His throat was scorched with dry heat, his eyes burning behind the goggles.
The next residence on Decker’s list was occupied by a woman carrying suitcases to her car. After giving her orders to leave immediately, he asked her if she could transport the pets he was holding. She agreed without hesitation and left her house, sobbing as she started up her car.
Smoke clouded any remnants of sunshine. The sky was dark charcoal and all Decker could make out were the pinpoint beams of headlights as cars filed out of the neighborhood. Mechanically, he jogged from one house to another, picking up any stray pet he could tote and giving them to the fleeing residents in the area, checking off address after address to make sure that no one was left behind.
An hour into his searching, he knocked on the door of a wood-sided one-story shingle. At first, it appeared that no one was home. But when he knocked again, Decker thought that he might have heard something, a muffled scream or yelp. It could have been animal, it could have been his imagination, but it could have been human. Something in his gut told him to go inside.
Lowering his shoulder, he rammed the door several times until the lock splintered and the door swung open.
The interior of the house was dark clouds of smoke.
“Anyone home here?” he shouted.
The response was a strangled cry: it seemed to be coming from the back. He made his way through the acrid hallway and found an elderly, bedridden, sweat-soaked woman who must have been in her nineties. It was nothing short of a miracle that she was still breathing. The woman’s wheelchair was folded and tucked into the corner. She was trapped and as scared as a treed squirrel.
“Thank God!” the woman mouthed, tears pouring from her eyes.
Decker unfolded the chair, lifted the sticks-and-bones woman from the bed, and eased her into the chair. Her nightgown was wet with sweat, urine, and runny feces. She was shivering even though it was close to a hundred degrees inside. He found a clean blanket and draped it over her skeletal frame. Then he noticed a pharmacy’s worth of medication resting on her nightstand and stuffed the vials into his pockets. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here.”
“Thank God!” the woman said again.
As he wheeled her through the smoke-laden living room, he said, “You’re all alone here, ma’am?”
“My nurse.”
“What about your nurse?”
“We heard a terrible crash …” The woman was trembling as if she had palsy. “She said she’d be back for me.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A long time …”
“Does she have a car?”
“Yes … in the driveway.”
There wasn’t any car in the driveway. The nurse had probably fled as soon as she saw the flames. Decker wheeled the old lady outside, pushed her in her chair for half a block until he found a van stuck in traffic on the road. He knocked on the driver’s window and a startled woman looked at him and then quickly away. He knocked again and presented his badge. She rolled down the glass.
“I need you to take this woman out of here. She was abandoned in her house.” Decker pulled out the medication from his pockets. “Take these with you.”
The woman didn’t respond, dulled by panic and fright. Eventually, as Decker kept talking, she comprehended what he was asking her to do. She depressed the unlock button and Decker opened the back door. He belted the old lady inside next to the woman’s five-year-old boy. The child gave the old woman a shy smile and then, in an act of altruism, offered her his lollipop.
The old woman cried. She grabbed on to Decker’s hand. “God bless you.”
“You, too.” He hefted the woman’s wheelchair into the back of the van and thanked the driver, who was still too scared and too stunned to respond verbally.
After he had finished his initial list, he moved on to residences that were farther down the road but still very much in the sweep of the firestorm. With all that jet fuel to burn and broken gas lines to feed the inferno, it would be a long, long time before things were under control.
The fire marshals wanted to clear a two-mile radius. A residential area like this one included not only private homes but condos and apartment buildings. That amounted to a lot of people and a lot of cars. Decker regrouped with his detectives and made new assignments.
Hundreds of remaining doors to knock on: the terrified eyes, soot-streaked arms holding boxes, fingers gripping suitcases. Forms flitted from house to house, vehicle to vehicle. Loose animals roamed the streets, crying out with choked and desperate barks, visibility close to nil.
It wasn’t hell but it was a good facsimile.
He worked without interruption as the fire burned deep into the night.
THE POLICE TOOK eighteen-hour shifts. Somewhere Decker got down enough food to calm his stomach, although he had no memory of eating. The crash information that filtered through to the emergency crews was incomplete and contradictory. With the passing of the first twenty-four hours, no radical terrorist group came forward to take responsibility and that seemed to soothe frazzled nerves. Decker thought it was quite a world when everyone was rooting for mechanical failure. From the eyewitness accounts, it appeared that the plane had been in trouble from takeoff. Ascent was never fully realized, and a few moments later, it nose-dived. No one remembered seeing a midair explosion, and so far, no videos of the crash had surfaced.
Thirty-seven hours after WestAir flight 1324 plummeted into 7624 Seacrest Drive, the fire department declared that the inferno had been contained, although it was far from out. Jet fuel was still stoking the flames, and even in the areas where active fire had died out, there were still flare-ups. It would take days before residents could come home. The Gov had come down, declaring the site a disaster area, making it easier for the surviving residents to get federal aid and loans.
From the snippets of data that went in and out of Decker’s ears, he surmised that the casualties numbered around sixty to seventy, of which forty-seven came from the hapless travelers on the plane. Ground casualties were still being assessed.
Decker was dismissed from duty after forty-two straight hours of work. If he drove home, he didn’t openly remember operating a vehicle. Nor did he recall seeing his wife and his teenage daughter, or taking a shower. Exhaustion had robbed any recollection of his falling asleep. His first conscious memory was Rina waking him up at nine in the morning. He was confused but not ungrateful. His dreams had been disturbing. He wiped his sweat-soaked face with the sleeve of his pajamas, leaving behind a gray streak of soot.
Rina handed him the phone. “It’s Captain Strapp.”
Decker took the phone and depressed the hold button. Electricity and phone service had been restored sometime between when he had left and when he had come home.
“We’re getting calls, Pete. Family of loved ones that lived in the burnt house or in the area: relatives wanting to know if their kin is alive or dead. I want you to set up a task force and collect as many names as possible. Also, get the dental X-rays so that when the coroner’s investigators go in for recovery, we can provide them a list of names and the X-rays for identification. We’ll be one step ahead.”
Decker understood the words as English, but it took him a few moments to grab the meaning. “Uh … do we have a list of the ground deaths?”
Strapp’s voice