3000 Degrees

by Sean Flynn

  A break in the shouting, the men easing back, startled by Mike's tone. He swept their faces again. He saw hurt in their eyes, betrayal.

  “You listen to me,” he said again, more softly this time. “We've already lost six. We're not going to lose any more.”

  It was as if he'd thrown a great, crushing weight upon them. The men slumped before him, physically sagged, the same reflex of defeat he'd watched Randy go through thirty minutes earlier. But it was worse this time. Mike had said it out loud, made it true: We lost six. In his time, Worcester had never lost one.

  “I want everybody out,” he said. He got on the radio. “Command to all companies,” he said. “Evacuate the building. Sound the evacuation signal. Evacuate the building.”

  A tremendous racket rose up from the streets, three blasts sounding from the horns on each of the trucks, the signal to abandon the building. Men filed out, walking slowly, hobbled by despair. It was over. The battle would continue for hours, but there wasn't anything left to fight for. Paul, Jerry, Tom, Tim, Jay, and Joe weren't coming out. All that was left to do was reposition the engines, circle the warehouse, pour water into the flames, wait for the fire to finally exhaust itself.

  Dennis Budd found Mike on the street, standing with Randy Chavoor and a few other men. “Mike, get four guys together,” he said. “I want to make one last push.”

  Mike started to answer. Randy cut him off. “You've been in there long enough,” he told Mike. “I'll go.”

  Randy and three other men marched toward the loading dock, through the doors, up the stairs. They were going to the third floor, as high as they could hope to get. Maybe Tom and Tim had been wrong. Maybe they'd been on three. Maybe they found their way down there.

  They found the rope tied off on the landing. Four men dropped to their knees, began to crawl. They inched in, the heat slowing them down. Randy could hear the fire, hissing and snarling and spitting, the sound seeming to come from all around him, but he couldn't see anything except black, couldn't feel anything except a sheet of steam wrapped around his face, swirling around him like a heavy cloth. He shivered despite the temperature, a premonition washing over him. Thirty feet from the door, he called off the mission. “Let's go!” he yelled. “We don't belong in here.”

  No one argued. Each man pivoted, began scuttling toward the door. It was longer on the way out. Randy felt another shiver. It's not done, he thought. The building's not done with us. The smoke closed in on him, formed itself into a massive black paw, swept over his shoulders, grabbed him by the neck. He could feel it pulling, dragging him into its misty gullet, strangling him. That's it. You're gonna die. He struggled against it, crawled what felt like thirty feet. No door. Another twenty feet. Nothing. He wondered if the warehouse had chewed off the lifeline, tossed it into a corner, lured him into a trap.

  He felt the ledge, the step up to the doorway. His mind had gotten to him, a trick, an illusion that made ten yards feel like one hundred. Drenched with sweat, shaking with relief, he barreled down the stairs with the other men. He saw Brosnihan at the bottom, tears streaking the big man's face, dripping around his mustache. He rushed toward Randy, toward the stairs, toward his lost lieutenant. Randy caught him, held him in a bear hug, felt him heaving with sobs.

  “We gotta go,” he said. “C'mon, we gotta get out of here.”

  Randy kept his arm around Bros, steered him out to the street. They were the last men to leave Worcester Cold Storage. No one would be saved tonight.

  Robin Huard felt a squeeze on his arm, turned, saw Mike Mc-Namee.

  “Robin, will you go in with me?”

  Robin was exhausted, felt he'd cheated death once tonight, knew Worcester Cold Storage was too far gone. But he liked Mike, respected him, believed he was the best incident commander in the city. He wouldn't let him go alone.

  “Mike, if you're going, I'll go with you,” he said. “But …” He paused, gathered the words. “But you know they're all dead.”

  “I know,” Mike said slowly. “But we've got to try something. I've got to try one more time.”

  Robin understood. An officer never leaves his men. Not a marine on Hamburger Hill, not a fireman on the edge of hell. He would follow Mike in if he had to.

  Dennis Budd intercepted them. “No more, Mike,” he said. “No one else goes in.”

  Robin was relieved.

  16

  EARLIER THAT EVENING, JUST AFTER SHE'D EATEN HER DINNER, Joanne McNamee remembered she'd left a package in the back of the aging Volvo station wagon parked in front of the house. She went out the door off the dining room, through the garage, and out onto the driveway. The night seemed peculiar, a month out of season. The air was chilly but not uncomfortably cold, and the breeze that blew up from the south was mild, nothing like the biting winds that typically rustled the bare branches in early December.

  She had noticed a familiar sound, a faint and plaintive wail, as she turned to go back into the house. She stopped to listen. Twenty-five years had passed since she sat in an apartment at the top of a hill, hearing the sirens from the streets below, whispering to her absent husband that he'd better not die, not now, not yet. They'd moved miles away, to a leafy neighborhood west of downtown, but the wind could still sometimes catch the echo, carry the howl into her living room or at least to her driveway. She didn't whisper to Mike anymore. She'd long ago accepted that her husband had chosen a dangerous trade, and with that knowledge came a certain anxiety, low-grade but constant. Eventually, she'd become immune to it.

  The noise grew louder, the volume seeming to double. She couldn't tell how many trucks were involved, but by the chorus, the overlapping yowls and whoops, she guessed a second alarm had already been struck. A dozen trucks, all rolling at once. They could be headed for Main South, but they sounded closer. Northern district, she suspected. “Must be a big one,” she thought.

  She had listened only for a moment or two before going back into the house, where she picked up the phone in the kitchen and dialed the number for Central Station. She didn't bother calling Mike's private line in his cinder-block office because she assumed he'd be out. She called the watch room instead.

  The fireman who answered confirmed that Mike was working a fire.

  “What's burning?” she asked.

  “Worcester Cold Storage.”

  She'd gripped the receiver more tightly, whitening her knuckles. She remembered driving past the warehouse only two weeks before, when Mike had pointed at it and told her how badly it scared him. She could hear him saying it again: God, I hope we never catch anything in there.

  “Shit,” she said into the phone. “All right. Well, tell him to call me when he gets in.”

  She hung up, leaned against the cream-colored tiles Mike had cemented to the countertop, let out a heavy sigh. Mike had been through worse nights. She remembered when he came home that morning in 1973, black, wet, and exhausted, stinking of ash and fire and haunted by ten dead civilians. She'd wanted to stay with him, hold him, tell him how she was frightened and relieved and grateful all at once, give in to all the emotions that could torture a fireman's wife. Mike had fallen asleep and she'd gone to work and she'd put it out of her mind. He came home, and that's all that mattered. Her mother's advice came back to her: You don't borrow worry. Tonight was no time to start.

  There were dishes in the sink. Joanne decided they needed to be washed, right then, immediately. She turned on the kitchen faucet, rinsed the plates, stacked them in the dishwasher, wiped the good knives with a soapy sponge and set them on a rack to dry. Then she sat on the couch in the family room and turned on the television, which was next to the window. Through the lace curtains, she could see the lamplight across the street in the window of the house where Jay Lyons had grown up, where his parents still lived.

  She knew Jay was working tonight. It was fascinating to think of him as a fireman, as a man, to realize how many years had gone by. In one frame of her memory, Jay was a lanky schoolboy delivering her newspaper. In the
next he was a rowdy teenager drinking with his buddies in the parking lot of the synagogue behind her house; she could hear the empty beer cans tinkling on the blacktop through the screen of evergreens that separated her yard from the lot. Then he was a handsome high school senior who she trusted to baby-sit her daughters, who brought them stuffed animals on their birthdays. “If one of my girls ever brings home a boy half as nice as Jay,” she'd told Mike once, “I'll be a happy woman.”

  At eight o'clock, she switched to NBC. She'd gotten hooked on Providence. As the opening credits rolled, a bold line of type scrawled across the top of the screen. A few words and phrases leaped out at her, seemed to be backlit, radiant. Five-alarm blaze. Her stomach knotted. Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse. Her mouth went dry. Two firefighters missing.

  She dropped the remote, grabbed her keys off the counter, ran out the front door, not bothering to close it behind her. She jammed the key into the Volvo's ignition, dropped it into reverse, stomped the gas, hit the pavement, then sped up Saxon Road. Mike's one of them, she thought. Mike would be in the building. Mike would be the first one in the building and the last one in the building. Mike's missing. Then, the worst thought, one she'd never allowed herself to imagine: Mike might be dead.

  The green foil crinkled when she wrapped it around the plastic pots, puckered into tiny metallic ridges that Kathy Spencer smoothed with her hands. She pressed firmly but gently, carefully avoiding the red leaves of the poinsettias that draped over the edge of the pots. She pressed gold foil around the next one, then red on the third, alternating iridescent holiday colors. It wasn't glamorous work, but it was relaxing. Kathy looked forward to every shift at the nursery, especially after Thanksgiving. She was good with plants, and the amaryllis bulbs and evergreen wreaths and holly garlands stirred her Christmas spirit, made the holiday seem literally alive.

  She worked until eight o'clock, then drove home to pack for the trip to New York City in the morning. A pang in her stomach reminded her she hadn't eaten anything since the turkey sandwich Tom made for lunch. She stopped at a sandwich shop, ordered an eggplant parmesan grinder to go, then drove the rest of the way home. She gave the horn a short toot as she passed the house two doors from her own where Tom's parents lived, which was next to the one where his brother Mike lived. He was a Worcester fireman, too. Tom liked living close to his family, the whole clan clustered together. His father had bought a small fishing boat a few months earlier, and when the weather warmed up three generations of Spencer men—father and sons and grandsons—would drift across a pond hunting blue gill and bass.

  It was almost eight-thirty when she put her sandwich down on the kitchen counter. She picked up the phone and dialed the number for the Grove Street station. It was a habit, checking in with Tom at the station when she came home. And she had to call tonight, his last night running Ladder 2.

  A staccato buzz vibrated the earpiece. Busy. She hung up, unwrapped her dinner. The phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Kathy?” One of her friends.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you know there's a big fire downtown?”

  “Um … no.” Kathy hadn't watched television, which had been broadcasting live shots from Worcester Cold Storage for more than an hour.

  “Well,” her friend said, “it's a really bad one.”

  “Okay.” An awkward pause. “Thanks for calling.”

  Kathy had gotten calls like that before, and she'd never been rattled by any of them. She didn't worry about Tom or any other man on the job because experience had taught her that firemen always came home in the morning. Her father had been a Worcester fireman, and her uncle, too, and they always came home. The hardest part for her father had been giving up the job. The city forced him to retire the day he turned sixty-five, which was December 26, 1984. He could have taken off Christmas Day, but he wanted to work one more shift.

  He was a big part of the reason Tom became a fireman. By his second year at UMass–Lowell, Tom knew he didn't want to continue with college. Kathy's father told him about fighting fires, a good job with good benefits and decent pay, enough to support his daughter and his grandchildren. Tom took the test, scored well, dropped out of school and joined the department in 1978. He'd gotten banged up in the past twenty-one years, but nothing serious except for the night he got lazy and, instead of moving a ladder over a couple of feet, he leaned way out to the side, slipped, and tore up his knee. Fact is, he'd done more damage playing baseball, fast-pitch hardball in an over-thirty league. “None of that sissy softball,” he'd tell Kathy. Two knee operations and a broken thumb later, she finally convinced him that his baseball injuries were keeping him off the firetrucks.

  Kathy scouted for her kids. Patrick, the oldest, was watching a video with his girlfriend in the basement rec room, where Tom kept his baseball encyclopedias and his Civil War books and, on a bench in the back, the wooden model of a schooner he was building, thin strips of veneer for the decking already soaked and pliable. Daniel, the youngest, was at a party. Kathy made a phone call, made sure he had a ride home. Casey, their daughter, joined her in the kitchen, where they talked about their trip in the morning while Kathy ate. Kathy's friend Cheryl, who was going with them, called to finalize their plans.

  She looked at her watch. Ten o'clock. The early news was on, with a weather preview near the top of the hour. Kathy switched on the television in the living room.

  The first bright image startled her. The screen was a swirl of black and orange, broken by the red-and-white flashes of the lights from the fire trucks. Flames twisted from the roof of a dark, hulking square. She would have known it was Worcester Cold Storage, would have recognized the shape and the highway running next to it, even if the logo painted near the roof had been burned away.

  Her eyes widened. “Wow, that is a big one,” she muttered.

  She felt Casey next to her. “What is it, Mom?” There was worry in her voice.

  “Just a big fire,” Kathy said. “But look”—she pointed at the bottom of the screen, where Ladder 2 was clearly visible— “there's Daddy's truck. We're all set.”

  She glanced at her daughter, whose brow was creased. Kathy snapped off the televsion. “C'mon,” she said brightly. “Let's go pack.”

  After the pizza dinner, Denise Brotherton ferried her oldest son to his basketball game and brought her next oldest so he could watch. Denise usually found a seat in the bleachers, too, but she couldn't stay tonight. She had to go home and cook platters of food for Kim's baby shower on Sunday.

  Kim was technically her sister-in-law, but they were much closer than that would imply. That was curious, too, considering that Denise had been her surrogate mother, helping Paul raise her after Paul's parents had died. When she was younger, Kim's friends used to tell her how lucky she was, growing up with her brother in charge. They didn't know the half of it. Paul and Denise were still young enough to know about the kegs of beer kids lugged into the woods at Burncoat Park, young enough to remember what went on all night after the senior prom. Which is why Kim had to be home at eleven o'clock every night, even during her senior year in high school, and why Paul grounded her for five weeks when she stumbled in past dawn after prom.

  She had lived with them until 1998, when she married her husband, Chris. Paul walked her down the aisle. A year later, he was the second person, after her husband, who Kim told she was pregnant. It was hard to tell who was more excited. “I'm going to redo a crib for the kid,” Paul told her, which he did. Eight months later, he still had to stick fresh wallpaper on the nursery walls, but he'd already decided he would call the boy Nat, short for Nathan Paul. Kim drew the line at letting Paul coach her through labor. “There is no friggin’ way you're coming into the delivery room with me,” she said.

  Denise got home at eight-twenty and went straight to the kitchen to start cooking. The phone rang. It was one of Paul's cousins calling. “There's a big fire downtown,” he said.

  “Really? Where?”

  �
��The cold storage building.”

  Denise thought for a second, scanned her memory of downtown, found Worcester Cold Storage. “Ugh,” she said. “That's not good.”

  “Yeah, I know. I heard there were two men down.”

  “Oh, God. That's terrible.” She gathered some bowls. “Look, I gotta go. I'll talk to you later.”

  It didn't occur to her that Paul would be missing. He was too careful, a stickler for safety. “You have to respect fire,” he'd lecture his sons. “It'll destroy you in nothing flat it you don't respect it.” When the medical runs increased, and with them the number of bleeders and pukers firemen had to deal with, Paul got himself innoculated against hepatitis B. She remembered him explaining why he was against doubling the size of their air tanks to a sixty-minute capacity. “No one should be inside a burning building for an hour,” he'd told her. “That's way too long. You've got to get out of the heat, get rehydrated, rest.” She knew Paul wouldn't be inside long enough to get lost, that he'd find his way out, bring his partner with him.

  She hesitated, thought twice. Maybe she should call the station, just check in. She dialed the watchroom at Central Station. “It's Denise Brotherton,” she said. “Is Paul in?”

  “Nope.” The voice was deadpan. “He's out on a run.”

  “Okay, just tell him I called.”

  She pressed the switch hook once, then dialed the number for the police department. “Hi, my name's Denise Brotherton—”

  The line went dead. She found that odd, but assumed she'd been accidently disconnected. With a fire raging downtown, the police switchboard must have been overloaded with calls.

  She put the phone back on the hook. It rang a moment later, Paul's cousin calling again. “Denise, they're saying there's four guys missing.”

  A twitch in her stomach. Paul was careful, but he was also on the frontlines. He would have been one of the first men in. And if he'd gone in looking for someone else, maybe he wouldn't have been as careful, would have taken an extra chance, pushed harder.