“Fluffy stuff,” he replied.
I tried to make my voice so authoritative that he would obey me. “Look for the beam from my flashlight and move toward it!”
Then I saw him. Crawling toward me around the end of an aisle, maybe ten feet away.
Relief. Visual contact. All I had to do was get to him and bring him back to the perimeter.
I started to move toward him.
But then two things happened, one after the other. The rookie—who must truly have been not right in the head to do this—stood up, like he was just going to walk over.
And then the ceiling collapsed.
Twenty-five
THE SOUND WASunreal—like a thousand cannons going off at once. The ground shook like in an earthquake for much longer than it should have.
Then stillness—and the room went white.
I couldn’t see anything. Not even my hand in front of my face. I crawled toward where DeStasio had been, but I found an overturned shelf. I shouted into the radio, “Are you conscious?”
“I’m okay,” he shouted back. “But something got my shoulder.”
“Stay there, okay? I’m getting the rookie. I’ll come back for you.”
As I crawled through the whiteness, my radio crackled with a long blast of static—the captain, asking everyone in the crew to report their status. I reported in as I kept crawling, though I suspected the captain couldn’t hear me.
Next, another blast of static, most likely the captain calling a Mayday—and then, seconds later, the sound of all the engines outside blowing their air horns at once for forty-five seconds. The sound that means,Get the hell out. Now.
But I was focused on another sound.
Because in the seconds before the air horns started, I heard something more urgent. The rookie’s PASS device started going off. PASS devices let out a shriek if you’re still for too long.
I’d heard the sound before, but never like this.
It meant he’d been still for at least thirty seconds.
And that could mean anything.
I kept crawling, unable to see anything at all in the whiteness, navigating my way through the space using my memories of what I had seen before the collapse to form a mental map. Was I going the right way? I had no idea. Had I passed right by Owen without even knowing it? Anything was possible.
But I couldn’t change the visibility. All I could do was focus like hell. I could have been off by aisles, but there was nothing to do but try. If I was right about the cyanide poisoning, every second counted.
People say that emotions muddy your decision-making, but that wasn’t my experience that day. How I felt about Owen—and the sound of that PASS device—sharpened my purpose to a knifepoint. It’s like an article I once read about a teenage girl who’d lifted a car off her father after an accident and saved his life. Those were some pretty herculean feelings.
I thought about my mom saying,Love makes you stronger.And then I couldn’t help but understand—clearly and brightly and inescapably—right there in the middle of it all, that I loved Owen. I loved him. And it wasn’t stupid, or girly, or a waste of time. It was the thing that was going to save his life.
I was going to get him out of here.
Or die trying.
The white powder was starting to clear. Through the fog of it, with my flashlight, I caught a glimpse of what looked like Owen’s boot. I felt it to confirm, and then I felt all around.
It was him.
Ceiling debris had come down on him, and I had to shove it aside before I could start dragging him back toward the exit.
It’s a little bit ironic that the “fireman’s carry”—that iconic image offirefighters throwing victims over their shoulders—is not actually a technique we use in fires. Heat rises, after all. You have to stay low. You’d never stand up with a victim over your shoulder.
