Line of Duty

by Terri Blackstock

  “Anybody . . . higher?”

  “No way. Top ten . . . fully involved.”

  “Any injured . . . ?”

  “Haven’t found any. . . . Looks like the floor was evacuated in time.”

  Dan wiped the sweat from his forehead and kept going as possibilities raced through his mind. If an alarm had sounded before the first blast, then those on the top floors might have made it down several flights before the bomb went off. Jill could be outside even now, trying to get to a phone.

  “Chief Breaux here.” The voice sounded distant and broken. The radios didn’t work all that well in high-rises. Fire departments all over the state had lobbied for better equipment, but so far the bureaucracy hadn’t coughed up the money. “What side of the building are you on?”

  Crackling lingered for a moment. “North side, Chief.”

  “. . . top twelve floors of the north side are involved . . . guys need to get out of there . . . down and sweep the floors for survivors as you go.”

  The men in front of Dan paused, as if trying to decide whether to keep climbing. Sweat poured from their faces. The guy directly in front of him was about thirty pounds overweight and looked as if he would need rescue himself if he climbed another flight.

  Dan tried to get around him.

  “I want to know who’s on each floor . . . how many injured are being brought down,” Breaux said. “Give me a roll call. Who’s on nineteen?”

  “Miller and Jackson. We’re the only ones, heading down.”

  “How about eighteen?”

  Dan kept climbing. He had reached sixteen when he encountered six guys heading down.

  One of them stopped him. “Wrong way,” he said. “Chief said to head down.”

  “I heard the transmission.” Dan wasn’t daunted. “I have to get up there anyway.”

  “Hey, son. Breaux’s in charge here and he meant what he said.”

  Dan looked past him and adjusted the hose he carried on his shoulder. The guy was slowing him down. “Look, my wife was on the top floor. If there’s any chance she’s there—”

  “We got injured!” One of the New Orleans guys burst through the reentry door. “Need help in here!”

  Dan couldn’t ignore the call. He glanced up the stairs one last time, then headed onto the floor. A ceiling on the north side had caved into one of the offices and a wall had collapsed. Several people lay trapped. Some were dead.

  Dan went to a woman who lay on the floor. “Please, help me,” she coughed. “I think my leg is broken.”

  The break was visible. She would have to be carried. Several more men were coming onto the floor. “Grab a chair,” he shouted to one of them. “Help me get her down.”

  The firefighter, who wore a NOFD T-shirt under his open turnout coat, grabbed a rolling secretarial chair with sturdy arms. The two of them lifted her into it.

  “Hold on, now,” Dan said. “Try to stay in the chair and we’ll get you down.”

  The woman was sobbing. “I should have gotten out earlier, but I thought I had time. I had to back up some of my data. How could I be so stupid?”

  “Calm down, ma’am. You’ll be okay.”

  They each grabbed an arm of her chair and carried her to the stairwell. Other firefighters on the way up turned sideways to let them down.

  Dan thought of handing her over to someone else, but there were other injured. And even if he traded places with one of the other guys, he wasn’t likely to make it much higher.

  Oh, God, please let Jill be safe.

  The woman in the chair began to cough, and he handed her the extra tank he had on his back, helping her breathe. “You’ll be all right, ma’am. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  They got her to the ninth floor, the eighth, the seventh . . .

  A blast shook the building, knocking the chair out of his hands. The woman went flying, and Dan dove for her. She hit the next landing and lay unconscious where she’d fallen. Blood ran through her hair.

  Dan yelled for help, but all was chaos behind him.

  “Evacuate immediately!” the radio voice shouted. “Evacuate! Evacuate! Get out of the building now!”

  The floor began to sway, like some trick foundation in a carnival horror house. Cement rained from the ceiling above him. He tried to cover the woman with his body. Debris knocked against his helmet, hammered into his back . . .

  He heard a rumbling thunder that seemed to pick up volume and velocity, and the building trembled like a shed in a hurricane.

  “It’s coming down!” someone shouted.

  The thundering grew louder. He pulled the woman up onto his back and started down the next flight.

  The wall next to him began to crack . . .

  And the stairs crumbled beneath his feet.

  He dropped her and fell forward, cement and steel shattering like thin ice beneath his feet. Rock and metal battered him, buried him, crushed him beneath its angry weight.

  I’m going to die.

  It was his last thought before the world went black.

  Chapter Seven

  It’s going to fall!” Ashley’s scream turned Jill to the building, and she saw it swaying.

  The top floors began to collapse in on themselves. For Jill, it was her life coming down, her hopes and her dreams, every plan she’d ever made. Dan was in that building.

  She screamed.

  Ashley grabbed Jill’s arm. “Run!”

  In the split second between paralysis and action, Jill made the decision to live. She would not stand here and be buried alive, and she would not let this girl die.

  She took Ashley’s hand and ran. A stampede of other evacuees scattered in all directions. She heard a violent tornado sound behind her, popping her ears and burying her screams.

  Debris crashed in their path. A wind of heat whooshed through them, then swallowed them in a mushroom of smoke and ash as it sucked the oxygen from the air.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t cough, couldn’t speak . . .

  She shoved Ashley under a car, covered her with her own body. Sheltering her head with her arms, she waited for it to end, the awful train-rumble and the tsunami wind, the horror of smoke and dust running them over, suffocating them, blanketing them.

  In the eye of her terror, she once again cried out to God for help.

  Chapter Eight

  Forty minutes away at the Blooms ’n’ Blossoms in Newpointe, Allie watched the television with horror as the third bomb exploded.

  “They’re telling us to get away from the building!” the reporter on-site shouted. The camera shook as it followed him away from the scene.

  The screen shifted to a broader view and an instant replay of the explosion. “Looks like this one came from one of the bottom floors,” the anchor said, clearly excited. “This does not look good for the evacuees or for the firefighters already in the building. Bill, tell us what you’re seeing.”

  Allie slapped her hand over her mouth and cried out. Was Mark in the building? Had Newpointe even gotten there yet?

  “Mommy?”

  Her child’s face looked tentative and frightened, and his bottom lip quivered as he started to cry. She was scaring him.

  She picked him up and turned back to the screen.

  The screen went black, then switched to a wider angle, filmed from a helicopter. The building was falling into itself, shrinking floor by floor as a brown cloud replaced the concrete and metal. It seemed to move in slow motion, erasing everything in its path.

  “Oh, God, no!” Allie cried. Justin started to scream.

  “It’s okay, honey!” She was trembling, trying not to drop him. “Mommy’s going to close the store, and we’re going to run down to the fire department and make sure Daddy’s okay.”

  She hoped Justin didn’t understand. Her heart slammed against her chest, beating out a warning rhythm. The building is down. Firefighters are dead.

  It couldn’t be. Newpointe was probably stuck in a traffic jam, unable to get thr
ough. Mark was probably sitting in the truck, watching the whole thing from a distance.

  God, please get him out of harm’s way!

  Quickly, she turned off the set, locked the door, and took off on foot the two blocks to the fire department from which her husband had left over an hour ago.

  He had called her from his cell phone on the way out of town. She had told him to be careful, never imagining what danger awaited him.

  Justin wailed as she ran, and she held him tighter. She passed City Hall, the police station, then crossed the grass and headed up to the fire department.

  She saw two off-duty firefighters pulling up into the small parking lot. Ignoring them, she raced inside. She found Slater Finch in the empty truck bay, donning his gear.

  “Slater, do you have any news on Mark and the guys?”

  “None,” Slater said, “but the building just fell and I’m goin’ over. I was off duty but I came in soon as I saw.”

  Johnny Ducote burst in through the door on the parking lot side. “We gotta get over there, Slater!”

  “Let’s go,” Slater said. “We’ll take my Jeep.”

  Johnny grabbed his turnouts and started out to Slater’s Jeep. Allie walked out to the parking lot as Lex Harper pulled up. “Wait for me!” he cried.

  Allie followed him in and watched him gather up his gear. “Lex, I need to hear from Mark. If you see him, please tell him to call me. If you have any word at all . . .”

  But Lex wasn’t listening. Arms laden with his coat, pants, and boots, he headed back out the door. Sobbing, Allie buried her face against her child.

  “Allie!”

  She looked up to see her friend Celia, tears staining her face as she clutched her own daughter. “Mark’s there, isn’t he?”

  Allie nodded, and Celia drew her into a hug.

  “What’s happening?” Allie cried. “It’s like nine-eleven all over again. The crashing building, the firefighters . . .”

  “Stan just left to go help. Honey, he’ll call as soon as he knows something. He knows how worried we all are.” She pulled Allie into the station, where the television still blared. The crashing building replayed on the screen.

  Allie set Justin down and watched it again as if for the first time. “How can people do such a thing?” She wiped her tears and wondered if there were terrorists watching the coverage. Were they calling each other in celebration over the crumbling symbol of corrupt capitalism? Was it Al-Qaeda? Bin Laden himself? Or was it some localized cell of hate-mongers who’d been biding their time, waiting for today to strike?

  “It’s going to be okay,” Celia whispered. “We just have to have faith.”

  But Allie knew that the Lord took the lives of the faithful all the time. Devoted Christians grieved. Lovers of Christ often suffered.

  Faith was not always an umbrella of defense. Today, good people had died.

  She prayed desperately that her husband wasn’t one of them.

  Chapter Nine

  Jill couldn’t breathe. Coughing the fallout from her lungs, she crawled out from under the car and rubbed the powder from her eyes. Silence had fallen over the street, like the morning after a snowfall. But it wasn’t snow; it was a yellow ash that coated the street and the cars and hung foglike in the air. Ashley slid out from under the car and bent double to clear her lungs. Tears rivered through the powder on her face. She walked back toward the building as if in a daze.

  “Ashley, we should stay back,” Jill choked out.

  But it was as though Ashley couldn’t hear.

  Jill followed her. Others stood frozen in the street, covered in yellow-white. Some coughed and gagged, others threw up. A cluster of firefighters convened quietly around a fire truck so covered in ash that you couldn’t see the color beneath it.

  There was a reverent hush, as if no one dared yell or cry out. Shock had dropped its covering over that block.

  Jill searched for that Newpointe truck she had been standing beside with Marty, but now all she saw was rubble and knew that the debris had buried it, right where she had stood just moments ago.

  Ahead of her, she saw the yellow fluorescent stripes of a fireman’s coat glowing in the smoke. Hope stirred from her despair, and she headed toward it. She touched the firefighter’s arm and he turned around. It was Ray Ford, Newpointe’s fire chief, his black skin covered with white and his eyes shell-shocked and dazed.

  “Ray, it’s me, Jill.”

  Recognition flickered in his eyes. “Jill!”

  “Have you seen Dan? Do you know if he got out?”

  “I ain’t seen anybody, Jill,” he said, “but I’m going back, and if he’s in there, I’ll find him.”

  He started to walk, and she followed behind him. The smoke was thicker here, and the air was thin and tainted. She coughed again.

  “Jill, you get out of here,” he said quietly. “There were already three explosions before the building collapsed. We don’t know if there are more bombs. You get to where it’s safe.”

  She sucked in a breath. “I can’t. I have to know if my husband’s alive.”

  “You know I’ll do everything I can to find him.” He started trudging through the debris. She started to follow him, but a pair of hands grasped her from behind and she swung around, thinking for the briefest of seconds that it might be Dan. But it was only a New Orleans police officer.

  “Ma’am, I have to ask you to leave the block. It’s too dangerous here.”

  She collapsed in a fit of coughing again. “You don’t understand . . . my husband . . . a fireman.”

  “There’s a school three blocks away that we’ve set up as a command post. We’re sending victims over there. You can wait there in the gym for word about your husband. Go down three blocks and take a right. You’ll see it.”

  “I don’t want to leave here,” she choked. “I can’t.”

  “Ma’am, your husband’s life might be at stake, and we need to work as fast as we can. We can’t have extra people milling around.”

  “I can help.” She started to cough again. “I can dig. I can do whatever you need.”

  “You can’t even breathe,” he said. “Go to the treatment center and wait.”

  She looked around, searching for someone else who could help, and saw Issie standing across the street, covered with soot and ashes. Her face was wet and streaked with tears.

  “Issie!”

  Issie ran to her and threw her arms around her. “Jill, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she cried, “but where is Dan? I can’t find him.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Our guys went up to help evacuate the building, and then it collapsed. Maybe they got out.”

  Jill looked toward where the building had stood. The cloud of smoke still hung in a phantom outline of the structure. “They told me I have to go to the school three blocks away and wait for word. You want to come?”

  “No,” Issie said, “there are too many wounded.” She looked helplessly around. “It seems to me like the end of the world. Doesn’t it to you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “only Jesus is supposed to come riding in on a white horse and take us away.”

  “I don’t see any white horses,” Issie said. “Maybe it isn’t the end. Maybe the worst part of all of this is that it has to go on.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jill had lost Ashley when she had wandered off into the fog. Hoping the girl had been told about the treatment center, Jill decided to follow the stream of victims heading that way.

  They were all like her—dazed, soot-covered, choking souls, walking in a grim parade down Canal Street to the school the police directed them to. She wondered if Wanda, her court reporter, had made it out. She was in the clear stairwell. Maybe she had gotten down long before Jill.

  Her eyes burned as if handfuls of hot sand had been flung into them. Those around her had bloodshot, swollen eyes, and Jill knew hers probably looked the same.

  The crowd began to move into the high school, w
here the air was clear. Outside, people who weren’t covered with filth handed out bottled water. She took one thankfully and went in. They were directed to the gym just down the big high school corridor. A “Tammy For President” sign hung on the door next to “J.D. for V.P.” Inside, the brick walls were papered with Tempra-painted signs—“Tame Those Dawgs” and “Falcons Fly” and “We’re Number One.”

  The place smelled of sweat and mold, but the flood of survivors brought the scent of smoke with them.

  “Ma’am, do you need to wash out your eyes?”

  She turned and saw a young woman in a Red Cross shirt holding two tiny cups of water.

  “Your eyes look bad. Here, wash them out.”

  Jill’s hands shook so hard that she feared she would spill the cups. Still, she took them. “Thank you.”

  “Over here,” the girl said and led her to the bleachers lining the wall. Jill sat down, and the girl knelt in front of her.

  Jill washed out each eye and let the tepid water run down her face. It gave her relief, but her corneas still felt lacerated. She wished she could step into the shower and let the spray run over them. The girl gave her more water. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

  She hurt all over, but she didn’t have time to think about it now. “I don’t think so. I need a phone. I . . . lost my cell phone.” The enormity of her loss crushed down upon her, and she started to cry again. “I have to call . . . try to find my husband.”

  The girl set a comforting hand on her shoulder and directed her attention to a line forming at the corner of the room. “We have a phone over there but there’s a pretty big crowd waiting.”

  Jill squinted at the line of people waiting to use that phone. Despair ripped through her, and she covered her face in anguish.

  “Where is he?” the girl asked softly. “At home?”

  “No,” Jill said. “He’s a firefighter. He was in the building when it came down. I have to know if he’s all right.”

  The young woman pulled a small cell phone out of her pocket. “Here, use mine.”

  Jill caught her breath.

  “I wasn’t going to tell anybody I had this, but your husband was in there and all . . .”