From: patti keiper pattik1
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2018 7:22 PM Subject: Booted
::Johnny...:: ::Johnny...:: came a mental touch inside Gage's mind. It was a memory. One that Gage had thought was long lost.
"Mother?" he whispered without sound. He smiled, and some of the incredible stress pressing in on him eased greatly. His mother had been dead for some years. He hadn't thought of her since her funeral that he had attended, when he was nine. It was a relief to find out that he could still recall the sound of her voice even after so many years.
::I know why I'm thinking of her now. There's a cold corpse pressing up against me.:: he acknowledged, sadly. ::Feels just like her hand did when I touched it back then. I must have blocked that out until today.::
He didn't know how long it had been since his victim had died, only that he had. Quietly and peacefully. ::It couldn't have been too long ago. There's still oxygen left in this tank.:: Johnny analyzed. He felt his muddy fingers carefully turn off the valve to save it for himself if it was needed. He wanted to release the safety snaffle connecting himself and the boy, to let him fall away and take off some weight from off his life rope, but the danger of the dynamite sticks jumbled around him made that a pipe dream.
So the paramedic endured the smell of aging escaped urine, bowel and the boy's souring blood, breath by breath.
::My life is what matters now.:: he reaffirmed. Gage closed his eyes to save his energy to fight against the chilling mud and water trickling steadily down his body.
Dimly, he heard the sound of splashing below, but he didn't see the powerful spotlight being aimed up the bottom end of his crevassed hole, two hundred feet below, from the underground lake.
##U.S.A.R. 103 to Engine 51. We think we've spotted where your man is.
There's dozens of sticks of old TNT floating in the water around Code F Victim One. Must have been a cache decades ago inside of a hidden old mine. No signs of movement, but there is only light water and mud falling into the lake. Plenty of breathing room for your man up there. He must realize what's happened. We found his radio battery tied up in a bag, floating nearby.##
"So, still thinking but unable to take any action. Got it. Heads up on a potential risk to your divers in the area. A dog is digging, on his own,
trying to reach Gage, our paramedic. Watch yourselves. We can't stop him until P.D. arrives, if it comes to that." Hank replied on their frequency.
The lieutenant diver in the lake swiftly hand signalled the others to return to the surface with their burden, adding the danger gesture to warn them on the reason why. They immediately swam away and the lieutenant in touch with Cap, followed. As an afterthought, he put his own lit up flashlight inside of the battery bag, aimed up so that some of its light might reach 51's trapped man and give him encouragement while he waited for rescue. ##Copy that, 51. Retreating out of the red zone.##
Roy almost tripped himself getting back to Hank by Engine 51. "Foam, Cap.
Fill up the hole. Johnny'll figure it out and use that O2 to breathe. And then whatever Boot does under the stuff, won't ignite ignite any sparks."
Cap got excited. "TNT's not crude oil, but it is soluable. Just might work minimizing the explosion risks. Good thinking, Roy." He got on his radio to U.S.A.R. and L.A. ##Engine 51. Send Foam 127 to our location. We're going to lay some down as a safety measure.##
##Will do.## came the reply, echoed by the dispatcher.
Five minutes later, Cap got Station 127's men gathered in a group.
"Not asking you to do this without volunteering. We need to enter a red zone around unstable TNT buried in a hill. Our man's stuck in that cistern hole,
unable to help himself because of it. What I need are two foam nozzles placed in two holes. One, in that dog's, and the other in my paramedic's, who's about eighty feet below on a life line with a pediatric victim, down in the second hole. Will you do it? We're guessing there's enough old explosive down there to vaporize a quarter block around that epicenter."
Nobody on 127's backed away from the task. "Understood." said their captain, waving them on to carry out the measure. "My men know the risks and will take them."
*We can catch the dog." a firefighter offered.
"You won't be able to. He's a street mutt with a rescue bent. The best thing we can do is make things safer around him while he goes to town. Time's the main factor. The faster we lay the foam, the less chances there will be for us getting blown to bits by that TNT, while we get my man and the last boy out."
Cap shared.
"Beats the H*ll out of waiting for the bomb squad. They'll take all day securing that stuff." 127's captain sighed.
"Now you see the problem. Our golden hour for that boy is passing. He has major injuries." Hank said.
"Say no more. This is the course we have to take, Hank. D*mn police department.
Wish they'd speed up their procedures a little when it comes to incendiaries." his colleague captain muttered.
Johnny thought he was hearing things, a fast scraping near his head. About two feet away from his face, a crumble of dirt fell away in the dimness, and then... he smelled wet dog!
Mud matted, eagerly digging, claws and paws finally broke through and a familiar impossible sight met Johnny's relieved eyes in the damp darkness.
"..Boot!.. How'd y- " he broke off, conscious of the risks of sound waves around the mummified dry TNT sticks squeezed against his face. ".. careful... careful..." he whispered, holding up hands to try to contain Boot's enthusiasm at reaching him. Johnny's gloves sank into Boot's coat as the dog wormed his whining way inside of his hole to sniff the boy's still face. His hands came away thick with fire retardant foam. ::Oh, this is ...just perfect. Fire foam!:: Gage thought happily. Johnny reached up to help Boot keep digging to let in more foam from his entry tunnel until it began to well up thickly. Johnny slipped on the oxygen mask from the tank he had saved and lowered the rim of his helmet to ward off the waves of foam starting to cascade down around them.
Boot's sad whines filled the hole when he realized that he was smelling death in Johnny's arms. The foam matted dog stopped digging and curled up in the space he had created near Johnny's face, sneezing mightily inside of their foam pile. He had decided that he wasn't going to leave Gage's side. Boot tiredly rested, his head tucked neatly underneath one of Johnny's arm pits so he kept some breathing room free of the surfactant that was softly billowing down from above and around them.
Slowly, one by one, Gage started grasping and gathering up only those dynamite sticks he knew were sitting completely underneath the foam layer. He began to drop them out of danger range into the lake below, from in between his wide spread, dangling feet.
He felt a sudden wave of dizziness sweep over him and a blinding headache began to pound. ::Sh*t, it's the nitroglycerin gel beads oozing out of the dynamite sticks. They're getting in contact with my skin. I'm absorbing it. My pressure's dropping just like it would for any angina patient chewing on a sublingual nitro tablet. Well, at least I can't go into shock now. My heart vessels are dilating nicely.::
Boot's constant soft whining turned into a half choking groan as a spasm jerked through the dog's body. ::Eoo. Same thing's happening to him.:: Johnny realized. ::Poor dog. I have no idea if nitro's a canine toxin.:: Johnny helped Boot clear the nasty tasting stuff out of his mouth with a clean wad of gauze as Boot started drooling and panting next to him. ::He was moving TNT getting down here? That's gonna stop right now.::
He decided to send Boot away. He took off his watch and placed it in Boot's mouth over his teeth.
"Here, boy. Take this to Cap. I'm fine, see? You can leave now. Go show him, Boot. Don't worry about the boy. Nothing we can do. You're here for me. Got it? Now, go.. Back the way you came.
Let them know you got to me and I'm okay. Good, boy. I'll follow you up.::
Johnny watched as Boot's weary, but wagging tail, disappeared back into the sunlight glowing foam, pouring out of the new hole. Then he bent to tie off his spare rope around the dead boy's chest so he would be able drag him along Boot's escape route, a few feet behind himself so he'd have some crawling room. ::That flowing foam should wash any sticky nitroglycerin off Boot's coat now that he's back under it. Too late for me, though. I don't have any fur. I gotta get out before I pass out from vaso dilation. There's enough gel residue soaking away around here to overdose on::
Thinking ahead, Johnny tied tight tourniquets around his upper arms and legs to keep his core pressure up to fight the side effects. ::Here we go.:: Johnny thought starting to work a slow careful way back up to the surface, worming his way around safely soggy dynamite sticks and mud clumps threatening to act like slippery soap beneath him. He began to use his turnout jacket's haligan tool like a climber's axe to keep from sliding backwards. As he expected, the gang had left his life line snubbed to an anchor but with the ability to get more slack so he could move and still have a life rope to catch him if he fell. ::I love Stoker's knots. Wish I was as good as he is with them.:: he grinned, pushing up through the river of foam. The light above him was grower brighter. ::Wow. Boot's long gone. He's probably already running across the parking lot.::
He felt his heart flutter inside of his chest for a moment and pushed it away with a deep breath from the medical oxygen tank. ::Uh, uh.. Not yet.:: he thought, squeezing his abdominal muscles while holding his breath to slow its rate down. His shortness of breath went away soon after he did the Valsalva trick. Johnny Gage resumed climbing.
His next hand grip clutched warm dried grass and it was then Gage knew that he was out of the hole. He heard Boot barking in the distance to his left while he sat up inside of the sunny foam layer undulating around him. He didn't trust standing up the way he felt. Johnny cut away the dead boy's rope from around himself and headed on hand and knees for the nearest tree, carefully checking for dynamite sticks appearing in the foam he was swiping away, while he crawled away from the cistern river bank. His oxygen tank ran out just as his glove reached the roots of an oak tree. He ripped off the oxygen mask and clawed a hole out of the foam glistening above his head, to the sky, so he could breathe. Then he pulled out his chrome silver Zippo cigarette lighter and lit the tree's peeling bark on fire. ::They'll see that smoke and this tree, flaming up easily. There's no way they won't know that I'm not exactly in this spot::
Thirty seconds later, Johnny felt a heavy bouquet of a fanning hose spray start showering over him, washing away the foam and soaking him thoroughly to the skin. ::Bye bye nitro issues. I'm being decontaminated.:: he thought giddily.
"Grab my hand!" shouted a voice above him. It was a firefighter from 127's stretched out on his belly on top of a horizontal aerial ladder stretched three feet above the ground over the foam pile.
"I'll pull you up with me!"
Johnny saw the glove reaching down to him and he reached up. The view doubled and tripled,
his visual blurry. "Took a nitro hit. Can't...focus." he gasped.
"No problem." And the firefighter hooked a shepard's crook behind Gage's collar and hoisted him up into the air on it long enough to grab his belt and haul him to the safety of the suspended ladder above the foam pond.
Gage felt himself hefted face down and firmly held between the rungs before the whole aerial began to move as Truck 127 backed swiftly away from the red zone.
"How are you doing?" the firefighter asked, hanging onto Johnny in a tight grip.
"Half ...*gasp*.. awake." Johnny whispered, keeping his eyes shut from the pounding in his head. "Where's Boot?"
"Who?" the man asked, carefully rolling Johnny over onto his back and into his lap.
"The dog. He got me outta there." Gage mumbled, feeling the firefighter place an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. He began to push it away. "Not yet. Listen to m-"
The firefighter knocked his hands away. "Shut up and breathe that in. You're blue. I haven't seen that dog since we laid the foam down. Why are you blue, paramedic?"
"Uh,... hypoperfusion from ...n-nitroglycerin...it's not-h.." Johnny guessed, weakily.
"Not hypothermia. Got it." The firefighter squeezed off an assisted series of breaths into Johnny's lungs with a trigger valve a few times before he got onto his radio. "Cap, he's conscious! Get that rescue squad over here! The boy's missing. The rope around Gage's second life belt has been cut."
##Copy that.## came the reply. ##We'll start an immediate search.##
Johnny could still hear Boot barking. Clear as a bell. "Go get the dog. Get him out of t-It's too late for the k-" His world went fuzzy and indistinct, like a dream, as they bounced on the ladder as the fire engine got adequate distance away from danger. Johnny's mumbling went unheard.
Puffs of mechanized pressured oxygen became his whole world as his heart began to pound from increasing hypoxia.
In a blur, Gage thought he saw Roy rushing towards him in Squad 51 from up the access road, screaming closer, with full lights and sirens on.
Back at Engine 51, Cap crowed happily. "They've got Gage!" he said, pulling his radio which had been set to monitor 127's truck-to-truck frequency, from his ear.
"How?" Marco startled.
"I don't know!" Hank said, smiling.
Marco and Stoker started kicking into high gear. Mike asked. "Did they get the boy?"
Hank frowned and finally shook his head. "They didn't mention finding him. Gage and the kid were separated somehow."
Chet strained his ears at a sound, out of the rescue usual. "That's Boot." he said, pointing out to the foam field. "Hear him barking?"
"Yeah, I wonder why he doesn't-" Lopez puzzled, turning to look in the same direction.
Bark! said Boot, leaping up high so his head cleared the top surface of the foam retardant's rising layer.
"There he is, guys. Whew! He was just trying to find us. Here, boy! We're over here!" Kelly shouted, gesturing so the dog could see him.
Bark! came another excited yap from the dog. A little closer. In his mouth, Chet saw the blue color of a boy's shoe, and a dusky tinted bare leg.
"Oh, my G*d. Is he dragging the kid?" Stoker asked, horrified. "It's not safe. He's gonna hit a-"
Bark! Bar- A colossal boom blossomed like a fiery orange and white cancer from the hill as a sudden explosion ripped apart the middle of the foam riddled meadow. It was followed by a cascade of concussions as buried TNT nearby was jarred and triggered into self destructing too, caused by the first explosion of dynamite on the surface.
Firefighters everywhere, dove under their trucks for cover as heavy clods of earth, rock and boulders showered down around them in a debris mushroom a hundred feet wide. The earth shook as centuries old hell fire was released from the old mine in one explosion after another.
Chet didn't see the fire or the flying debris expanding over the red zone. He could only recall the sight of just moments ago, when his eyes had connected with Boot's happy ones, because the dog had thought he was successfully rescuing another one.
Photo: Cap on the walkie talkie near crew applying fire foam.
Photo: Johnny reaching a victim tied to a rope.
Photo: Stoker reaching out a ladder to you.
Photo: Firefighters flinching in a massive explosion.
Photo: Chet Kelly looking stunned in a close up.
Photo: Truck 127 stretching out it's aerial ladder horizontally.
Photo: Boot, peeking out over an edge, between Johnny's legs.