The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 49

“Miss Mueller, are you all right?”

Lisolette looked over the railing through the narrow space between the flights of steps. She could just see Harry Jernigan on the landing below. “We’re coming right away, HarrY-little Martin fell down and his shoe came off.” The three-year-old was busily trying to wedge his foot back into the tied shoe while five-year-old Chris looked on in disgust.

“Lisa, please hurry up.” It was Linda’s voice. Lisolette peered down over the railing again. Linda was holding onto Jernigan’s hand, looking up at them, her mouth pursed in impatience. How like the very young, Lisolette thought-to so recently have been in danger of their lives and to have forgotten it already. “He’ll try to put it back on by himself,” Linda continued primly. “He always does and he’s too young.”

Jernigan’s voice had a note of urgency in it. “Better hurry him along, Miss Mueller. We’ll wait until you catch up.”

Chris, quite unconcerned with all that was going on, was investigating the folds of fire hose locked in a frame bolted into the concrete wall. He started to play with the lock. Lisolette told him to stop and then knelt to help Martin put his shoe back on.

She was off balance when the explosion came. The blast threw her over little Martin, who cried out in sudden terror. She lay there for a moment, slightly dazed; then there was another blast several stories above her and all the lights in the stairwell abruptly went out. She heard a steady roaring sound for a moment and the concrete landing rocked beneath her. The roaring gradually stopped and she struggled to her knees. Chris was tugging at her skirts and crying, “Lisa! Lisa!”

The air was filled with masonry dust. She couldn’t see but fortunately she had her hands on little Martin. As she stood up, she felt the concrete slab that formed the landing quiver and cant slightly away from the wall behind her. She felt for both Chris and Martin in the darkness and hung on to them.

The slight movement of the landing stopped. There was no sound but that of falling debris and little Martin, who was wailing at the top of his lungs.

“My God,” she whispered to herself. “My God, what happened?”

“Miss Mueller!” Jernigan shouted up at her from the darkness.

“Miss Mueller, are you all right?”

“I think so!” she shouted back. Her voice sounded odd; it didn’t sound as it had before in the stairwell. There was, she realized with an abrupt sense of alarm, a lack of echo. “Harry, what happened?”

His voice was urgent. “The children-how are the children?”

“Frightened, but no one’s hurt. My God, Harry, what happened?”

“High-pressure steam line explosion. When one of those goes, it’s like a bomb.” There was sudden fear in his voice.

“Miss Mueller, don’t walk too near the edge of your landing.”

The dust was settling now and where the wall had been on the other side of the stairwell was blackness. Air was blowing in at her, an odd mixture of cold air and drops of hot water. The condensing steam, she thought. But the cold air?

Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now and she realized it wasn’t completely dark. The wall that had stood between the stairwell and the utility core itself had vanished for a distance of three or four floors around her.

The building wall remained behind her but in front there was …

nothing.

It was then that she realized the explosion had shattered the flight of steps that led down to Jernigan’s position.

The stairs were concrete risers cast on a central “I” beam and for several floors the steps had disappeared, the beams themselves half torn from the wall. Lisolette, for all practical purposes, was suspended on a concrete platform some twenty feet above the one where Jernigan stood.

In front of her there was a sheer drop to the bottom of the core-itself.

“Take me down; I want to go down!” Chris screamed.

She held them both close to her. “Hush now. In a minute, Lisa will take care of you.” The platform beneath her trembled again and she gasped involuntarily. Below her she could hear Jernigan say, “Linda, go into the corridor. I’ll follow you in a minute.”

“No, no,” Linda sobbed. “What about Chris and Martin?”

“Do as he says,” Lisolette shouted. “I’ll take care of Chris and Martin.”

She could see now by the flickering light in the well and looked around her. Behind her was the fire door leading into the building proper. She tugged at it and realized it was still locked. Then she thought with a feeling of panic that the fire must be just beyond; the doorknob was hot to the touch.

There was an ominous rumbling; she grabbed the two children and huddled against the wall. Just opposite her, part of the shear wall of the utility core seemed to shake itself. As she watched, it suddenly dissolved and great chunks of masonry tumbled down into the shaft.

Dust rose from the very bottom of the well and she began to cough.

The children clung to her tightly, too frightened to even cry.

She stood quietly for a moment, then realized she had closed her eyes the moment the wall had started to fall in toward her. She opened them and gasped. Part of the external shear wall had collapsed for several floors and she was looking out into the night sky, her little landing platform now canting dangerously out into the void. Only the steel reinforcement rods that threaded through the platform into the inner wall saved them from plummeting down eighteen stories to the bottom of the well. And Jernigan and Linda?

“Turn around, children,” she told the two boys. “Face the wall.”

She could not let them see that terrible drop.

She forced herself to walk to the railing and look over at the landing twenty feet below them. It was canting now, too, and littered with chunks of debris, some of them the size of a watermelon. There was no sign of Jernigan or Linda.

She felt her own landing quiver again and concrete dust came up in little puffs from where the landing butted against the interior wall.

She couldn’t stay ‘there, she realized. The platform would pull away from the wall soon, or perhaps part of the wall itself would go.

“Miss Mueller, for God’s sake, are you all right?” It was Jernigan’s voice and now he apparently had a flashlight and was beaming it up at her platform. She leaned cautiously over the railing again and glanced down. He was standing amid the debris, looking up searching for her, trying to find her in the beam of his flashlight’ Behind him, there was light coming from the stairwell door. She guessed, correctly, that firemen were working in the corridor just beyond.

Jernigan’s landing must have been the one the two firemen had been heading for.

“Where’s Linda?”

“Safe inside,” Jernigan shouted. “I saw cracks opening in the outer wall and we ducked just in time. Miss Mueller, we’ve got to get you and the children down from there. That landing won’t hold much longer.”

“How?” she called.

“Can you drop the children to me?”

She felt her breath catch in her throat. “It’s twenty feet, Harry!

And if you miss…”

“We’ll have to chance that. Miss Mueller-I promise you I won’t miss.”’ “It’s too risky!” she cried.

“It’s the only way!” Jernigan yelled back. Lisa started to protest and then felt the landing wrench slightly farther away from the holding wall. She turned quickly to Chris.

He couldn’t weigh more than fifty pounds, she thought, but what Jernigan expected her to do would tax her strength, to say nothing of his.

“Chris,” she said softly, “can you close your eyes and make yourself very stiff, as stiff as a board?”

“You’re going to drop me!” he accused.

She felt like crying. “Mr. Jernigan is very, very strong, Chris.

He’ll catch ‘you. But you mustn’t wriggle or twist.

Can you do it?”

“Do I have to?” he asked rebelliously.

She could feel the tears gathering inside her. “Yes, Chris.”

He nodded and clenched his fists and stood as erect and stiff as a soldier. “Close your eyes, Chris-that’s very good. Don’t open them until you feel Mr. Jernigan’s arms around you.” She tried to maintain the calm in her voice.

Then she picked him up as if he were a statue. She could feel his body quivering with the tension and for a moment she felt the heavy thump of his heart against her chest.

She looked over the railing to where Jernigan stood twenty feet below with his arms outstretched over the abyss. She prayed silently to herself as she lifted Chris up and over the, railing. Her arms fought his weight and she remembered the past with the Turnverein in St. Louis. Thank God for the residual strength from those grueling days. She held Chris suspended over the void, positioned him as carefully as she could, and dropped him.

He fell as though in slow motion. She saw Jernigan flex his knees and then the boy’s body struck his arms.

For a brief moment it seemed like they were both going to go over.

Then Chris was a wriggling mass of flesh, clutching frantically at Jernigan. He sank to his knees, holding the boy around the waist while Chris clung to his neck.

“He’s okay!” Jernigan shouted triumphantly. A fireman appeared behind him and led Chris away. Jernigan straightened up and rotated an arm. “Christ, I think I pulled a muscle.”

“Can you catch little Martin?”

“I think so-I have to.”

After that, Lisolette thought, the situation would become very grim indeed. She could hardly jump as the children had done and hope that Jernigan could catch her. Somehow, she would have to get down on her own.

She turned to Martin.

“No!” he screamed, wriggling out of her grasp. “I won’t! I won’t!”

She grabbed for him and he struggled hysterically. Beneath them, the concrete landing shuddered and dipped slightly farther toward the yawning core.

“Harry! I can’t drop Martin, I’ll have to bring him down myself!”

“Miss Mueller, there’s no way!” Jernigan shouted from below.

She glanced frantically around the landing, then suddenly saw the racked fire hose. The frame was now loose in the wall. “Yes, there is!” she shouted to Jernigan. She left Martin sobbing on the floor and ran to the hose. The wind was driving snow into the utility core and she could feel dampness spread over the back of her dress. She wrenched at the rack and it came free from the wall. She pulled the hose away from its retainer rod and began to feed it over the railing.

Jernigan grabbed it from below and began to pull. In seconds, the full length was played out. Lisolette eyed the coupling that held the end of the hose and decided it would be strong enough. It had to be; she didn’t have time to devise another anchor in any case.

She began to rip strips of cloth from the. bottom of her dress.

Her nice dress, she, thought; the one she had bought especially for the dinner with Harlee. But there was no way out of it; the dress was ruined anyway. As soon as she had half a dozen stout strips of cloth, she called to Martin. “Come here, son.”

“No!” he cried.”Come over here and put your arms around Lisa’s neck,” she coaxed. “That’s a good boy. But stand behind me and do it.”

Martin dubiously walked behind her and before he could wriggle away,.

she grabbed his wrists and bound them with one of the strips. He jerked back, nearly choking her. As he struggled, she reached behind and circled his body with two of the strips tied together, then brought them around to the from and knotted them at her waist.

It was crude but when she had finished, Martin was firmly bound to her back.

She walked to the railing and ran her fingers over the rough surface of The hose. Her palms were wet with perspiration and she wiped them on the front of her dress.

Martin was struggling on her back, crying with fright. She eased herself carefully over the railing, concentrating on looking at the hose rather than at the pit that opened beneath her feet. She turned and gripped the hose, transferring their full weight to it. The first few hand over hands were an agony with the boy bucking and struggling against her.

“Please be quiet, Martin,” she pleaded. “Lisa will take care of you.”

She slowly let herself down the hose, clutching at the rough fabric with her knee. Thank God she had torn some of the cloth away from the bottom of her dress or she wouldn’t have had complete freedom to use her legs.

She was halfway down when she heard the high-pitched screeching from above; the reinforcing rods that held the platform next to the interior wall were giving way and bending. The edge of the landing dropped a frightening two feet. Lisolette’s heart pumped violently and for a moment she closed her eyes. Then the movement stopped and she started to let herself down the hose again, trying desperately to master her panic.

All the old instincts were coming back now and she could feel long-unused muscles bulging beneath her skin. She felt a sudden wave of pride.

She could still do it; she would make it.

Martin had become very still. The sense of power and competence that she now felt seemed to have been communicated to him. Then she felt strong hands on her ankles, guiding her down. The next moment she was standing beside Jernigan and a fireman who helped to free the now quiet Martin.

“Come on,” Jernigan said urgently and pulled the two of them through the door where Linda and Chris waited.

Once inside, Jernigan looked at her proudly in the light of a nearby lantern. “You were tremendous,” he said quietly.

Lisolette smiled. “Thank you very much, Harry.” Before she could say more, there was a high-pitched rumbling sound. Lisolette darted one quick look behind her, then grabbed Chris and Martin and hastily pulled them back into the safety of the corridor.

The concrete landing she had been standing on moments before pulled away from its supports; with an almost unbelievable slowness it fell toward their landing.

It smashed with an explosion of concrete shards and then that landing, too, gave way. From the safety of the corridor, Lisolette and Jernigan watched the two concrete slabs tumble end over end down the utility core.

It was some seconds before they heard them strike the bottom, nineteen floors below.