Whoever was out there wasn’t worried about stealth, their heavy boots shuffling across the floor with whatever they were doing. A few seconds later, complete silence, and Sam hoped the men had given up. But then the strong scent of diesel reached them, the oil flowing under the door, pooling beneath the engine they’d used to block it.
Suddenly they heard a new rippling sound, followed by a loud woosh, as a growing holocaust raced across the warehouse floor.
Oliver reared back, fear bordering on panic. “Fire! There’s no escape!”
Remi ignored Oliver and calmly informed emergency services that the Payton warehouse was on fire. “Please hurry. Mr. Payton is trapped inside. Please hurry,” she repeated in her best uptight tone.
Sam grabbed the fire hose from the wall, hoping it was still connected to the outside water hydrant. He aimed at the blazing fire, opened the valve, and was rewarded with a lame spurt.
Remi had pocketed her phone and grabbed an extinguisher from the rack on the wall. One twist with both hands and it broke off in a cloud of dust, along with an avalanche of mummified rat bones. Undeterred, she aimed at the fire. Nothing happened.
“Now what do we do?” Oliver muttered, shrinking into the corner.
Sam and Remi’s eyes locked on each other for a moment, well aware they might never see tomorrow. In unison, they turned and stared at the old Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine.
18
Sam possessed a flair for creating a plan of action during the worst of times, and it took him no more than ten seconds to calculate the odds. He held his focus. His eyes still locked on the big red fire engine—not just any engine, it was an Ahrens-Fox, the Rolls-Royce of firefighters.
His childhood passion came flooding back as he remembered riding his bicycle to a fire station with his pals, helping the firemen polish their equipment in exchange for a free ride, with siren shrieking, bell ringing.
The firemen didn’t call it a fire truck, but a pumper. The engine was a massive four cylinders behind the radiator, and a maze of valves and faucets mounted beneath a big nickel-plated ball that increased pressure enough that it could throw water onto the roof of a forty-story building.
On occasion, the firemen would show the boys how to open certain valves so they could shoot water over a cornfield behind the station.
As Sam recalled the events of twenty-five years ago, when he felt he had to work a complicated crossword puzzle in just minutes, he judged the distance from the pumper to the iron door. Eighty feet for acceleration, then add the momentum and the weight of impact and deduct the drag of the flat tires.
At best, it was a toss-up.
Remi had found a piece of wire and was using it to tie her hair up in a ponytail. “Couldn’t be worse,” she said, with a grim smile thrown toward Sam.
Black smoke was rising and flowing through the shattered skylights and becoming a cloud that soon spread and stained the sky outside. Burning debris from the rafters fell on everything, starting small fires. The heat was already unbearable, and their breathing was starting to come in painful gasps.
“Oliver. Oliver!” Sam shouted. “Oliver!”
But Oliver was lost in fear. He sat like a statue, his face ice white, eyes glazed, blankly staring at the blazing rafters ready to fall. Remi clapped her hands right in front of his eyes, trying to get his attention.
Sam shook the man’s shoulder. “Oliver! The fire engine, does it run?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “It should.” He seemed to stare right through Sam as he answered. “Got the Bentley running, so we could sell it.”
“Why is it still hidden away in a warehouse?”
“Collectors claimed it had a replica body and too many flaws. They all refused to pay me, so I hid it away.”
“And the fire pumper?”
“My grandfather kept it in a building on the farm as a safety vehicle in case of fire in the buildings or the fields.”
Sam looked at Remi with a look that belonged in a pickle jar. “If we get out of here, we’ll rewrite the book.”
Sam walked over to the grease pit that was sunk into a trench below the concrete floor. The flaming diesel was throwing up a torrid wall of fire like lava bursting from a volcanic eruption on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Sam had no more patience.
“What about the pumper? It’s bigger and heavier, to ram the doors?”
Oliver continued to stare right through Sam. “The Bentley is . . . faster. Couldn’t sell it. The deal fell through. Must have some gas in its tank.”