Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson Page B

a precautionary hose line, while I walked across the now-closed highway in front of the rows of waiting vehicles to see what the medics had.
    “Sure you want a hose line?” Karrie asked.
    “You ever see a trapped person burn to death in a car?”
    One of Karrie’s weak points was her questioning of authority. It wasn’t so bad around the station when she asked if you
really
wanted the floor mopped, as if you might change your mind and decide to do it yourself, but fighting fire was a paramilitary activity and obeying orders in the field without hesitation was a vital part of the contract.
    After surviving an initial training period at the state training center, Karrie was now seven months into a one-year probationary cycle. Her primary supervising officer, Joel McCain, had given her a poor evaluation the month previous, not because of lacking skills but because of her attitude, and warned her that if she didn’t modify her behavior, her job would be in jeopardy. It was something I would have to deal with now. Something I’d been trying to ignore.
    The paramedics had split up, one to a vehicle. The pickup truck had rolled over on the driver’s side, and the roof was caved in, the passenger’s side door crumpled. What remained of the windshield space had been compressed until the gap was too small to extricate a patient. There were two males inside, both conscious and talking. In fact, one of them wouldn’t stop.
    The other vehicle was a new Volkswagen Beetle, crumpled all the way around; the driver, a tearful young woman in her early twenties, had gotten out on her own. “My graduation present,” she said. “I just waxed it.”
    The medic was taking her blood pressure and trying to get her to sit down, while an excited male witness in glasses and a button-down shirt explained how the Beetle had nearly missed the wreck altogether, that it had been zigzagging through the tangle of swerving cars and only got clipped at the last minute, spinning around like a shot glass on a table. There were two other damaged cars up the road on the shoulder. The witness said he’d spoken to the drivers and neither was injured. We would check later ourselves.
    As Ian dragged a hose line across the highway, I said to him, “The driver of that truck needs to be extricated and put on a backboard—we’ll have to take the roof off and bring him out the top—the passenger’s lower leg is pinned. It’s going to take awhile to get him out.”
    “I’ll get the jaws,” Ian said.
    “I’ll be with you as soon as I go up here to see what else we’ve got. I’ve already asked for more help on the radio. Snoqualmie should be showing in a few minutes.” I turned to the closest medic, Dan Logan, and said, “You guys check the vehicle in the woods?”
    “Not yet.”
    Karrie and Ian were off-loading the Hurst power unit for the jaws, a two-person carry unless you were Stan Beebe, who took pride in toting it alone. It would have been nice to have him here today. As shorthanded as we were, it would have been nice to have anybody here.
    Heedful of the slippery antifreeze on the road, I jogged along the freeway and stepped off the shoulder, crossed the ditch, and hiked up into the trees. Judging by the skid marks, the third vehicle had crossed several lanes, then shot up into the grass, up the slight embankment, and buried itself in the thick firs.
    The first thing I saw was the International Association of Firefighters union sticker hanging off what was left of the rear window. Whoever was inside was either a firefighter or a relative of one. It was a black Ford pickup truck, still hot and stinking of burned rubber, spilled gasoline, and engine fumes. The truck had snapped off enough fir trees that the whole area smelled like a Christmas tree lot.
    Squeezing past a bright yellow swatch of blooming Scotch broom, I moved along the driver’s side of the vehicle.
    The driver’s door was intact but wouldn’t open. The glass was broken out of