Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  I see something on the bed that I can’t identify at first, but after focusing through the smoke, I realize it is a human arm, that there is a gun at the end of the arm, and that the muzzle is pointing at me. It is the man of the house, Bernard Pederson, gun-toting iconoclast. He is the proud American homeowner with the right to bear arms, and I am the intruder caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It occurs to me that I’ve cuckolded him repeatedly and that in some societies shooting me would be his right—in others, his obligation. How ironic that we should meet like this. It would be even more ironic if he killed me.

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  His eyes are bloodshot and teary from the smoke, snot trickling down to his beard from his wide nostrils. He wears trousers, one boot, and a shooting jacket. I figure he woke up to the smoke, and while his wife was dodging around looking for an escape route, he was in here girding himself for battle. Iola has told me how paranoid he’s become after the kamikaze pig made its suicidal crash attack on their house. For five seconds he stares, trying to figure out what I am doing in his bedroom at six in the morning. I try to figure out how nuts he has to be to have wasted time putting on a shooting jacket. Working on intuition, I step to one side at the exact moment he fires. He fires twice more, the sounds deafening and the muzzle flash like sheet lightning in the smoke. He is as benumbed by our transaction as I am. I’ve never been shot at before, and I am more pissed than scared, although I am plenty scared. I reach across and take the gun out of his hands. He grapples for it but gets only a handful of smoke. A man with a gun doesn’t expect you to reach out and take it from him.

  “Seattle Fire Department. Don’t shoot.” That last part coming too late, of course.

  “Give that weapon back.”

  I toss the semiautomatic pistol onto the floor in the corner of the room and reach for him. “Come on, buddy. We’re getting out of here.”

  “I musta left the flue closed,” he says, as I pull him upright on the bed.

  “Your house is on fire.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Trust me.”

  “I’ve kept the wiring to code.”

  He is drunk. It is six in the morning, and he’s drunker than his wife. Protesting every step of the way, he staggers to the door, at which point I force him to crawl into the hallway, where it is noticeably hotter than it had been a minute earlier, so hot that he complains. I sympathize, but this is his only chance to escape a grisly death.

  “Can’t do it,” he says, and balks. “It’s too smoky.” His breath is coming in small gulps.

  Still angry over the shooting, I prod him along the corridor and into the room with the laddered window. Although I made a point to close it 270

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  earlier, the door is open, and a good deal of hot, black smoke from the corridor has found its way into the room and is blowing out the window past us.

  Below, I spot Oleson hitting the fire through the back door with a straight stream, but it doesn’t look as if it’s going well. I can tell he’s not coming inside.

  I’ve heard nothing on the radio in my chest pocket for a good while, no sounds of incoming units receiving instructions or announcing their arrival, and no sounds of firefighters communicating with each other inside the structure. We are going to lose the house. The fire is already too entrenched.

  I close the door behind us and the heat decreases as if I’ve closed an oven door. I don’t want this room to flash over any sooner than it has to. It is the only route through which I can channel Sonja after I locate her. The stairs are untenable, a death trap.

  I lead Bernard Pederson, still crawling—it is too hot for him to stand—to the window. When I stick my head outside, Oleson looks up from the hose line and rushes toward the base of the ladder. It is a strange fire, two of us doing the work of ten, the second occasion in six weeks where I find myself making rescues with no help.

  “One more after this,” I yell.

  “Okay,” he says, starting up the ladder. Without prompting, Bernard climbs out and touches the rungs with his feet, his eagerness to evacuate a welcome contrast to Iola’s reluctance.

  “My daughter,” Pederson says, as he situates himself on the ladder.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “I’ll get her. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, my God. Sonja. Sooonnnnja . . .” He tries to climb back inside, but I stiff-arm him. He is larger than me and charged with the superhuman strength of a man in desperation, but I have leverage, positioning, and even more desperation.

  Bernard Pederson looks down as a huge sheet of bright orange flame roars out the bathroom window to his right, the flame shooting maybe eight feet into the air. We can both feel the heat.

  “Holy shit,” he says, and heads down the ladder past the flame.

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  I have seen no sign of Sonja inside the house. I can only hope she has not been sleeping with her bedroom door open, because if so, she has already taken too much carbon monoxide to survive. I’m also hoping she didn’t go downstairs earlier when the stairs were tenable and find herself trapped by flames. I can hear the fire roaring down there, an express train of heat and violent death rolling through the rooms, waiting for the right moment to complete its assault up the stairs.

  When I turn to leave the room, I am startled by a man, squatting under the heat in the same corner where I found Iola. The sight of him frightens me in a way I haven’t been frightened all night.

  “Hey, boy!”

  “Tronstad. How did you get up here?”

  “Same as you. You get ’em yet?”

  “One more. She’s down the hall. I think.”

  “You stupid fuck! The bonds. I’m talking about the bonds. Did you get the bonds? They’re going to burn up if we don’t get ’em out of the building pronto. Come on. Get going. Move along, buddy.”

  44. SONJA

  W I PUSH THE door into his face and dive into the hallway, where the heat is significantly hotter than it was a minute ago. Fires grow exponentially, not linearly, so I’m guessing it’s probably forty percent hotter. I know it will only be a minute, perhaps two, before the hallway bursts into flames. It is being preheated now, and even with all my gear on it takes tremendous willpower and no small amount of perseverance for me to push down the hallway and mingle with the heat surging up the stairs. In an instant the heat penetrates my turnouts and I get small burns in half a dozen places—my wrists, my calves, the back of my neck. Once again I turn left, moving as quickly as I can on my hands and knees. I fear the rest of these bedrooms don’t have windows, that the only room available for escape is the one I’ve laddered. Not that there is anybody on the fire ground to throw another ladder up. Nor do we have another ladder. Engine 29 carries just the one. It occurs to me that Tronstad will not follow me, that the sight of flames licking the high ceiling at the top of the stairs will convince him to retreat. If one thing has been written in concrete over the past weeks, it’s that Tronstad doesn’t do fires. At Arch Place he barely budged from the doorway, even with a hose line to protect himself; here, he has no line, and it’s hotter than the front porch of Arch Place. It’s hotter than the front porch of hell.

  When you’re a firefighter and you go into a fire building, you want two things. The first is protection from the fire, such as a hose line. The second is a means of escape you can return to, as well as a backup. What we have here is no hose line and a single exit, our pathway to the latter already compromised by flame. To my surprise, Tronstad trails me. Tonight he is not risking his life for the lives of strangers or the respect of his fellow firefighters, or for

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  cheap laurels the fire department might hand out in a ceremony virtually nobody will attend. Tonight he’s scrambling to rescue twelve million dollars, money that has already resulted in the deaths of five human beings an
d converted him into a liar, burglar, arsonist, conspirator, murderer, and defecator.

  “Gum?” He is trailing me, but I know by the amount of smoke, the lack of visibility, and the growing heat that he’s in unknown territory, that he’s counting on me to know what to do.

  I push on the first door I come to and identify it as the room in which I found Bernard. My helmet light slices the smoke in front of me, but the swath of yellow extends a mere two feet. Beyond that, I see nothing but a solid wall of gray.

  The heat in the hallway, spectacular to begin with, grows hotter by the second. Even on my hands and knees, I feel it creeping up the cuffs of my turnout trousers when I move, biting my wrists, creeping down my upturned collar to kiss my neck and scald my skin like a succubus. If it’s this dicey for me in my turnouts, it will be unbearable for Sonja. I know I have only seconds to find her.

  “Gum? Gum? Wait for me.”

  I am in the bathroom now, searching, reaching into the tub, turning around, bumping into Tronstad, who, inexplicably, now jams the doorway with his bulk. “Get out of the way.”

  “I ain’t movin’ until you tell me where them bonds are.”

  I smack the side of his head with a left hook, giving it all the strength I can muster. The blow is unexpected and knocks him flat. I crawl over him.

  “You fuckin’ bastard,” I hear him say as my weight squeezes the breath out of him. “Gum? Quit fuckin’ around. We gotta get those bonds out. This place is about to blow.”

  There is a bedroom door across the hallway from Bernard’s room.

  “Fire department,” I say, as I reach up and open the door. As soon as I enter the bedroom, it begins to fill with smoke the way a pit on the beach fills when the tide crawls in. From behind, Tronstad scampers across my legs and into the room, sprinting for the bonds, or so he believes.

  I close the door, hoping to keep some of the heat out, but already the 274

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  room is blacked out. I can barely see Sonja. She’s on the floor, staying low, where the air is clearest. She wears only panties and a bra. I cannot tell whether she is alive or dead.

  Although the sounds have been registering subconsciously for some time, it is only now that I realize the noises I’ve been listening to downstairs are the popping noises of ammunition heating up in the fire and exploding, one cartridge at a time. It is louder in the bedroom than in the hallway. Dozens of bullets are blowing apart in the fire downstairs. A round strikes the floor below us with a thunk. I can’t tell whether the round has punctured the floor or stuck in the floorboards.

  “Sonja. It’s me. Gum.” As I speak, my alarm bell goes off, signaling I am almost out of air. I sit up and disconnect the high-pressure hose line that attaches to my nose piece, silencing the alarm but leaving my face piece in place. I may need that last little bit of clean air. It won’t last long. The room grows quiet as the smoke slides down my windpipe and sears my lungs like battery acid. I’m relieved to hear Sonja cough. It means she’s alive. “It’s Gum, Sonja.”

  “Gum?”

  “Hey, Doublemint? You know this chick?”

  “I woke up hearing shots across the hall.”

  “Your father took a couple of potshots at me.” The thought flashes through my mind that Iola had neglected to wake her stepdaughter.

  “We gotta get you out. Is there a window?”

  “A skylight. It’s way too high.”

  “Follow me. Keep low and you’ll stay under most of the heat.”

  She coughs again. “I tried before, but it was too hot and smoky.”

  “The faster we move, the easier it’ll be.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, Gum!” Tronstad says.

  “Get out of the way.”

  “I’m not letting you out until—”

  “They’re outside in the garage.”

  “Bullshit!”

  The smoke is hot and acrid enough to sting my eyes inside my mask. I guide Sonja past Tronstad.

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  Before we reach the doorway, she stops precipitously and flops onto her stomach. Tronstad is holding her bare ankle. I turn off my helmet light and stand up, feeling a tremendous blast of heat that is almost incapacitating. Walking past Sonja, I kick Tronstad in the head. In the smoke, he doesn’t see it coming, and the blow knocks him backward, dislodging his face piece momentarily. Air hisses out. I think I might have broken his neck.

  Crawling forward, I steer Sonja out of the room and into the excruciating heat. In the minute or so I’ve been inside her bedroom, the corridor has become superheated to a degree I’m not sure I’ve ever felt before. I don’t know how she is braving this in only bra and panties, but she is. I’m not sure she can make it to the ladder room. In fact, I’m almost certain she cannot.

  Below us, ammunition is popping off at a furious pace, the house sounding like a gigantic popcorn popper run amok. More and more freeflying bullets lodge in the floor beneath us, making sounds like builders pounding on it from below.

  In the hallway, Sonja grinds to a halt. “Keep moving,” I tell her. She squeezes the words out between shallow gasps. “I can’t breathe.”

  The room we’re trying to get to isn’t more than twenty feet away, but it must seem like miles, for she balks and stalls, coughing like an asthmatic. She will be burned if we continue. She will be burned if we stay. She is being burned now.

  I feel the pain from the smoke in my lungs, the same pain she feels. The flame that had been crawling along the ceiling at the end of the corridor has run down the hallway and almost reached the door of the room we’ve just left, dark orange fingers showing through here and there in the black smoke.

  There’s no way a woman in a bra and panties can make it along the corridor now. Hell, there’s no way I can make it in my gear. Not without two hundred gallons of water a minute at my fingertips, and maybe not even then.

  She begins to crawl forward, but I stop her. “I can make it,” she says.

  “No.”

  Without a plan, I take her across the hall to Bernard and Iola’s bed-276

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  room, sealing the door behind us. There is less smoke in here, although it is by no means clear. Much of the heat has been excluded from this room because the door has been closed. The problem is there’s no window. Downstairs they’re applying water though the windows and doors from outside. With all that ammunition exploding, they will have declared a defensive fire. An exterior operation means the building is going to be a grounder. The fire simply has too deep a grip; there are too many nooks and crannies that cannot be reached with hose lines in the yard.

  “If we’re going to die, I’m glad I’m with you,” Sonja says, moving toward me. I brush her aside, not wanting to hug her in my gear, which has been heated up now and will scorch her with contact burns.

  “We’re not going to die.”

  I rip off my face piece and give it to her to hold against her face, then hook up the high-pressure line so she can breathe whatever clean air is left in my bottle. Tethered to Sonja by the mask and line, I find the wall between this bedroom and the room next door and pull a dresser away from it. I keep her close and lie on my back on the floor, finding studs and kicking at the space between them, kicking hard enough to injure my heel. I continue kicking.

  Fortunately it is wallboard and not the wood paneling they’ve installed downstairs, which I wouldn’t be able to break. I kick out a hole twenty-four inches wide, the standard wall-stud distance when this house was constructed. When I get through it, I begin to work on the wallboard in the room next door. I kick frantically, knowing it is only a matter of a minute or so before the room next door is compromised by flame, knowing also that the ladder might not be there, and that the firefighters below may have already given us up for dead.

  I sit up and begin breaking out wallboard with my hands.

  “Where’s the other fi
reman?” Sonja says through the mask.

  “He’ll be here.”

  After enlarging the hole to a dimension she can squeeze through, I discover a desk up against the wall in the other room. I lie back and shove with my legs. Slowly, it begins to lurch forward. I grip the two-by-fours and push with added leverage. Sonja keeps close, the high-pressure air

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  line and face mask feeding her confidence along with the compressed air. The desk moves slowly.

  I’ve done all the work I can do and have taken all the smoke a man can take. I’m running on willpower and the desire to see a good woman go out and live the rest of her life. I don’t care any longer if I make it. The engine driving me is running on the principle that it will be a damn shame if Sonja dies because I’m not enough of a firefighter to get her out of this.

  Every microgram of adrenaline in my bloodstream has been used up. I feel nothing but weariness and an almost irresistible urge to close my eyes and surrender. Inside my sopping bunkers, the sweat competes with a dank, slippery kind of fear. I am as thirsty as I’ve ever been in my life, as if my mouth is full of desert sand.

  “Sonja?” When I hear my voice, thick, hoarse, and threadbare, I realize how little time I have left in which to function. “Sonja?”

  My bottle has run out of air now. She coughs, and mutters, “Gum.”

  She is curled up on the floor. Neither of us can see each other in the smoke, although she might be able to see the light on my helmet.

  “Go through here. Through the wall. There’s a ladder at the window.”

  She comes alongside and I guide her to the opening she can’t see, usher her through, feeding her thin limbs through the ragged hole, her smooth, pale skin a stark contrast to the heavy firefighting gear I wear. In order to get through the wall she has to drop the mask, which is now useless but which she’s been holding like a teddy bear. She wriggles through the hole, her bare feet disappearing into the other room, and I think how incongruous her pale feet and legs look in the smoke.