glumly requested.
"And a drop-sheet!" Gage regrettably tacked on.
Stanley gave them a 'thumbs up' signal and, within moments, the second stretcher started to descend.
The two rescuers turned their solemn attention to the other fall victim.
The paramedic respectfully draped a bright-yellow drop-sheet over the dead workman. His broken body was strapped into the Stokes, along with the Trauma box, and pulled back up onto the staging platform.
John was the next one to be tugged topside.
His partner had already established an IV, administered the necessary drugs, and gotten the go ahead from Rampart to transport.
Gage gazed down at the staging platform, at all the scattered, open cases. "I'll collect the rest a' this stuff and then catch up with you at the hospital."
Roy nodded.
Stanley, Stoker and Lopez hauled Kelly up onto the roof and released his lifeline. Then they each latched onto a corner of the critical patient's stretcher.
The foreman grabbed a hold of the fourth.
"On three," Hank directed. "One…two…three."
The Stokes was picked up and carried onto the construction elevator.
Roy retrieved their Bio-phone and their Drug box and followed his fellow firefighters onto the crowded lift.
Station 51's Commander quickly realized that they were going to have to make two trips. "Chester B.!"
Kelly's helmeted head obediently swung in his Captain's direction.
"Mike and Marco will be back up in a bit, to help you and John bring the other guy down," the fire officer informed him. "In the meantime, you two can start gathering up the gear."
"Right, Cap!" Kelly acknowledged.
The open-air elevator's safety gate closed and it began its slow descent.
Instead of 'gathering up the gear', Chet stepped back over to the very edge of the staging platform for one last long look down. "Didn't it strike you as strange, that neither one a' those guys had their life-belts on?"
The paramedic snapped another equipment case shut. "Yeah. It did," he confessed. Gage glanced up and saw that his fellow 'gear gatherer' was still just standing there, staring down at the platform rig four floors below. "Shouldn't you be coiling ropes up, or something?"
"Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out what must a' happened, yah know…"
Just then, a strong gust of wind came up and blew the roof crane's jib arm inward. Which, in turn, swung the crane's counter jib outward.
The counter jib's ballast struck Kelly in the back and he was knocked off the edge of the staging platform. "Ahhhhhhhhh!"
John watched—in abject horror—as his friend was suddenly swept right off the roof. The rather large pile of loosely coiled rope at his feet was rapidly growing smaller. He snatched a section of the dwindling rope up and twisted it around the open clip on his life-belt a couple of times. Then he wrapped his arms and legs around the base of the nearest girder and held on, to both the rope and the steel beam, for dear life!
Kelly quickly reached the end of his rope. "OOOF!"
The falling fireman's dead weight slammed the person on the other end of the rope into the steel beam he was hugging. "Gahhh-ahhh!" the paramedic cried out in agony, as the air was forcibly expelled from his lungs, in a sort a' steel girder version of the Heimlich Maneuver. His life-belt pressed painfully into his lower back and the rope bit into the palms of his hands.
The sudden stop caused the falling fireman's body to bounce back upward.
John felt the rope in his hands suddenly go slack and—for a few horrifying seconds—he feared that it had snapped. But then the tension returned to it—full force! Gage grimaced as he was, once again, rammed into the steel girder he was embracing. Just as his vision was beginning to 'tunnel out' on him, the rescuer's twice traumatized lungs began functioning again. "Oh-oh…gawd!" was the first thing he said, once he had regained the ability to speak. "Ah-ah…shit!" was the second. The paramedic closed his watering eyes and then sat there, wishing that that damned elevator wasn't so damn slow.
Speaking of the damn elevator…
The other four members of Station 51's A-shift had heard Kelly cry out.
All eyes in the lowering lift had widened in horror, and all hearts had skipped a few beats, as the fireman's falling body suddenly shot past them.
Four audible sighs of relief could be heard, when Kelly's unscheduled flight abruptly ended—well short of the ground.
Stanley, Stoker and Lopez exchanged amazed glances. They knew that Kelly's lifeline was no longer secured. So what had stopped his fall?
"Ga-age…" Hank realized aloud and turned his attention to the foreman. "Can you stop this thing?"
"I can stop it, all right," the man grimly replied. "But we still gotta go all the way down, before we can go back up."
"Damn!" the Captain angrily exclaimed, and stood there, wishing that the damn elevator wasn't so damn slow.
TBC