The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 45

Thank God, Leroux thought, it was the last load. The two men who had assisted in handling the evacuees had gone down the time before, leaving him, Thelma, Quinn, Jenny, and a scattering of the kitchen help-enough to actually overcrowd the small, scenic elevator.

Suddenly one of the woman diners turned to Quinn. “I thought Harvey was in here,” she said, panic in her voice.

“He was with me until just a few minutes ago!” Leroux remembered both of them-a woman in her fifties who had been having dinner along with her teenage son.”The boy had made a pig Of himself on the free wine and it suddenly occurred to Leroux where he was. He motioned to Quinn. and they stepped back in the foyer for a moment.

“He’s probably in the john,” Leroux said in a low voice. “Too much Wine; he won’t be ready to leave for a few minutes yet.”

She bit her lip. “Mr. Leroux-when he comes back, there’s no way we can squeeze him into the elevator.

We’re overloaded as it is.”

Leroux swore to himself. “All right, I’ll stay behind and wait for him.”

Quinn shook her head. “I don’t think that would be practical.

Neither your wife nor Jenny will leave without you. For all three of you to stay behind is ridiculous. I’ll wait for the boy.”

“I can’t let you do that, Quinn.”

“Why not?” She looked irritated. “Because I’m a woman? That’s ridiculous. We both know we’re in -no danger up here, even if the others don’t. If we were we would certainly have known . by now.

Don’t be foolish; go on down and I’ll join you in another ten minutes.”

She laughed shortly. “I’ll get some soda from the kitchen; the boy will need something to settle his stomach.”

“All right, Quinn; you’re the boss.” He stepped back inside the elevator cage, and told the woman that her son would come down with Quinn in the next load, then he pressed the button for the doors to close before she could object. A moment later he felt the descent begin.

He started to relax.”He had made up his mind what to say to the reporters-which was nothing at all-and now he was anxious to get it over with.

“You can see the whole city below,” Thelma said quietly to Jenny.

They were all standing by the glass side of the cage. “With the snow falling, it looks like a jeweled fairyland.”

“It’s beautiful,” Jenny agreed.

Leroux put his hand gently on his wife’s shoulder.

There would be investigations later that would be hard for him to take. He would need Thelma then more than he ever had. Suddenly he felt a sense of shame. He had kept her out of so much of his life. It hadn’t been fair to her-or to him.

They were almost halfway down now; he could make out the ground below through the swirling snow. A few moments more and they would be in the lobby. And the ordeal would begin.

At that point a muffled explosion rocked the cage.

Someone grabbed at Leroux for support to keep from being thrown to the floor. Dimly he saw below them a flash of flame, reflected from the falling snow. The exterior bulbs that outlined the cage in a faint aura of light went out abruptly. There followed a ripping sound as the elevator plunged for an instant … then came to a sudden halt. The mechanical emergency brakes screeched against the side rails.

The inside of the cage became a screaming bedlam.

Several people had fallen to the floor; they now struggled to their feet. Next to Leroux Jenny moaned, “Oh, my God, what’s happened?”

Leroux, stunned, shook his head. It was obvious what had happened.

Somehow an explosion had ripped away part of the shear wall of the utility core, twisting and bending the guide rails below them. When the electricity failed, the cage had dropped several feet. The emergency brakes activated by a too fast descent, had automatically stopped their fall.

They were now suspended over the city, a good three hundred feet below.

Early Morning The beast has been weakening, growing older and more feeble.

Water has sapped its strength and death is gnawing at its vitals.

Its life span has been short, but in that length of lime it has burned and blackened all of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth floors. Now most of the fuel that fed the fire has been consumed. The flames on the twenty-first floor are being beaten back foot by foot.

In a few short hours, the fire grew from babyhood through adolescence to become a lusty adult. Now it’s past middle age and fast slipping into senescence.

Throughout the floors, -firemen are working their way through the debris, their pry bars and pulldown hooks ripping out walls, exposing smoldering studding, smashing furniture to reveal the wormlike sparks nibbling along . fabric seams. Whenever they are found, the sparks are deluged with water and quickly die.

But the beast is cunning; in small out-of-the-way rooms and closets it has hidden secret caches of food. One of them’ is in a storage room directly below the room in which the fire was born. It is a storage room for the executive offices of the Tops Supply Company, a large retail hardware and paint chain, and holds samples of various paints, varnishes, solvents, and the like. Many of the containers have been opened by salesmen to test the contents and then returned to the storeroom with their lids only loosely sealed. The Tops Supply Company is a recent tenant, having moved into the Glass House when a previous firm leasing the space had suddenly failed. Neither the inspectors for the Department of Building and Safety nor those for the Fire Department are aware of the new tenant or the contents of its storeroom. Both have been routinely notified, but the paperwork in each department is enormous the notices are buried at the bottom of incoming correspondence boxes. Both departments will find them about a month after the fire is over.

The door of the storeroom has not been breached during the course of the fire bat inside, the solvents, paints, and waxes have melted and vaporized in the intense heat.

The air in the room has been limited and most of the volatiles have gone through a first stage of combustion to yield hot carbon monoxide and various highly flammable breakdown products. Carbon monoxide is an extremely explosive gas and the temperature in the storeroom is well past its ignition point.

It is at this point that rookie Fireman David Lencho reaches out and opens the door. Cool fresh air rushes in to mix with the superheated fuel gases,. The reaction is instantaneous. The explosion shatters the walls of the storeroom, blowing David Lencho’s tattered corpse halfway down the corridor. It rips out the rear wall of the storeroom, which is also one of the walls of the utility core.

Directly behind the wall a massive, high-pressure steam line carries steam up to the sixty-fourth-floor machinery room to power much of the hVAC system.

The line itself has never been quite adequate to the task and tonight, the first really cold night in the city since the Glass House was opened, the line is operating over capacity. The steam in the pipe is several hundred pounds per square inch at a temperature of more than 500 degrees Fahrenheit. The line is already under strain and the sudden explosion in the storeroom hits it like a giant hammer blow. -The line buckles and a brazed expansion joint, designed to allow for contraction and expansion the pipe, abruptly fails; the line explodes.

If the blast in the storeroom was violent this is far more so.

The force of the steam explosion rips through the outer wall of the utility core at a point where the rails of the scenic elevator are secured. Rivets tear from their mounting and the steel rails curl outward as if they are made of lead. The elevator slams to a hall, its emergency brakes wedges driven between the cage and the splayed rails.

But the rails have been torn from their mountings and the braking power of the wedges is weak.

Inside the core, ductwork collapses as if a giant has stepped on its galvanized sheet metal. Electrical conduits are shredded. Power fails abruptly throughout the building, plunging the residential and the office floors into darkness.

Next to the electrical conduits and running the length of the utility core is the main gas line, carrying gas to the residential apartments and the public restaurants. It is held to the masonry walls by heavy steel strapping at the Point where the gas booster pumps are positioned. The force of the steam explosion tears the gas main loose from the wall. It does not break at this point; rather its supports fail and the pipe itself bows away from the explosion. The shock is transmitted up the pipe and it vibrates like a plucked violin string.

It is in the upper machinery floor, separated from the Promenade Room by the Observation Deck , that the pipe finally fails.

A heavy flood of gas gushes from the pipe and fills the.

machinery floor, billowing around.the emergency electrical generators. The gas is lighter than air but, because the gas is relatively cold compared to the surrounding air, a good deal of it flows down into the floors beneath. There it seeps among the stacks of asphalt tile, plywood paneling, and other building materials stored on the still incomplete floors.

Up on the utility floor a relay suddenly snaps and a standby motor starts. The spark from the relay is enough.

A low-order explosion rips through the floor. The armature of the motor is thrown off its shattered bearings and the armature begins to Smoke. The motor overheats and the insulation begins to burn.

Elsewhere on the floor, small fires have started near oil spills and in small open cans of grease. On a floor. below, the gas-air explosion starts fires in several paint cans carelessly left open near a stack of paneling.

It is a modest beginning, but the beast quickly makes the most of it.

The asphalt tile flows, chars, and ignites.

Wooden studding and plywood sheets blacken at the edges and burst into flame. It takes only a minute or two for the beast to become firmly established in its new home.

Far below, the fire has been rekindled on the twenty-first floor and quickly finds its way through utility holes and ductwork to twenty-two.

The beast has a new lease on life and sends triumphant tongues of smoky flame up into the snow-filled night sky.

It roars its rage and glares down at the city below it.