"A Heavenly Cause"
Chapter Seven
The fire may have surpassed its previous strength, but it was still no match for six fresh interior crews, twelve steadily advancing attack lines and a snorkel operating under full pressure.
Once again, the raging beast was beaten into submission, reluctantly releasing its flaming hold on one apartment after another.
But then, that's the way the 'game' was played.
Sometimes the fire won—sometimes it lost.
No matter.
It would just return another time…another place.
The fire and the water and the firemen were age old enemies.
And they would remain enemies—to the death!
Speaking of which…
Still stuck back up on—er, in 'the unreachable star', 51's paramedics had managed to completely exhaust both themselves and their supply of breathable air.
What little oxygen the closet may have contained had long since been sucked out to fuel the fire raging out in the apartment.
The two trapped men sat there, with their legs bent at the knees and the backs of their sweat-drenched heads resting against the closet wall, growing woozier and woozier with each deadly, labored breath.
A drop of something other than his own sweat struck the dark-haired fireman on the forehead and he opened his burning eyes a bit to investigate its source. He gazed dazedly up past the hazy glare of his dangling light.
Water was dripping down from the ceiling fixture and splattering off the metal clothes rod.
"Hey," he mumbled groggily, "it's…raining…on our…parade."
The, at first, refreshing spray quickly became annoying.
The little trickle soon became a torrent and their discarded helmets were slowly re-donned.
Because they'd managed to seal the bottom of the closet door so well, the water had nowhere to go, and quickly began to accumulate.
"I can…just see…the headlines…now," DeSoto dryly remarked, between more fitful bouts of painful coughing. "Firemen…Drown in…Apartment Complex…Blaze."
Gage was forced to grin. "That…would be…embarrassing."
Suddenly, the coughing stopped.
The sound of his buddy's helmet, banging into the side of his, broke the silence. "Ro—?" Johnny anxiously began.
But, before the worried fireman could even finish speaking his friend's name, he, too, was out cold.
The beast had left its lethal breath—carbon monoxide gas—in the devoured oxygen's wake.
36's captain and crew were among those fighting the fine fight. They had managed to push the fire back down the building's third floor and now had it contained to the end of the hallway.
The fire continued to slowly die back until, finally, it was extinguished.
In its flaming fury, the beast had managed to take with it most of the building's B-side.
A faint light was streaming through what remained of the third floor stairwell's soot-covered windows.
The guy's from 36's stared down its blackened hallway not feeling very triumphant.
There was no way they were going to find the two missing firemen alive.
The rescue party exchanged sad, solemn glances and then went right back to work. They still had a promise to keep.
Using their fire axes to sound the charred floor boards beneath their boots for structural integrity, Captain Carlton and his recovery crew continued down the gloomy, water-logged hallway, in search of their fellow firefighters' bodies.
The door to one apartment had a gaping hole in it.
Tod Whitley yanked a few ragged pieces of charcoal out of his way, creating an opening large enough for him to insert the entire upper half of his body into the blackened abode.
Fire had completely gutted the apartment. Even its floor and ceiling were gone.
The searcher was about to duck back out into the hall when he caught a flash of color out of the corner of his facemask. Curious as to what had managed to survive the fire's sooty assault, the fireman swung the beam of his light in the object's general direction.
A rather large portion of a once neon-yellow jacket was protruding from a crack at the top of a blackened door. In fact, it appeared as though someone had draped several articles of clothing over the door. Either the apartment owner had run out of hangers or—
Whitley stiffened and promptly backed out of the apartment. "Cap! Over here! I think I may have found something!"
"What d'yah got?" Carlton inquired as he came cautiously stepping up.
"Look above the door on your left," Whitley advised and stepped out the way.
The Captain poked his helmeted head into the apartment and obligingly swung the beam of his bright light to the left. Dave Carlton took note of both the dangling articles of clothing, and the apartment's missing floor and ceiling, and swore.
Any attempt to see if anybody was on the other side of that door, was going to have to be made from the roof.
Carlton pulled the HT from his pocket and thumbed its send button.
Hank Stanley was seated on Big Red's sideboard with his HT in his hand.
The radio suddenly crackled to life, causing 51's guys to stiffen.
"Battalion 10 from Engine 36…"
51's Captain and crew sprang to their feet and exchanged extremely anxious glances.
Could this be the news they'd been both hoping for…and dreading?
"Battalion 10 here. Go ahead 36..."
"Chief, the floor and ceiling are gone in one of the apartments up here on Three, and we need to check something out. Is there any way 110's could get some ladders, rope and life-belts up to the roof for us?"
"What is your current location, 36?"
"Heads up!" Carlton cautioned via his radio.
Every helmeted head on the fire-ground obediently tipped back and every eye watched as a flashlight suddenly came sailing out of one of the third floor's charred windows and exploded onto the sidewalk.
"Okay, 36. We've got your position. Help and equipment are on the way."
Hank and his men glanced hopefully in Brice's direction.
The coughing had stopped. Their vitals were all stable.
Craig gave his watch a quick glance and then nodded the crew's release from REHAB.
51's already geared up guys rewarded the paramedic with looks of undying gratitude and then went trotting off in the direction of the Chief's car.
By the time the snorkel platform of 110's rig descended to street level, the requested items were all lined up and ready to be loaded.
The ladders were lashed onto the tops of the snorkel's safety cage and the other items were tossed up onto the platform's deck.
Dale Manthey stared disbelievingly down at his cargo. The combined weight of all those coiled ropes and ladders meant he would to have to place a restriction on the lift's number of passengers. "I can only take two, this trip."
"All right. Stoker! Kelly!" 51's Captain unhesitatingly called out.
The two thrilled to have been selected crewmen quickly scrambled up onto the snorkel's crowded deck. The security bar was lowered into place and the hydraulic ladder's platform began climbing slowly and steadily toward the roof.
A few extremely hectic minutes later…
The ladders were still lying flat down, having been stretched across one of the gaping holes in the building's weakened roof—the hole that was located directly above the third floor apartment.
Stoker and Kelly had donned life-belts on the ride up. Their belts were secured to some ropes and, working from the ladders, 36's guys began lowering 51's guys down through the hole in the roof.
"Okay! Hold it!" Whitley shouted up as the lowered men drew level with him.
The guys manning the ropes held it.
Stoker and Kelly grabbed onto each other's ropes, to keep from spinning, and took a look around.
The apartment they'd just been lowered down to may have been devoid of a floor and ceiling, but it still had walls.
And one of 36's guys was standing in the doorway to the hall, pointing toward one of them. "See that door over there? We wanna find out what's behind it. Can one of yous swing over there and check it out for us?"
Chet released Mike's rope and the engineer obligingly gave him a shove in the door's direction. He kept on shoving.
Chet kept on swinging until his outstretched hand finally managed to latch onto the door's blackened brass knob. He jerked the charred portal open and gasped. It happened be a closet door—and Johnny and Roy just happened to be inside it! "Found 'em! Give me some slack!" The requested slack arrived in the rescuer's rope and he was able to use the frame of the door to pull himself into the tiny room with them. The look of elation on Kelly's face quickly faded. The shouting hadn't roused them. "Johnny?!...Ro-oy?!"
A flashlight was dangling from the ceiling cord and, by its dim glow, Kelly could see that their eyes remained closed.
"Johnny?!...Ro-oy?!" he shouted again, a whole lot louder.
But the two of them just continued to sit there on the floor of that water-logged closet, shoulder-to-shoulder and helmet-to-helmet, not moving a damn muscle.
Kelly unclipped the top of John's sopping wet turnout coat and placed the palm of his hand down on his chest. His mustached face filled with horror. "Get in here! Quick! They ain't breathin'!" he screamed back at Mike. "An' tell 'em ta send down a couple a' belts!"Before starting AR, he took a moment to grind his knuckles into Johnny's sternum.
No reaction. No response.
'Damn!' Chet pinched the unresponsive paramedic's nostrils shut and started breathing for him— praying to God that it wasn't already too late.
TBC
AN: Thanks Minerva, Marbo, Kathy and Elise, for supplying some fuel for these old arthritic typing fingers. :D
:) Ross7
