Firetrap by Earl Emerson

a thermal imager?”
    â€œIt’s a handheld camera that shows heat. Like infrared. It sees through smoke and through walls. We’ve got one on the truck right outside. I’ll show it to you.”
    Trey took me out to the apparatus bay, where he climbed into the truck and came out with what appeared to be a handheld camera the size of a tiny portable TV. “Truckies carry this into a fire, and it can essentially see through smoke. It senses heat and has a scale along the side here that tells you the temperatures you’re looking at.” He turned it on, and a small black-and-white screen lit up. Then he pressed his palm against the side of the ladder truck for a few moments, and when he removed it, the camera showed the heat from his palm print on the sheet metal of the truck. Everything warm in the camera was white. His face and arms were white.

9. SHOE SALE
    FIREFIGHTER HERBIE SCHMIDT, AID 14, C SHIFT >
    We help Ladder 7 put up their aerial on the B side of the building, but just as we’re getting ready to go to the roof, somebody asks for the aid car on the C side, so me and Alan Francher drive the aid car around the block and park. I look up and there’s a ground ladder going up to this smoky window on the second story, a good twenty-five feet to the window.
    There’s four or five civilians crumpled on the ground at the base of the ladder, all kind of lying there like they’re hurt. Another guy’s limping toward me. There’s a woman coming down the ladder and one just getting off at the base. And there’s a firefighter trying to go up the ladder while these civilians are trying to get down. There’s only two firefighters there, and from what I can see, it’s a mess.
    It’s pretty clear that the second floor is full of people, that the fire’s about to flash over, and that we need six ladders, not one. Francher talks to the first person we see limping toward us. He’s African American and dressed pretty nice, except he doesn’t have any shoes. It turns out his ankle’s broken. Francher takes him to the triage area and I move ahead.
    I find two women on the hood of a car. The hood’s all bashed in. They’re kind of dazed, and there’s smoke oozing out the walls next to them. The first is heavyset and she’s got a broken tib-fib. I’m trying to figure out if I can carry her by myself, because, like I said, she’s heavyset. The other woman, I’m not sure what’s wrong with her. I do a scoop and run on the first one, picking her up like a kid, and just as I get her off the car I look up. There’s a firefighter in the window, and he’s dangling a woman out the window by one arm, and before I can say beans she lands on the roof of the same car. Boom! They’re throwing them out the windows! I’ve never seen anything like it.
    I yell up at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    He yells back, “Clear some space. Get those people out of there!”
    About that time another engine company throws up a second ladder a couple of cars to the left of us, but there’s a shitload of flame coming out that window. I cart my first victim maybe thirty feet, set her down in the parking lot, and start ferrying the others out as fast as I can. They’re flying out the windows. Hitting the cars. And that first car is just getting more and more pancaked.
    We set up this relay. Me and Francher and some other firefighter whose name I never get. We transport the victims away from the building as fast as we can, most of them with broken legs, a few with no injuries except smoke inhalation. We’re moving as fast as we can so we won’t get hit by the next falling body. It’s like some game thought up by a maniac.
    After a while the bodies stop coming out of the dark so quickly, and then not much later they aren’t coming out at all. If the firefighter who’s been throwing