by Earl Emerson
What I did not see was either of my daughters.
Or Morgan Neumann.
Several hours earlier they’d gone to the movie in my truck, but the truck was back now, parked by the side of the house.
I touched Helen Neumann’s shoulder. “The girls, Helen? Where are they?”
She gave me a blank look and turned back to the fire building. An hour ago I thought going brain-dead was the worst thing that could happen.
I’d been wrong.
This was the worst thing that could happen.
Watching your family burn in the fires of hell.
Though we were sixty feet from my house, the heat on our faces was enough to make Helen wince. From the blackness and speed of the smoke I knew the interior was boiling over. As if to confirm my judgment, another living-room window cracked open, and sections of plate glass fell into the flower bed.
Things were moving in slow motion. I felt as if I were trapped in a dream. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I was still back at the Sunset Motel and this was a nightmare.
I grabbed Helen’s shoulders. “Helen? Where are the girls? Where is your daughter?”
“She’s . . . why . . . she’s baby-sitting for Mr. Swope.” Helen’s mind was always slow, but tonight it had stripped all its gears.
“Are they at your house? Have you seen them?”
Two couples from the other end of our small enclave stepped in front of me, the women in nightgowns and tennis shoes, the men with their shirts hurriedly thrown on, one of them barefoot. Nobody had seen my daughters. A car full of teenage girls was parked to one side, having driven up the lane to gawp at a stranger’s tragedy. People needed to see others in pain. It was like a circus act.
I’d wasted half a minute unmasking the obvious.
If my daughters had come out, they would have been next to Helen Neumann. They hadn’t and they weren’t.
I ran to the Lexus, popped the trunk, kicked off my shoes, pulled my bunking boots-trousers ensemble out, and stepped into the boots, pulling the suspenders up over my jeans and T-shirt. I slipped into the bunking coat and picked up the face piece and helmet as I walked. The helmet slipped out of my fingers. I’d never been this nervous at a fire. Not even my first.
I’d wasted too much precious time.
I ran to the engine, where two firefighters from the Snoqualmie department were dragging hose toward my house. I pulled a spare backpack out of the compartment and onto my shoulders, fastening the waist buckle and shoulder straps as I walked. I tugged my facepiece over my head, put on my helmet, and twisted the main air valve behind me on the bottle, all of this done on automatic pilot.
Two unmasked firefighters from Snoqualmie were in my front yard directing a hose stream through the broken-out front window. They were thirty feet away, but still, the heat was forcing them to duck low. It was pretty obvious everything in my front room was cooked.
Unless they were in one of the back bedrooms, my girls were gone.
“There are kids inside!” I yelled at the firefighters. “Get in there! Move up on it!” One of them glanced over his shoulder at me, but neither budged. I don’t think they heard me.
Masked up, flashlight in my gloved hands, I jogged toward the front door. Before I could go in, one of the firefighters on the hose line, a large, pale man with a black mustache and crooked teeth, grabbed my shoulder and held me back. “You’ll never make it. Let us knock it down from out here first.”
Their line was directed horizontally into the rolling ball of orange but was having almost no effect. Over two hundred gallons a minute making no dent in the heat. Failing to darken the flames.
I stepped close to the house, knelt, opened the front door—it should have been locked—and felt a searing blast of heat on my face.
I crawled into the house on my belly. “Allyson!” I called. “Britney! Where are you guys?”
In my mind they were dead, having hidden under their beds or in a closet, long since having given up on their father. I could think of nothing worse than dying by fire, especially when you thought your hero firefighter father was going to save you.
And didn’t.
It became apparent quickly that I wasn’t going to bring them out through the front. The heat was so bad my wrists were burning where the gauntlets on my gloves were pushed up into my sleeves, the back of my neck feeling like the worst sunburn of my life. I tried to get lower, slithering along on my stomach for another few feet. I was breathing cool air from the compressed air cylinder on my back, but the room was as hot as anything I’d ever endured.
I backed out just as the hose stream hit the ceiling above me and a great billow of steam descended all around, burning my cheeks around the edges of my face mask, scalding me so badly I wanted to scream.
Just before I cleared the front door, something opaque came down across my vision and slapped my facepiece so I could see only out of my left eye. I wondered for half a second if my face was burned. There was so much adrenaline pumping through my veins, I couldn’t tell.
When I got outside, the firefighters in the yard cut down the volume of water from their nozzle and arched a stream of water onto me. We could hear the sizzle of evaporating water on the plastic Cairns helmet, on the metal parts that held the shield up. Steam rose off my coat and backpack.
As they cooled me off, one of the tires on my pickup truck exploded with a dull pop. A male bystander scampered over to it, opened the door with a T-shirt wrapped around his hand, released the brake, and tried to push the vehicle to safety. Two other men ran over to help but found the sheet metal too hot to touch.
When I swiped at the object across my facepiece, I realized a piece of my helmet had melted onto my air mask. Only by taking my helmet off could I peel the melted plastic off.
“God, you’re burning up, man,” said the nozzleman. “I didn’t think you were going to come out.”
“Don’t shoot it into the rear,” I said. “I’m going in the back door.”
“It’s not going to work. It’s—”
Maybe they would be back there somewhere—my girls—hiding in one of the back rooms.
As I reached the still-intact window of the family room in back of the house, I could see flame rolling across the kitchen ceiling toward the back door.
I opened the door and was met by a dull roar of orange bursting out over my head. Stupid bastards. The firefighters in front were using their hose stream to push the flame and heat at me from the front. They hadn’t listened to me.
I dropped to my knees and crawled inside, flashlight in one hand.
Another burst from the hose line in front of the house pushed a gigantic ball of yellow-orange across the ceiling toward me. I flattened out on the floor for a moment, feeling the heat on the back of my neck and through my heavy protective Nomex clothing.
Knowing the pain had just begun, I inched forward into the inferno.
48. RICE, SOUP, AND KIDS IN THE CUPBOARDS
I moved along one wall sweeping my arms under furniture, under the futon, behind the chairs, anywhere a child might hide or an adult might fall. On hands and knees I made a quick and thorough circuit of the family room keeping my nose on the floor. Walking upright, I would have lasted all of ten seconds. Our bunkers were fire-resistant, not fireproof, and even on the floor I could feel the incredible heat.
As I crawled, I felt blisters forming at my wrists and on my ears, where the heat knifed under my bunkers. House fires didn’t often get this hot, especially with the building’s windows broken out and water being applied.
In the kitchen, I reached under the table and heard the familiar sound of chair legs scraping across linoleum when I bumped them, the sound I heard every night at dinner.
Remembering my daughters sometimes liked to conceal themselves under the sink, I opened every one of the lower cupboards. Britney often leaped out at me when I swung the cupboard door open to get cat food for Eustace.
Unnerving her dad was about the most fun Britney ever had.
I would give anything to have her leap out at me now.
She didn’t.
As I passed the refrigerator, I heard the clatter of plastic and knew I’d upset the cat’s bowl. It was all so normal. Under the scrim of smoke and heat, everything was the same as always.
Visibility was marginal in back of the house, growing worse as I moved forward under volumes of thick black smoke. The farther I moved toward the front of the house, the hotter the air grew. The flashlight in my hand didn’t help much. I couldn’t see it. Water streams pouring through the front windows produced hundreds of gallons of steam, which descended to the floor and burned me. From time to time I swiped the steam off my facepiece with my glove.
In my panic my inclination was to speed straight through to the bedrooms, but years of training took over and I searched each room as I came to it in an orderly manner. Hit-and-miss searches had been the precipitator of more than one civilian death. Especially with children, who tended to hide; it was too easy to scoot right past them and not know it.
My prayer was that my daughters were in their bedroom, door closed, rags stuffed around the cracks. That they were safe and waiting for me. Wouldn’t that be any father’s prayer?
Approached from the front, our house had an open floor scheme, the only sealable rooms the bathroom to the left of the front entrance and the two bedrooms, also to the left of the front entrance. If you went right, you came into the living room, where I was now, then the kitchen and the family room, both of which I’d just now searched.
Our living room was burning like the inside of a woodstove.
The interior walls had half-inch shiplap on them, knotty pine nailed over older shiplap also half an inch thick, both sides identical, two inches of wood to drill through for our TV cable. The guy who built this place must have been pilfering from a lumberyard at night. To make matters worse, one of the previous owners had varnished all the knotty pine with an oil-base sealant.
Cozy-looking house.
Total firetrap.
The girls and I might as well have been living inside a can of gasoline.
The water stream hadn’t knocked down much, if any, of the heat. The others should have been inside fighting the fire. Aggressive, up-close attacks worked best in a residential fire. Too many of our volunteers liked to keep their distance, and God knows we didn’t have many regulars left. Click and Clack, but I hadn’t seen them outside.
An interior attack was the game plan you wanted when searching for victims. But that’s not what they were doing.
Moving along the left wall, I reached out to my right, expecting to find one of my girls, inert, helpless, but all I found were familiar objects, the antique cedar chest Lorie had bought at an estate sale and refurbished, where we kept our old calendars, tax records, and school papers. The chest was charred on top but intact, feeding my hope that my daughters were still alive. I opened the lid and felt around inside.
“Britney? Allyson?” Nothing.
The fire in the attic space above me produced a dull roar. I’d never been below an attic that was going quite like this. The roof would cave in soon.
Again, the sound of the hose stream drowned out all other noise, alternately pounding outside on the roof, then slapping the walls through the windows. When the water hit it, the fire on the shiplap walls would go out momentarily, then spring back, growing steadily hotter all the while.
Through the open window I heard men shouting, the airy burp-burp of alarm bells on self-contained breathing apparatuses as firefighters activated them. People were getting ready to come inside and help.
Then, for whatever reason, whether they’d run their water tank dry or simply reversed strategies, the hose stream shut down. Immediately the atmosphere around me became hotter.
Using my gloved hands, I felt underneath the low coffee table in the living room just opposite the gas stove, touched something, a piece of clothing, a stray shoe. When I moved the table, I realized the shoe was attached to a foot.
Pulling the table out of the way and feeling with my gloved hand, I knew I’d found someone. Not either of my daughters. Too big.
Morgan!
She wasn’t moving, nor did she react when I touched her.
I felt around on either side to see whether my girls were nearby but came upon bare hardwood floors and nothing else. Morgan must have been sleeping on the sofa when the fire started, must have slept through the initial phase. Why the smoke detectors didn’t arouse her was another matter. They weren’t beeping now, but they must have been before they melted.
Too often civilians woke up, smelled smoke, jumped up out of bed, and dropped dead right there because they’d inhaled a lungful of air so hot it cauterized their lungs. Had Morgan rolled off the sofa and kept her face near the floor, she would have been out of the worst of the heat and able to suck up enough oxygen at floor level to get out of the building. Even during the late stages of a fire, there was almost always an inch or two of breathable air on the floor.
For a split second I contemplated leaving Morgan where she lay, going after my girls. But I couldn’t do that.
I could only hope the men outside with the hose lines would get their act together and tap the fire, that my daughters were in their room with the door closed.
At night, closed bedroom doors were standard policy in our house, as they were in most firefighters’ homes, yet a bedroom door didn’t hold off a fire for long. Theirs was a standard hollow-core interior door rated for twenty minutes in a fire. Worse yet, it may have been open or partially open, because when my daughters were upset they wanted their door open, Allyson as a rule more claustrophobic than Britney. Morgan would have given in to their request in a heartbeat.
Tortured by doubts, I dragged Morgan’s body back through the house, through the kitchen, awkwardly around the corner into the family room, then out through the utility room door to the back porch. I might have taken her through the front, a shorter trip, but I chose the route I knew to be safe.
Morgan was a delicate creature. So precise in everything she did. Always with that awkward grace of a yearling. So thin. Pulling her along the floor was like pulling a stick doll.
When I reached the back porch, nobody was there to assist me. It was still too early in the fire for the legions of volunteers who generally helped out in the yard.
I got to my feet, picked her up, carried her away from the structure and out onto the cool grass of our backyard. I was still looking around for somebody to take over when I realized she wasn’t breathing.
She had no hair. No recognizable face. Her clothes either had burned off or were melted beyond recognition. Char everywhere on her body. No identifying marks, just a stiff, doll-like figure, arms clenched in front of herself in the classic pugilistic burn victim pose. The only color anywhere was on patches of clothing that had been against the floor. This was an obscene and grotesque caricature of the sweet young woman Morgan had been. The body on the ground in front of me looked more like a Hiroshima bomb victim than my baby-sitter.
When I returned to the back porch, I found my pathway blocked by one of the firefighters I’d seen in front, Christi, who stood deliberately in the doorway, black smoke pouring out over his head.
“Good work,” he said. “You got her out.”
“Move!” I was still “on air,” breathing through my face mask, clean compressed air instead of hot, filthy smoke.
“Don’t chance it again, Lieut. Anyone else in there is dead.”
“My daughters are in there.”
It wasn’t clear whether he heard me or not. “Nobody could do it now. We didn’t think you were going to make it out the first time.”
“Move.”
“I can’t let you do that. You’ll be burned.”
“I’m already burned, you stupid bastard.”
I tried to push past him, wrestled with him for a moment, and then found myself on the ground next to the porch. Whether he’d pushed me or I’d tripped, I h
ad no idea. As I climbed to my feet, he ducked low and ran from the doorway, racing away in front of a surge of flame that rolled out after him like the boulder at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The family room had become a furnace. Nobody would make it in there now, not even with a hose line.
I sprinted around the other side of the house to my daughters’ room. The window was intact, but the inside shades were burned off, the space beyond that filled with boiling flame. Jesus Christ, I thought. The fire’s consumed my babies.
I’d been a damn fool to waste time searching for them in the main rooms of the house.
The canniest tactic would have been for fire teams to have taken their line through this window; had they done it soon enough, they might have been able to protect my kids from the flames, which, as far as I could tell, had been largely in the main section of the house. We might have gotten my kids out this window.
Had I come to this window first thing, I might have rescued them.
The front yard was filled with neighbors, police, volunteers, a news photographer I recognized from the local paper, even old Fred Bagwell, standing off to one side as if we were all contagious. Another engine was wedged into the drive behind the Lexus, a tanker farther back in the trees. Yellow helmets everywhere.
A hose team worked bravely on my front porch, even though everybody involved could see flame leaping out over their heads like huge farts from Satan himself. A moment later the interior gave off a low, rumbling sound and a torrent of smoke and flame belched out the doorway, knocking both firefighters off the porch and into the yard. Another hose team cooled them off with a water stream.
As I stared in disbelief, part of the ceiling in the living room dropped, splashing a million hot embers into the interior. My experience and survival instincts told me anything I did now would only get me killed.
