The Chiefs had arrived on scene.
He didn't know if it was the threat to public safety for tens of thousands of Los Angeles County residents and businesses without phone service that had brought out the white helmets, or the millions of dollars in fire, smoke and water related damage to the telephone company central office, or the fact that seven – no wait, 36's paramedics were still getting breathing treatments so it was nine - firefighters had already been hospitalized, but Roy wondered if the Los Angeles County Fire Department had opened a Headquarters branch in Carson. And there were a lot of guys in business suits hanging around with them; he presumed that the Pacific Telephone Company's upper management had arrived in full force as well.
He noticed other things too. Parked next to the light truck was a mobile air trailer for refilling SCBA bottles at the scene and someone from HQ with a brain had made sure that all responding companies had plenty of water to keep their guys hydrated when they rotated off the hoses and swapped out their tanks.
But based on the IV that Shafer had going on a firefighter Roy'd never seen before, not everyone was taking advantage of it.
"Word is that the Sheriff's department, the LAPD, pretty much every law enforcement agency has every vehicle on the road, patrolling slowly so that if there's an emergency, someone can wave them down and they can radio it in," Shafer said as he adjusted the flow of the IV.
"Makes sense," Gage said, as he dropped the box of supplies in the center of the triage area. "Kinda smart, actually."
Roy glanced around, surveying the mess they'd left behind when they'd pulled out earlier and he grimaced.
On the plus side, in the time they'd been gone, the crews on scene seemed to have gotten the fourth and fifth floors under control, and the second floor was on its way to being contained even if it was still putting out smoke so dense that that it seemed the hose streams were slicing it into pieces rather than dissipating it.
"All of the television stations and radios are broadcasting updates, letting people know how to get help and of course every politician in the County is getting his face in front of the cameras whether his district is affected by it or not."
Shafer hadn't left the scene any time in the last hour so Roy wondered if there was any truth what he was saying, or if Shafer was just repeating the rumors he'd heard from the guys he'd treated.
He watched Shafer listen to his current patient's lungs with a stethoscope and then say something with a grin that was returned.
Shafer patted the guy on the shoulder. "Finish out that bag and then we'll see how you're doing, okay?"
He joined Roy in picking up some of the medical debris.
"How'd it go?" Shafer asked in a quiet tone, one not meant for the guy on the IV. "You see Ferrara while you were there? Any word on Kelleher?"
He was definitely not interested in reliving his trip in so he went for the easier questions.
"I didn't see Steve at Rampart; I was kind of expecting to see him back here." Come to mind, it was a little surprising that Ferrara hadn't been more visible. "I don't know. Maybe he was trying to get in touch with Kelleher's family but he would've had to go somewhere out of district to find a working phone."
It wasn't as if Ferrara's Captain or crew were in position to know if he'd taken an unauthorized side trip, but it just didn't seem like something the Steve Ferrara that he knew would do in this situation.
Shafer bent down and swept some discarded wrappers into the palm of his hand, and then looked around for a place to toss them. Roy held out the bag he'd been using.
"All I got from Brackett was that Matt had inhaled a lot of smoke. With all the activity from this scene, plus the normal stuff, the ER docs are spread pretty thin, so he told me that some doc from Pulmonology had taken over Kelleher's case. And then Brackett got pulled into something else, so I didn't get a chance to ask him anything more."
"A pulmonologist? That ain't good. Don't suppose Brackett mentioned his O2 sat levels?
Roy shook his head, slumping a little as he thought about what Gage had said about Marco getting his lungs checked too.
"Hey, Shafer!" Gage yelled. "Where're their helmets and stuff?"
Shafer didn't even fully turn, just twisted his neck to one side. "On their Engines. Stoker picked up some, Harrison picked up some and I brought over the rest."
And damn, Roy thought, I haven't even checked in on Mike Stoker, Engine 51's last man standing. He turned and looked toward the Engine, where Stoker stood dutifully at his post, which seemed a lot more solitary than it usually did. Roy felt both obligated and reluctant and then he was swept by an embarrassing surge of relief when Gage waved him off and jogged over in that direction.
"You guys okay?"
He should have been the one to check on Stoker, not Johnny.
He, Mike and Cap were the senior guys on their shift: the leaders, officially in Cap's case, unofficially in theirs. They were the ones who set the example for the rest of the guys to follow. He had a pretty good idea of how Mike might be feeling after watching that building blow with the rest of their crew inside it. Or maybe he didn't; he'd been lucky enough to have his partner at his side afterwards and then plenty to keep him occupied.
"Roy?"
Mike wasn't the type to open up to just anyone either. He was pretty sure that Mike was even careful about what he said to Cap, since there were things you might talk about with a good friend that you really couldn't tell your commanding officer, even one as fair-minded as Hank Stanley. And then he was blindsided by the sudden realization that with Cap down, Mike was officially in charge of Station 51's A-shift right now, his boss, at least until the Department brought in a replacement Captain.
Shafer stopped into his personal space and Roy jerked his mind back to the scene. Wandering minds were a hazard at a working fire, or so he'd had drilled into him over and over and over again.
"Roy, you okay?"
He tried to smile but just couldn't summon any kind of positive feeling, or much of any feeling at all come to think of it. He sighed; that seemed to be coming pretty naturally.
"Yeah," he paused, trying to remember Shafer's first name. "Yeah, I am, or I will be anyway. What do you hear about replacements?"
Shafer pushed his helmet back up off his forehead and rubbed a hand at his hairline.
"I know a guy who works at HQ," he flung an arm in the direction of whichever chief had taken over as Incident Commander, "and he said that they're trying to bring B-shift crews in early for Station 22, Engine 51, and Squad 36, and bring in some guys individually to tag out the heat exhaustion or smoke inhalation cases. But the phones are out of service all over Carson City, West Carson, Gardena, Torrance and Lomita so Headquarters is having a hell of a time getting in touch with any of the guys who live locally."
Shafer hadn't said a word about replacements for Squad 51 and with the way his luck seemed to be running today, they'd end up with Hookrader as their replacement Captain, if only because he lived in El Segundo and presumably had phone service. He wished he knew where Ben Collins lived. Hell, he'd take Dick Hammer over Hookrader if anyone asked and he knew for a fact that Hammer didn't live locally.
"And speaking of phones being down," Shafer said, and his voice dropped in both volume and tone. He nodded in the direction of Engine 51. "I gotta admit, it hadn't occurred to me that someone was going to have to go do home visits for the injured guys who live in this area but when Houts did his walk around…"
"Houts was here?" Roy said, flabbergasted.
Shafer shrugged. "Still is, as far as I know. This is a big f'ing deal, Roy. Lead story on every news channel including national news, according to my brother-in-law."
Roy blinked at him.
"The guy I know at HQ." Shafer puffed out an embarrassed exhale. "My wife's older brother. He's some kind of staff guy. Anyway, when Houts did his walk around, Harrison and Stoker both asked him straight out if they could go out with whoever was notifying the emergency contacts for their crews…"
Roy already knew the answer since Stoker was still manning Engine 51.
"…but without any replacements, and with both of their Engines being an essential component in relaying water to the crews on scene..." Shafer shrugged and his mouth twisted into something mocking. "Blah, blah, blah. You get the idea."
It would have been nice for the Stanley, Kelly and Lopez families to see a familiar face when they got the news; Roy wished he had thought of it himself.
Maybe it was a married guy thing to obsess about it so much, which is why Johnny didn't get it, since he didn't have anyone waiting or worrying at home, someone with an abiding interest in local news reports and a conflicted relationship with a ringing telephone. Every time he thought about Karen Stanley or Mrs. Kelly or Mrs. Lopez hearing a doorbell ring at this time of the morning, what he heard was the doorbell for his own home. He pictured Joanne being woken by the sound of it; woken by the repeated ringing or maybe someone leaning on the bell hard and long enough to wake her from sleep or to get the dog barking, which would wake her. He could plainly imagine the look that would freeze her face as she fumbled for a robe, knowing what that doorbell ring might signify.
"So who's doing the notifications?"
"Not sure," Shafer admitted. "I think Houts said that they had off-duty Battalion Chiefs and some Company Officers out doing it, but he didn't say who."
Roy changed his mind: Hookrader as a replacement Captain for this shift was tolerable; it was a hell of a lot better option than Hookrader doing any notifications, especially for anyone from Station 51. He wouldn't wish that job on anyone but he hoped that they'd asked someone with people skills, someone like Ben Stone maybe.
He heard the thud of boots against pavement and turned to see Gage trotting back towards the triage area, expression closed off and thoughtful.
Roy nodded in Stoker's direction. "He doing okay?"
Gage stopped, caught his breath and then turned a sharp-eyed gaze in his direction. "I dunno, Roy. Are you?"
DeAngelo was back by 0100 and the four of them manned the triage area, rinsing eyes with saline, providing O2 to firefighters who ate some smoke but not too much smoke, and applying silver sulfadiazine to burns that could be treated on scene. They took turns taking patients in to Rampart when the smoke inhalation, heat exhaustion or the burn demanded it.
Between patients, they watched the fire.
Two firefighters stumbled their way toward the triage area at about 0230 and he and Gage went out to meet them.
"He's got a burn on his leg," one of the men said, between coughs.
"Only because you knocked me into that support beam, you jackass," said the other, with more affection in his tone than in his words.
Both wore helmets that said 127, which carried a special, unspoken obligation, at least for DeSoto and Gage, not that they wouldn't have taken good care of them anyway.
"Okay, how about you take a seat over here," Roy said, steering the guy with the burn towards a blanket. "Johnny, you want to…"
"Yeah," Gage said, already reaching out a hand to the fireman with a bad cough. "Hey, why don't you grab a seat while my partner treats your buddy and let me take a listen to that cough you got going."
Roy reached for his shears automatically, running them up the fabric of the uniform trousers, wishing not for the first time that night that the crews on scene had gotten called out just a little later, late enough that they might have been wearing bunker pants rather than the blue fabric ones. He took the burn kit that DeAngelo handed him, draped sterile gauze over the burned calf and snipped the top of the saline bag.
He nodded a quiet thanks to DeAngelo who crouched down next to them, fingertips on the patient's left wrist.
"How's it going in there?"
It was sufficient to pull his patient's attention away from Johnny listening with a stethoscope to what sounded like a case of smoke inhalation on the other guy, which was at least partly Roy's intent.
"Bad," the guy from 127s said, lips tight slashes in a grim face. "Both back staircases are completely gone now, stairs, rails, platforms, you name it, all came crashing down. Useless except as chimneys, and they're a little too good at that."
Roy nodded, moving his saline stream steadily over the burn. He had heard the thunder of falling metal platforms and treads more than an hour earlier and Cap had predicted it at least ninety minutes before that.
"Fire jumped up the cable conduits to the third floor. You have any idea how many insulated copper cables they have up on that floor?" the man demanded. "Try tens of thousands, maybe a hundred, two hundred thousand. Tons of fuel, almost no ventilation on that floor, not that we haven't been trying, you know. Cutting through those concrete walls is a bitch and a half. We've gone through every blade we brought and my Lieutenant went begging for spares." He shifted, unwittingly moving his bad leg, and hissed in pain. "How bad?"
"It'll hurt less if you try not to move it."
Roy waited until DeAngelo finished listening to the patient's lungs before he said anything else.
"It's not too bad," he said gently, "probably second degree, but it's over enough surface area that I'm gonna send you in."
He watched closely, waiting for the instinctive, almost automatic objection he expected, but the man took a deep breath and then sagged back. All the fight in him had been sapped by the fire.
"Yeah, okay," he said. "What about Sheridan? He all right?"
Roy looked to his right, where Gage had Sheridan on O2 and was talking quietly on the biophone.
"Something tells me you'll be sharing a ride."
He was certain now that while the walls of this sturdy little fort of a building might still be standing, its contents were completely lost. Someone in charge must have agreed because orders went given: at 0430, they pulled everyone out of the building.
He felt as if he'd been awake and in motion for a full 48 hour shift, maybe a 72. He'd heard some departments still did those but he couldn't imagine how their guys functioned. There was usually some sleep on a shift but it was never a guarantee.
He'd started wondering if 127's Lieutenant might have gotten it right when he said the fire might burn until Thanksgiving if they didn't get more water on it. He wasn't sure how much water this one was going to need. Would Castaic Lake be enough? How about Littlerock Reservoir? Maybe they should just redirect the Aqueduct system to this location.
And then someone walked into the triage area wearing a turnout coat and a Captain's helmet that said 51 and Roy accepted that he'd started to hallucinate, probably from exhaustion. He'd personally transported Captain Stanley to Rampart and had helped Brackett stabilize him enough for exploratory surgery. As of an hour ago, 51's Captain was still in surgery.
"DeSoto," the hallucination said. "Any word from the hospital on Hank, Lopez or Kelly?"
He stared at the helmet, trying to make sense of this figment of his imagination until gradually his eyes drifted down to the face under the helmet's brim.
Ben Collins stared back at him, pale blue eyes squinting, jaw shifting in a display of worry that Roy had never before seen from 51's B-shift Captain.
"Yeah, okay," Collins said with a look Roy couldn't quite interpret. "I just came from the IC. You and Gage are going to pack up here and take the Squad back to the Station. My guys will take over, resupply, whatever needs doing. They didn't want to pull the Engine from the scene because she's at the front of the relay, so my Engine crew came here instead. Dawson is going to give Stoker the keys to his car."
Roy nodded. He felt a presence besides him and he knew it was Johnny, which was good because Johnny rarely had a problem talking and for some reason right now, Roy couldn't seem to come up with the right thoughts or words, much less actually speak them.
"I'm sorry we couldn't get here sooner but with the phone system being down, it was hell to reach everyone. Dawson," Collins jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the B-Shift Engineer who was walking towards Engine 51, "and I ended up having to go out to their homes to roust Hagan and Cooper out of bed 'cause we couldn't get through." He looked at Gage. "Any news?"
"No news yet, Cap," Gage said, and Roy was shocked at how raspy he sounded, as if he'd been eating smoke instead of treating for it. "We took 'em in around midnight and I don't think Rampart was really prepared for how many guys we ended up bringing." He titled his head towards the paramedics from 43s who were listening in but not participating. "Eddie Shafer did the last run to Rampart about an hour ago. Squad 36's guys had completed their breathing treatment," and he shuddered from his less than fond personal memories of those, "but our crew and the guys from 22s were still being treated."
"Okay, you guys can head out," Collins said and he looked them both up and down. "Assuming either of you two is fit to drive the Squad back."
"I got it, Cap," Gage said immediately, faster than Roy could open his mouth. For a change, he didn't feel particularly inclined to argue the point.
Collins didn't look entirely convinced.
"You're probably safe to get back to the barn; it's a short trip. I know you're going to want to head to the hospital after that but you need to get some rack time first. Just do it and don't even bother arguing with me. I'm not sure either of you is safe behind a wheel right now, and Hank'll have my ass if I let you try."
"I'll get them where they need to go, Cap."
Collins whirled; none of them had heard or seen Stoker coming up behind him. The B-Shift Captain focused on Stoker, evaluating him, and then nodded.
"Okay." He looked around and then relaxed his shoulders a little and gave them something that slightly resembled a smile. "Go on, get out of here. You're relieved."
