All Write, Already!

"...kzrkt...der 12 move inch-and-a-half lines in to cov...krrrsshhh...all companies worki..."

"...spatch this is Engine 4, 10-97 east side of the complex."

"Copy Engine 4, be advised incident command post on north si..."

The handset for Tom's radio was broken. He could hear snatches of communications through it, but he couldn't transmit. For all the good it was doing him, it might as well have been on Mars. So far, nobody had even reported him missing.

Tom was part of the direct attack company on a six-story structure fire. He'd always volunteered to go direct attack, to "put the wet stuff on the hot stuff." The adrenaline rush was like nothing in any other sphere of his life, and he enjoyed the camaraderie he felt with the other members of his company. The guys who worked ladder companies, who spent their lives directing deck gun spray onto exterior windows, they might as well have been dead to Tom.

Tom started trying to get into FDNY straight out of high school. He'd moved from Hartford and found himself what had to be the tiniest apartment with its own bathroom in the entire five boroughs. He failed his first attempt at the competitive examination by two points, but it was because his examination cohort had been packed with guys just as eager as he was to be New York's Bravest, and there were only so many slots for applicants.

Then one sunny Tuesday morning, 343 firefighters gave their lives in lower Manhattan and all of a sudden FDNY was calling his phone, leaving three messages in a single day while he was working at Jekyll & Hyde serving tourists spooky-themed hamburgers. They'd all but begged him to show up for his physical (and Tom had a sneaking suspicion that even if he'd had a second head, they'd have taken him).

Three years had passed since then, and this morning he'd been studying for his lieutenant's exam when Ladder 10/Engine 10 had sounded their fifth alarm for additional manpower. Tom hit the pole -- he'd never get tired of that child-like glee when he slid down the brass -- and started pulling on his turnout gear: feet into his heavy rubber boots, bunker pants up and suspenders over the shoulders, Nomex hood down over his neck and tucked into the coat that he pulled on over his dark blue FDNY uniform T-shirt. SCBA on his back, mask hanging on a clip on his chest, and his helmet last. Then it was onto the rear deck of his house's pumper and out the door, his coat flapping around him as the pumper sped down the canyons of the city.

He and his partner Guilleremo ("call me 'Willie'") had been working to douse the second-floor apartment that was the source of the fire. Probably a meth lab, something in there had been an accelerant in big quantities, fueling the tongues of flame lapping their way up the building. The secret in fighting enclosed fires is that it is water vapor, not water itself, that extinguishes the fire. The steam displaces oxygen in the air and suffocates the flames. Tom had always been good at math, and he figured he and Willie had the oxygen reduced to 20% or so when they felt the floor give under them.

Before they knew it, they had fallen through the first floor and all the way into the basement, where Tom had landed on his back. Tom figured both his lower legs were broken, and even if they weren't, the piece of joist jutting up through his left thigh left him pretty well impaled to the floor. Willie was about six feet from Tom, but he wasn't moving, and he wasn't blinking; his eyes were fixed and his chest still. Tom realized that he had some time to work before total structural failure. Maybe seven minutes, maybe ten. Call it seven. Seven minutes to get up the stairs and out to his own company, another company, anybody.

Well, the stairs were thirty feet away, and he could still see them off to his left. Smoke had only just started to bank down into the basement yet, so he had a clear shot to his way out. Time to get moving. But first, he'd have to get himself unstuck from the floor.

He looked down at his leg, and realized that the only way to break free would be to lift his leg off of the spike of wood impaling it. If his femoral artery was severed, that wood might be the only thing keeping him from bleeding out. On the other hand, while he might bleed to death, he damn sure would be crushed in a few minutes when everything above him came down. So.

He gritted his teeth and hauled his torso upright to get a better view. With his lower legs out of commission, he wouldn't be able to use leverage from below to push his leg off; he'd have to pull it. Tom set his hands on either side of the wound and gripped hard. Then he fell backwards, using his momentum to rip the meat of his thigh off of the jagged post. He screamed, a high, keening wail of pain, and unconsciousness swallowed him.

When he came to, his eyes shot open. His watch was broken, so there was no way to tell how long he'd been out. The up side was that he wasn't dead, which meant that his femoral artery was still intact. Time to start heading for the exit, which was noticeably more obscured by smoke now.

Tom rolled himself onto his stomach and screamed again -- not as loudly -- as the shattered shin bones sent fresh waves of pain through him. The pain brought nausea with it, but he couldn't throw up. He needed to keep his mask on, because the air around him was superheated, and oxygen-poor. He threw an arm out in front of himself and pulled. A foot, maybe a foot and a half. Just twenty more of those and he was home free to get up the stairs. He'd pulled himself forward three more times before he remembered his Halligan, hanging from his harness.

"Fuck," he whispered to himself as he struggled to free the metal bar. The spike on the end would dig into the floor and give him traction. He might be able to get five feet at a go out of this, and it would help him pull himself up the stairs, too. Maybe he'd be able to get up to the entryway and find help.

Ten feet to the stairs. Swing the Halligan, pull body forward, swing again. The bottom stair bumped against his helmet as he completed the easy part of his journey. Now for the stairs. Every thump against his legs would be agony, every inch upward an Everest. No choice but to try.

As he swung the point of his Halligan's pick into the steps above him, he heard it -- a creaking, splintering sound. The building was going to give, and soon. Got to move.

Halfway up to the 90-degree turn in the staircase, Tom heard something else that made him stop. The bell. Every SCBA compressed air bottle has a bell that sounds when there is two minutes' worth of air left in the cylinder. Tom swung the Halligan again. Two minute warning, he thought, and scowled. The pick slipped from the edge of the steps, and Tom went tumbling backwards, landing at the bottom of the staircase.

Tears began to stream freely, and he knew that it was useless. He leaned back on his bottle, breathed as deeply as he could, and thought about the things he'd loved in life: his last day of school, the first time he'd kissed a girl, getting his slot in Engine 61, pulling a little boy out from under the kid's bed and passing him out the window of his burning house to a waiting ladder crew. It was better than most people get, he mused as he heard the bell stop ringing.

Except for his parents and the men of his house, few people cared about the death of Firefighter Thomas Clayton. After all, he didn't die in the Towers' collapse. He just died doing his job.