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KIM BALDWIN. “Yeah, a house F re. Not far from here.” Gable continued to her bedroom without further elaboration
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“Yeah, a house F re. Not far from here.” Gable continued to her bedroom without further elaboration, threw on her clothes, and was back in the living room in seconds.
Erin had her shoes on and was waiting by the door. “I’m coming with you. I may not be able to help much yet, but I want to go.”
“Okay.” There was no time for discussion.
They got into Gable’s Jeep, and Gable turned on the emergency f asher as she hit the gas and sped toward the F re.
“I wish I had my gear.” Erin looked enviously at Gable’s F re coat, turnout pants, helmet, and boots, piled in the back of the Jeep.
The smoke was visible from a couple of miles away—a dark column billowing upward into a clear, cloudless sky. They were F rst to arrive. The top f oor of the two-story home was nearly fully involved.
Flames leapt from the south side windows and curled upward, charring a wide black swath to the roof.
As the Jeep screeched to a stop on the gravel drive, a middle-aged woman came running out from behind the house. The turquoise housedress she was wearing was half burned off her, and much of her frizzy blond hair was gone on one side, the charred ends black.
“Help!” she screamed. “My son Peter is up there! I couldn’t get to him!” She ran up to Gable as she got out of the Jeep and grabbed at her arm. “Help him! He’s only seven!”
“Where is he? Where did you last see him?” Gable scrambled into her gear. She cursed the fact she did not have her SCBA. The air packs stayed with the trucks.
“He’s in his bedroom.” The woman pointed at the only corner of the second f oor that was not engulfed in f ames. “I couldn’t get to him.
The stairs were on F re. Hurry! Please!”
“Do you have a ladder?” Gable asked.
“Behind the house.” The woman broke down crying.
With no time to comfort her, Gable and Erin darted around the house, found a tall aluminum ladder, and hurriedly set it under the bedroom window. “I’m going up for the boy,” Gable told Erin as she pulled her gloves out of her pocket and put them on. “You wait for the pumper and tell them where I am.”
“Please be careful,” Erin urged, positioning herself to steady the ladder.
• 114 •
FORCE OF NATURE
Gable raced up the rungs, mentally going through the checklist that had been drilled into her during her training. Stay low and go. The temperature of a burning room was three hundred degrees just a foot off the f oor, F ve hundred degrees F ve feet up, and twelve or thirteen hundred degrees at the ceiling.
The window wasn’t locked. She opened it but kept her face turned away as thick black smoke billowed out and up. She hyperventilated, holding her last big deep breath as she crawled inside and dropped to the f oor. She kept one hand on the wall to orient herself.
The smoke was thick, but she caught a glimpse of the door to the hallway across from her—it was closed but on F re, fed into a hot sheet of f ame by the rush of air from the open window. You don’t have muchtime.
“Peter!” she hollered. She inhaled a lungful of the thick acrid smoke and immediately began coughing.
“Peter! Where are you?” she managed between coughs. The smoke stung her eyes, causing them to water profusely. She had to keep them closed much of the time, taking quick, squinting glances to try to see.
“Peter! Answer me if you can!”
There was no response, so she began to search. Crawling along the f oor, one hand on the wall, the other extended in front of her. Childrenare most often found in or under the bed or in closets. She came to a dresser and skirted around it. Came to a corner of the room. Beyond it, a nightstand. The bed! She searched it quickly but thoroughly, then sprawled f at to grope beneath it, both hands outstretched. Nothing but boxes. Comic books. Toys.
Her eyes were burning and her lungs ached. She sucked in more smoke. Taking too long, her mind thought fuzzily as she went into another coughing spasm. But she forged ahead, around the bed. Another nightstand.
She was so close to the F re now she could feel the heat of it and hear the roaring, crackling sound as it consumed the door and spread up into the ceiling above her. You have to hurry. Not much time.
She left the safety of the wall to scramble around the door, keeping her face averted from the f ames. She groped her way to the opposite wall, her hands F nding shoes and toys and discarded clothes…and then, another door. Closet!
• 115 •
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