3000 Degrees (2 page)
A dozen men working the third tour out of Park Avenue, four each on Aerial Scope 3 and Engines 4 and 10, were moving before the dispatcher started repeating the assignments, hustling into their turnout gear. Most of them pulled on long boots that rose to the middle of their thighs, just above where the bottom edge of their coats would fall. A few, including Mike, stepped through the legs of newfangled fire-resistant pants and into shorter boots. In less than twelve seconds, every man was on his designated truck. The officers took the seats on the passenger sides of the cabs, where they could yank the air-horn cords and toggle the sirens on and off. On the ride south along Park Avenue, each man except the driver slipped his arms through a fire-resistant coat hung on the back of his seat, the sleeves already laced through the straps of an air tank. When Mike's boots hit the pavement outside the warehouse three minutes after the first tone, all of his men were ready to square off against an inferno.
But there wasn't much of a fire left. When the first flames heated the air to 165 degrees or so, tiny metal plugs melted in the sprinkler heads plumbed through the building, opening the spigots and dropping a heavy shower on the fire. The only thing left for the firemen to do was shut off the main valve to the sprinkler system, soak a few embers, and then track down the owner of the building to tell him to replace his spent sprinkler heads and board up his doors and windows. A quick knockdown. Thirty minutes later, they were back at the station, scrubbing the dinner dishes.
If the fire had been accidental, then the sprinklers had saved the building and protected the men who came with their hoses and axes and ladders. If it had been arson, then it had been merely a setup fire, a prelude to a bigger, more devastating and dangerous blaze. With the sprinkler system disabled, the flames from a second torching could get a jump on the fire crews. In the unimpeded minutes before the fire department's arrival, two or three isolated ignition points could engulf the entire building.
The second alarm for 82 Jacques Street came in three hours after the first, shortly before ten o'clock. Dispatch announced the same unit assignments, and all twelve men at Park Avenue, plus eight more from the Webster Square station and ten out of Central Street, quick-stepped back into their gear and onto their trucks. When Mike hit the pavement the second time, black smoke billowed through the roof and blown-out windows. The second floor was fully involved, a tangle of orange and yellow. A second alarm was struck. Headquarters dispatched another dozen men on two more engines and a third ladder company.
The driver on Engine 4 stayed with the truck, working the controls that regulate the water coming in from the hydrants and pump it out through the hoses. Mike and two of his men grabbed a coil of hose from the bed above the back bumper and lugged it toward a street level door, up a staircase, and into a hallway. From the smoke and the sound, they knew the flames were raging somewhere behind a steel fire door that had rolled shut. Much the way the sprinkler heads had been activated by heat, the fire door had automatically closed when the heat melted a pin that held it open, the idea being to contain the fire to one room.
Mike and his men pulled their plastic masks over their faces, cranked open their air tanks, and rolled back the door. Then they dropped to their knees, ducking below air that might have been 300 degrees at waist height and twice that at head height. At the ceiling, twelve feet above, the temperature was nearly 1,500 degrees, almost as hot as a crematorium. With the hose charged—filled with water sent up by the engine's pump—the three of them crawled into the black folds of smoke. When the last man cleared the fire door, it rolled closed behind him, propped open only a couple of inches by the trailing hose.
T
hey were in forty feet, halfway across the storeroom. “Now?” the nozzle man hollered.
“A little closer,” Mike yelled back again. Another ten feet, he thought to himself. Ten more seconds, then we'll hit it.
He shuffled his left knee forward, then his right, keeping one hand on the hose and another on his nozzle man. He moved his left knee again, then stopped short when he saw it: a flicker through the smoke, near the ceiling. Then another, a shimmer that brightened and blossomed into a deep yellow glow, the color of overripe lemons. A bad color signaling a very bad thing, a phenomenon Mike had read and heard about, and even witnessed from a distance. But he'd never been up close, directly in its path, had hoped he never would be. The sound came next, a low rumble through the hiss and snap of the fire, like thunder tumbling across a prairie horizon.
One of his men, maybe both of his men, shouted something, but the words were swallowed up by the growling near the ceiling. Mike reached for his nozzle man. His hand touched nothing but smoke. He wheeled on one knee, flailing his arm behind him for his other man. Nothing. Above him, the rumble swelled and quickened, a trembling whoosh. The storeroom, a box of thick brick walls closed in by a bulky steel door, had trapped too much heat inside. The gases lingering near the ceiling had reached their ignition temperature, the point at which each tiny particle of smoke and wisp of oxygen turned to fire. Mike, groping at smoke in the dark, realized he was alone in a room about to explode. “Oh, fuck,” he muttered.
Then he saw it happen. It started on the back wall, above the fire he'd been inching toward, an orange ball expanding, erupting, blowing across the ceiling. It spread to the walls on either side, covered the width of the room, and spun forward, flames biting into the smoke like a thresher into wheat, spears of fire curling and weaving a few feet above Mike's head. It moved as fast as a breaking wave, washing across the length of the storeroom to the wall blocked off by the door, then plunged to the floor, covering all that ground in three seconds, maybe two.
Mike dropped flat on his back as the flames passed over him, as much by training—always stay low, beneath the heat—as instinct. A man could survive a rollover, but it was one of the most terrible phenomena he would ever witness. The only thing worse would have been a flashover. The physics were similar, gases superheating until they exploded. But where a rollover happened near the ceiling, a flashover happened everywhere at once, every scrap of cloth and stick of furniture and atom of hydrogen instantly exploding into flame. A man on the edge of a room about to flash could take maybe two giant, panicked strides out; a man inside that room was going to die.
In the dark, Mike slid his hands to the end of the hose, found the nozzle, and yanked the lever back. Water tore out like cannon fire, jerking the line, forcing it one way, then another, as if the hose was alive, a serpent fighting to get loose. Mike pinned a length of it beneath his back and clamped the rest between his left arm and rib cage, wrestling until he had the nozzle aimed straight up at the ceiling. For the next fifteen seconds—or it could have been five or fifty, because a man can lose track of time when he's trying not to die—Mike washed the air above him, scattering hundreds of gallons of water into the void. But he wasn't getting wet. None of the water was splashing back down. He knew it was turning to steam, a mist that would eventually settle on him like a searing fog. But 212 degrees of steam was better than 1,500 degrees of fire.
For an instant, the flames receded. The bright orange disappeared in a shroud of black smoke, the air finally cooled enough not to burn. Mike had punctured the fire's flanks, sent it into a temporary retreat, the way an army would fall back to regroup. Except a fire regrouped in only seconds, not hours or days. In one quick motion, Mike slammed the nozzle shut, twisted onto his knees, and started crawling, his shins banging off the floor, his hands slapping along the hose line. He covered forty feet like a sprinter, moving so fast in the dark he smashed his head into the fire door just to the left of the opening where the hose slipped out. He could hear his nozzle man screaming. “Where's Mike? Where the fuck is Mike?” Then he saw two pairs of gloved hands pulling at the fire door, wrenching it open just enough for the lieutenant to scramble into the hallway. It rolled shut behind him.
Mike slumped against a wall. His two men were sitting on the floor, wide-eyed, panting. They hadn't meant to leave him alone—firefighters, good ones, never leave a man alone in a fire, and Mike knew these were good men. They had thought he was bailing out with them. That's what they'd been yelling about, the words Mike couldn't hear over the rumbling of the rollover.
Mike stared at them, his breath coming in great, labored gulps. Finally, he said, “Holy fuck.” He stared some more and said it again, hoarse, almost a whisper:
“Fuck.”
From behind the door, he could hear another roar, the sound of the room exploding. If he'd been inside, Mike knew, he'd be dead. He considered that, but only for an instant. “Sometimes you have to bring an extra pair of shorts to work,” he liked to say. And that was okay. Every fireman, unless he was a fool, sometimes got scared. But they never expected to die. Because, truth be told, they hardly ever did.
T
HE LATE
N
OVEMBER SUN SANK BEHIND THE GREEN STEEL
trestle of the interstate and the empty warehouses behind it and, farther off in the western distance, the forested tops of stubby mountains that creased the middle of Massachusetts like a scoliotic spine. Mike steered his Buick into the low, gold light of the afternoon, squinting behind his thin-framed spectacles when the rays stabbed through breaks in the landscape, between the squat domed spires of Union Station and the beams holding up the highway and the narrow gaps separating the triple-deckers. The few strands of cinnamon left in his silver hair caught the light, glinted like bronze threads.
“Where are you going?” Joanne asked. She sat next to him, fidgeting with the visor, trying to block the glare. She was a small woman, not much more than five feet tall, which put her face, perfectly round with dimples pressed into her cheeks and an upturned nose, in the bright gap between the dashboard and the visor. When she narrowed her eyes, her dimples deepened and her nose crinkled just below the bridge, the same way as when she smiled.
“I'm taking Franklin over to Grafton,” Mike said. “It's faster.”
Joanne shrugged. Mike knew the roads in Worcester better than she did, the back alleys and uncluttered lanes that bypass the arteries clogged with late-afternoon traffic. Firemen knew all the shortcuts, the routes that would shave a few seconds off the race to the flames. After twenty-seven years on the job, working out of stations all over the city, Mike had figured out the shortest path from any point in the city to any other, and committed most of them to memory. He was kind of a geek that way. When he was a younger man, a rookie, Mike would walk the blocks around his first station, Winslow Street, with his toddler daughter strapped to his back, noting the location of every fire hydrant. The police thought it was weird enough that they stopped him once or twice, wanting to know why he was casing the neighborhood. Mike would takes his notes home, spread an oversize map on the living room floor and plot all the hydrants with a black marker. It used to drive Joanne nuts, coming home from her shift at the hospital to find her husband crawling around with a pen, the bed unmade, dishes unwashed, baby Kate burbling on the floor next to him.
Kate was twenty-three now, a college student in Washington, D.C. A vegetarian, wouldn't even eat poultry. In a few days, she would be home for Thanksgiving, which was why Mike and Joanne were driving across the city. There was a Middle Eastern bakery on Grafton Hill that made the finest Syrian bread and the best damned spinach pies in central Massachusetts. Kate would eat spinach pie.
Mike turned left onto Franklin Street, passing under the trestle of Interstate 290 and into the shadows of an old warehouse district. Fifty yards up Franklin, Mike took his right hand off the steering wheel and pointed a thick finger ahead and to the right. “See that building?” he said.
Joanne looked where he pointed. She couldn't have missed it if she'd tried. Worcester Cold Storage was a colossus of brick and mortar, wide as a city block and more than eighty feet tall. It was actually two buildings, connected by a common wall and laid out like a fat L, but from her angle, a dead-on view of the front from the curb, it looked like a massive cube.
“Yeah,” she said. “What about it?”
“It scares me.”
Joanne looked again. She'd seen that warehouse a thousand times before and never thought it was particularly spooky. It was a landmark, looming over Worcester just east of downtown for four generations. When she was a child, the blocks around it had rumbled and screeched with trucks and railcars, and the stench of offal and blood and diesel hung close to the ground. Hundreds of men labored in a dozen buildings, carving cattle and hogs into steaks and pork chops, fresh cuts that were stacked in the refrigerated warehouses. The meat cutters, like nearly every other industry in Worcester, had moved out of town by the end of the seventies. The cold storage businesses lingered for a few more years, but by the late eighties they were closed as well, the few windows along one stairwell and in front of the old office sealed with plywood and nails, the steel doors on the loading docks padlocked and chained. All that remained were the shells, monoliths of ocher and russet.
Worcester Cold Storage was the biggest of them all, dominating the abandoned abattoirs and freight depots and, in the shadow of its western wall, a small sliver of a diner called the Kenmore. It even dwarfed Interstate 290, eight concrete lanes that cleaved through the center of the city and passed only a couple dozen yards from the sheer brick facade of the warehouse. If anything, the highway gave it a grander scale; in a fluke of perspective, the guardrails of the eastbound lanes underlined the logo—
WORCESTER COLD STORAGE AND WAREHOUSE CO
.—painted near the top in giant white letters. Everyone in town knew that building, precisely where it was and what it looked like, if only because no one could avoid passing it in traffic.
