No Ordinary Day
Page 14
“ ‘Maintain a healthy fear of this job?’ I think we all have that rule covered, Cochrane,” said Ronnie Halari snidely.
“Actually, I was thinking ‘no one leaves ’til the scene is secured,’ ” Cochrane fired back, “but I know that’s never been one you’ve tested out for, Halari.”
Dave rose quickly as the two men turned angrily toward each other and raised his hand.
“Listen,” he said sharply.
The crew fell silent, obeying.
At first, there was no sound outside of the noise of the other rescue and law enforcement agencies doing their disaster relief work.
Then, in the distance, a thin noise could be heard over the whine of the wind.
A weak cry, throaty and frail.
Possibly a last gasp.
But unmistakably that of an infant.
An explosion of Styrofoam coffee cups blasted skyward as the firefighters scrambled for their tools and flashlights, suddenly energized.
“SHhhh!” Dave Windsor cautioned. “Quiet.”
The crew froze.
The noise had stopped.
Dave raised a finger to his lips, new light in his eyes, as the men and women of Obergrande Fire Company #2 inclined their ears into the wind, listening hard, praying silently.
They heard nothing but the gusting clamor of the wind and the roar of the river.
“Come on, little one,” Dave whispered. “Come on—tell us where you are.”
For an agonizingly long time, the firefighters waited, straining their ears.
Then, finally, somewhere in the darkness they heard what appeared to be the sound of hiccups.
Walt Bentley, the senior member of the team, pointed rapidly upriver.
“There!” he shouted. “It’s coming from up there!”
The team scrambled toward the new waterfront, holding their flashlights aloft, scanning the refuse along the shore.
Oh God, oh God please, Dave thought, holding his flashlight high and shining it in the area Bentley had indicated, along with almost a dozen others.
The lights reflected on nothing but endless garbage, pushed up against the edge of the street and floating in the pooling floodwater.
“SHhhhh!” Dave Windsor commanded again.
The firefighters kept their lights trained on the wreckage, falling into anxious silence.
Nothing.
Footsteps running behind him barely registered in his ears until a panting voice spoke next to Dave.
“Chief?” It was a woman’s voice, husky and high in pitch.
Dave turned slightly away from the spot, trying to keep his eyes fixed on it.
Lindsay Saboran, one of two women on his team, stood beside him, puffing from the exertion of running so fast in her gear.
She held up a piece of equipment.
Trying to keep from losing the direction of his focus, Dave grabbed it from her and held it up in front of his face.
It was the unit’s thermal imaging camera, on loan from Clarkson University.
A new, high-tech camera that sensed, and projected, heat.
His concentration broken, Dave stared at the equipment in irritation.
Then, a moment later, understood her intent.
“Turn off your flashlights!” he shouted to the rest of the team, who were still focusing their beams on the garbage-strewn shore. The firefighters turned in confusion, only to see him switching off his helmet light and sighting the thermal imaging camera.
Looking for heat, even in the smallest amount.
As understanding passed through the crew, lights in their hands and on their helmets snapped off in short order, leaving the rain-swollen streets black, the pretty antique streetlights all dark in the powerless city, save for the distant beams of the television crews and the endless flashing of the police lights.
“Hold still,” Dave Windsor directed.
He turned on the camera and made his way closer to the docks, pausing beside his comrades who stood, silent and still in the devouring darkness, holding their breath.
“Where are you, little baby?” he murmured. “Where are you?”
For an agonizingly long time, he scanned the new, clogged waterfront, looking for a heat signature.
He could see nothing.
Then, at the edge of the camera’s range, a small flash of heat.
Very dim.
Dave Windsor rotated and pegged the camera on the small flash, then zoomed in quickly.
He saw what might be a tiny limb, in what appeared to be a broken canoe, the rest of the body blocked by heatless refuse.
The little arm twitched, then lay motionless.
He dashed to the mound of lifeless garbage, holding on to the camera tightly, his boots tripping over rubble in the way, righting himself.
And stopping directly above where he’d seen the glimmer of heat.
“Here!” he screamed. “Here!”
The men and women of the crew were right behind him, their strength and energy renewed by a blast of hope. Like a machine, they formed a bucket brigade, only rather than applying water to a fire, they were dragging garbage out of water, passing it along and out of the way down the line.
A team of brothers and sisters, their spirits broken over the course of this day of loss and death, reinvigorated and strong.
Beneath him, he could see the heat of the firefighters’ faces as they dug frantically, through the lens of the experimental camera which was now crowded with colored readings. He tried to stay focused on where he had seen the tiny arm, giving oral directions to the diggers, until one of them seized something rectangular very close to what he thought was the limb.
And tried to lift it, but it was wedged in mud and sand.
“Help me!” Paul Moody shouted. “Scrape the crap off this thing, it’s stuck!”
A knot of bodies in fire gear surged forward, some hands dragging on the rectangle, some pawing at the weeds, mud, and garbage that stuck it to the bottom of the shattered watercraft. Their focus was honed, their training in full use, and within a matter of moments, Moody hauled the metal-and-fabric rectangle out of the canoe and spun it around to face Dave Windsor.
A life jacket surrounded the broken metal frame; the fire chief unsnapped the clasps and threw it on the ground as the crew quickly turned their headlamps and flashlights on, illuminating the scene.
At first he could see nothing beneath it but muddy cloth and webbed straps.
He tore the cloth away carefully, revealing a tiny, dirty face, hair smeared with grime.
Unmoving, seemingly lifeless.
“Nope,” Dave Windsor said through gritted teeth. “Nope. Sorry, kid, hope the dream you’re dreaming isn’t that great, because you’re gonna wake up now.”
He shouted for the medic, Callie Masino, who slid into place like a runner sliding into home plate, her bag in her hands, which she dropped to the ground.
“Give,” she said sternly to the fire chief, plucking the backpack out of his extended hands and laying it quickly on the ground with the help of three of the firefighters around her. She patted the baby’s face gently as she spoke to her team members.
“We need to get him or her out of this thing,” she said calmly, struggling with the knotted straps for a moment before giving up and snatching her scissors from the medic bag. Two snips and a few helping hands later, the broken backpack was dragged out from beneath the child, who was laid on a blanket another member of the crew had placed on the ground.
As the medic undertook infant CPR, two crew members kneeling beside her, handing her the instruments she asked for from the bag, the rest of the unit stood silently, exhaling the stress from the adrenaline rush they had just experienced, some whispering quiet prayers, others staring without speaking.
All tense.
Betty Finley came hesitantly to the edge of the circle, a tureen of coffee wrapped in dishtowels in her hands.
“Step back, Mrs. Finley,” Don Farmer said impatiently, trying not to snarl. “We don’t n
eed coffee here now—”
“I thought you might need warm towels,” the town clerk whispered raggedly. “The coffee is keeping them hot.”
Farmer and Paul Moody exchanged a glance. Farmer took off his fire hat.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said quietly. “You’re right—it’s been—well, it’s been—”
Mrs. Finley nodded understandingly, her face white from shock and the lights on their helmets.
Callie was leaning over the infant now, compressing the chest, blowing gently into the nose and mouth.
“Come on,” Walt Bentley urged. “Come on, kid. Come on.”
Dave Windsor had stepped away, calling for an ambulance on his walkie talkie.
“Get the wet clothes off,” Callie instructed when she was back to chest compressions. “They weigh more than the baby does. There’s probably ten pounds of water in that diaper.”
The two assisting firefighters followed her instructions, gently cutting and removing pieces of the clothing when Callie’s hands were out of the way.
“A little girl,” Ronnie Halari, one of the two assistants, said quietly. He looked up, his eyes gleaming, and smiled at the other man assisting, Thad Cochrane, who returned the grin, both of them fathers of young daughters who had exchanged cross words a short time before.
Cross words long forgotten in the fellowship of their rescue efforts.
Their smiles faded as the child remained unresponsive.
Just as the medic was bending down for a second round of mouth-to-mouth, the infant flinched, then coughed, foamy water spilling from her mouth. Callie rolled her quickly to her side as she stretched, then spit up.
And let out a furious shriek that split the night and raised the hair on every head gathered around her.
A roar of laughter, followed by gasping cheers and shouts, hugs and high-fives, ascended into the dark night.
Breaking through the gloom, shattering the pall of death that had descended on the suffering town.
And the men and women who protected it.
At least for a moment.
The exhausted first responders rubbed their eyes, rolled their shoulders or bent at the waist, shaking the despair from their backs.
Celebrating the life they had found in the overwhelming grip of death all around them.
Mrs. Finley pushed her way tentatively forward again and unwrapped the towels from the coffee tureen, holding them out to the medic, who quickly wrapped them around the angry baby.
Who, in turn, stabbed their ears with an even more livid squeal.
“Maaaaamaaaaaa!” the little girl wailed plaintively as the lights of the approaching ambulance lit the area, splashing around, illuminating the drowned town square.
Stripping the smiles from the firefighters’ faces.
The word echoed against the walls of the surviving buildings.
Sweeping the joy that had blossomed for a moment into the last winds of the departing hurricane, which carried it into the sky.
Taking it far away from Obergrande.
Chapter 20
‡
10:47 PM
Fire House #2, East Obergrande
LATER THAT NIGHT, after the ambulance had sped away toward the Mountain Medical Emergency Center in Emmettsville, carrying the rescued infant to the emergency room and the care she needed, Dave Windsor sat in the oil lamp-and-candle-lit kitchen of Fire Station #2, a broken backpack and life jacket on the table in front of him.
Lost in thought.
Betty Finley, the town clerk, despite being profoundly shaken, had offered to accompany the infant to the hospital and stay with her until morning, when, with any luck, she would be reunited with her parents. Her husband, Leland, Obergrande’s highway superintendent, had agreed to drive his wife to the hospital behind the ambulance so that none of the first responders needed to continue their vigilance into the night.
Dave had known both of them since elementary school; a half-generation older than he was, Leland had coached his high school football team, and Betty had volunteered in the school library, generous, he thought, for a childless couple who were not, he suspected, childless on purpose.
His mind returned to the baby his unit had found.
He tried not to think too heavily on where her parents might be. There were many people he had seen in passing looking frantically for missing children, and he had every reason to believe that when morning finally came, bringing light and dry air and calm to the Seventh Circle of Hell that Obergrande had been turned into by the flood, her parents would be located, and the family reunited.
Every reason to believe.
Even though, in his heart of hearts, he didn’t.
He had saved the backpack, had searched for it and located it while the baby was being loaded into the ambulance. Callie Masino had also volunteered to go with her, and rode along in the rig, holding the squalling infant in her arms while the paramedics checked her over.
While he was searching for the backpack, the dozen members of the crew stood in silence at the back of the ambulance, watching solemnly until the rig pulled out of the area, its lights and siren screaming into the air. They remained in silence, standing there until they could no longer see the flashing lights, could no longer hear the siren’s wail echoing off the mountains.
Then, almost as one, they exhaled.
“Hang in there, honey,” called Walt Bentley in the direction the ambulance had gone, choking up. “We’ve got your back, whatever you need. Hang in there!”
“I think when she’s back with her parents, we should ask if we can all adopt her, kind of as honorary aunts and uncles,” Kevin Moreland suggested. “Make her the official Obergrande Fire Company #2 mascot.”
“She broke my damn heart when she called for her mama,” Lindsay Saboran said, fighting back tears. “I’m never gonna get that sound out of my head.”
“You’re the first one in line for aunt-hood, if her parents agree,” Paul Moody said to Lindsay, accompanied by a low vocal chorus of agreement. “Never would have found her if you hadn’t thought of that thermal camera. It would never have occurred to me—I forgot we were testing it for Clarkson.”
“With Callie right on line behind you, Lindsay. She was totally in the zone tonight. That little kid was lucky Masino was on this team,” Cochrane said. “No one else here had the cert for infants.”
“Any sign of who she belongs to?” Andy Klein, the assistant chief, asked Dave. The chief held up the backpack.
“This is all we have to go on, except for the canoe. Forensics has it now. I’m gonna take this back to the station and go over it with a fine-toothed comb.”
He lowered the backpack and took off his fire hat.
“The rest of you, go home, or to the shelter, if your house was in the flood zone. The Red Cross is set up outside the station and on the other side of Tree Hill Park all night. Go there if you need chow or a place to stay. Flood waters usually recede pretty quickly, but the work continues for a long time afterward, so rest up—we’re going to be on duty for quite some time. Good work, Fire Company #2. You’ve earned your bars today, each and every one of you.”
He held the backpack aloft in salute.
The crew returned the salute silently, staring with wide eyes at the little carrier that had saved an infant from the raging river.
Dave examined that backpack now. It had no particular insignia identifying its brand, and only one zippered pocket for storage. The life jacket that had been placed around it had doubtless kept the child alive, because the canoe showed signs of traumatic impact of the most devastating nature.
It looked, as far as he was concerned, like a massive tree had run into or fallen on it, either on land or in the river.
The impact had been on the opposite end of the canoe from where the baby had been secured into the watercraft, and had filled half of it with small branches and leaves.
Though not certain, Dave Windsor thought there might have been blood in it as well.
The use of which was an idea that had come from Lindsay Saboran, a smart and common-sensical young woman that Dave expected he would serve under as the department’s chief someday.
I need to put her personally, and the unit collectively, in for a commendation when this nightmare is over, he thought, running his finger over the backpack’s zippered compartment, little more than a pocket.
Inside that compartment, Dave could feel something hard and thin.
Carefully he slid the pull on the zipper across its teeth, trying to keep from breaking it.
And succeeded, after a moment, in doing so.
The pocket was small and shallow, perhaps three inches deep and eight or nine wide.
Dave slipped his finger inside.
Rather than hard metal, what he expected to feel, his finger brushed a soft, velvety material, a bag or pouch of some sort that contained the harder object, with packing foam in the corners of the pocket protecting it.
He slowly slid that container out of the sodden backpack and laid it on the table in the candlelight before him.
The pouch, from what he could see, had a very old and shedding piece of twine sewn through the top, like a drawstring. Dave untied the knot carefully, using his Boy Scout badge-level knot untying ability, then pulled the bag open and allowed the object inside to slide out onto the table.
It gleamed in the light, despite a layer of tarnish that coated it.
A bracelet, formed of hammered silver, old, from the looks of it, with a single dark stone, its color impossible to discern, set in the center of it. The setting was sectioned, with a clasp and a locking piece.
Dave Windsor was a bright man, with more knowledge of horticulture than anyone in Obergrande, and most likely, all of Essex County.
But, other than identifying it as most likely a bracelet of some kind, uncertain as to what part of the body it was expected to be worn on, fairly certain it was made of what appeared to be silver, and set with a dark, translucent stone of some sort, he had no idea what he was looking at.