Apparently the fire doors at the top and bottom of the stairwell were kept open.
“We’ve got to go up,” he said slowly. “We’re cut off down below.”
He helped Albina up the next flight. She suddenly turned at the landing and glared at him suspiciously.
“How far? How far up?”
“All the way up to the top.”
“You’re crazy, man!” Jesus spat. “That’s more than forty stories.
We ain’t ever going to make that. Mama can’t make that!”
“You got a better idea?” Douglas asked coldly. “It’s either go up or stay here and suffocate or burn. It’s the only chance we’ve got.
Take it or leave it.” He turned to Albina. “You understand?”
She nodded, her face impassive. “Albina understand.”
They started up the steps again. Behind him, Douglas could hear Jesus making vomiting sounds. Moments later, Douglas heard the scrape of his shoes on the stairs.
It was going to be a long walk, he thought-and the air was already heavy with smoke.
CHAPTER 33
It was a quarter to midnight when Mario Infantino turned into Elm Street, two blocks from the Glass House.
Ahead of him was pure chaos: The street was a tangle of automobiles full of thrill seekers, police cars, ambulances, and fire equipment.
Quantrell and the eleven o’clock news must have brought half the city down to watch the fire in spite of the weather, he thought, disgusted.
At the end of the block, the stream of fire buffs had finally been stopped by police barricades and forced to detour to the right.
He drummed his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel, his frustration building up with every bulletin that crackled from the car’s two-way radio. It had been difficult getting there at all because of the weather and then the closer he got, the thicker was the sightseeing traffic. His siren had helped at first but now he was locked in; traffic was too jammed for it to get out of his way. Just ahead, he could glimpse the Glass House jutting into the overcast, almost lost in the driving sleet and snow.
Heavy smoke was billowing from the seventeenth and eighteenth ‘floors and behind the windows he could see an occasional smudge of orange flame. It looked as bad as his radio had described it.
A car to the immediate left suddenly stalled and he whipped the wheel over and edged into the gap, then broke into the empty lane and roared toward the road block ahead, scattering spectators who had wandered into the street. The sidewalks, he noted, were as jammed with sightseers as the right lane of the street was with He’d have to get the police to move them back another block at least.
That would make for twelve road blocks instead of four and require more police. But there was no helping it; the winds around the building were getting stronger and pieces of glass from broken windows could sail this far.
The police waved him through the intersection and Infantino pulled up behind Fuchs’s official car on the opposite side of the street. The chief engineer had beat him there but then he had a head start. He reached in the back seat for his helmet and got out, buttoning up the collar of his turnout coat. The sleet seemed to bite right through the canvas-covered Neoprene. The temperature was still dropping-the worst thing they could have hoped for. The colder the weather, the greater the difference between the temperature indoors and out and the stronger the chimney effect. It was a condition firemen dreaded, particularly in multiple-story buildings such as high rises - and the Glass House was one of the tallest in the city.
The one bright spot was the strong north wind. If he remembered the layout of the building correctly, it would help to keep one of the stairwells relatively free of smoke, though God help anybody trapped in the other one.
The street was a jungle of hoses leading from the city hydrants to the pumpers and then to the Siamese connections jutting from. the side of the building, extensions from the standpipes in the stairwells.
Aerial ladder trucks and snorkel units were helpless in any fire this high up; you had to fight it from the inside. The hosemen must have carried in their fifty-foot coils of two-and-a-half-, inch hose and connected up to the standpipes by now.
He saw only one salvage company and made a mental note to call up another one; water would cascade down the stairwells and the elevator shafts and even the poke throughs made by the utilities people. They’d best be prepared to handle the lobby and two or three floors at least.
“Hey, Mario, somebody said this is your baby. That true?” Tom Bylson, chief communications officer, thrust his head out of the department’s communications van at the curb.
“You heard right; what’s the picture up there?”
“Hot as hell by the sound of things-heavy smoke and fire on the seventeenth and it’s breaking through to the eighteenth. It’s into the sixteenth, too. Flammable liquids flowing down the stairwell.” He shook his head. “It’s going up faster than anybody expected.”
“Get a call through to the battalion chiefs. I want personal reports in fifteen minutes; make it in the lobby.”
“Not a good idea, Chief; most of the tenants are camped in the lobby.”
“Have they got a security room?”
“Right.”
“Make it there.”
Bylson ducked back into the track, a brief babble of radio transmissions cutting through the cold night air before he closed the truck door.
Infantino jogged toward the lobby entrance, nodding at several familiar faces huddled around the Red Cross van where harried workers handed out cups of coffee to firemen and a small group of tenants in pajamas and overcoats.
The confusion in the lobby was worse than that in the street outside.
Tenants still streamed from the residential elevator; they stood in small groups, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
Some had suitcases and small stacks of clothes and valuables. One couple even had a small poodle on a leash; the dog, half crazed by the noise and commotion around him, was snapping at everybody within reach.
Infantino motioned to a young policeman nearby. “Get that dog out of here.”.” The policeman noted his rank and nodded. “What do you want me to do with it, sir?”
“I don’t give a damn-lock it in a storeroom in the lower lobby, if you have to. I don’t want it running around in here if it gets loose.”
A small knot of tenants by the reservation desk were arguing with one of the building’s security guards, insisting that they be allowed to go back to their apartments to retrieve wallets and other valuables . . Infantino strode over to the guard. “Nobody goes back up, absolutely nobody. Once they’re down, they stay down. We have to have free access to the elevators.”
At the elevator bank, he spotted Captain Miller of Engine Company 23.
“Having any difficulty getting up?”
Miller shook his head. “Not too much. Electric locks on the stairwell doors; pried one open, then borrowed a key from a security man for the others.” He stepped aside as a hoseman hurried onto an elevator carrying a fifty- foot coil of hose in a pack on his back.
“We’re getting as much hose up as possible. Heat’s pretty bad; we’ve lost one section already.”
“Elevators?”
“Two of the commercial elevators have a manual override; we’re taking them up to sixteenth and then up the stairwell. Sixteen had started to go but we knocked it down pretty fast.”
The manual override would eliminate the use of the elevators by any of the tenants who might have been working late, Infantino thought, but that couldn’t be . helped. If they were below the fire floor, they could use the - other commercial elevators to come down. And if they were above … Well, God help them.
