The Perfect Fire

This article originally appeared in July '00 issue of Esquire.

It's not so much a bell, really, as an electronic horn, short and shrill. When it goes off, firefighters freeze and listen for the sound that comes next. Usually, only words follow. "Engine 1," the dispatcher might say—or "Engine 8" or "Ladder 5," but only one truck—before reciting an address and a task. One tone signals a medical run or some minor emergency, like going out to stabilize a car-crash victim or a coronary case until an ambulance arrives, breaking a toddler out of a locked-up Taurus, or squirting water on a flaming car. Milk runs.

Sometimes, maybe every fifth time, a second tone will follow the first. Two tones is more serious, perhaps a fire alarm ringing somewhere, probably triggered by nothing more than a stray wisp of cigarette smoke or a burp of electrical current jiggling a circuit. Dispatch sends two engines and one ladder truck for those, picking whichever units are available and close.

Even rarer is three tones. Three tones means a reported structure fire, a house or a condo or a strip mall already blowing smoke into the sky. Three tones means blazing orange heat, black smoke, and poison gas; sirens and lights and steam and great torrents of water; men ripping into walls with axes and long metal spears, smashing windows and cutting shingles from roofs, teetering on ladders a hundred feet long. It doesn't always turn out that way, but three tones, at least, offers the chance of action. Firefighters love a triple.

Late autumn had been a slow stretch for the men working under Mike McNamee, the gray-haired forty-nine-year-old chief of Group II, North End District, Worcester Fire Department. They had spent their shifts cooking and cleaning and sleeping, interrupted only by sporadic milk runs and false alarms. The night of December 3, 1999, was quiet enough for McNamee to tend to his bureaucratic duties, riding shotgun in a Ford Expedition to the far-flung stations, retrieving vacation requests from the rank and file. Once his aide, George Zinkus Jr., had wheeled him to all six stations in the district, they would return to Central Station, where dinner, twenty-five pounds of beef, was roasting in the oven.

Thirteen minutes after six o'clock, McNamee's Expedition—or Car 3, as it is officially known—was on Clark Street, in the northern reaches of the city, Zinkus steering it toward the Greendale Station, when the first tone sounded. McNamee cocked his head toward the radio. A second tone, then a third. "Striking box 1438, Franklin and Arctic, for a fire at 266 Franklin," the dispatcher deadpanned. "Engine 1, Engine 6, Engine 12, Engine 13, Ladder 1, Ladder 5, Rescue 1, Car 3."

McNamee and Zinkus stared at each other, brows arched, eyes wide. "That's a bad building," McNamee said. He let out a breath, said it again. "Bad building."

Two-sixty-six Franklin. Everyone in Worcester knew that building, if not by the address then by the shadow it had cast over downtown longer than anyone could remember. It was a hulk of brick and mortar rising eighty-five feet above an old industrial park immediately east of Interstate 290, eight elevated lanes that cut through the heart of the city. Civilians knew that building because of the giant words painted in white on the wall and underlined by the freeway: WORCESTER COLD STORAGE AND WAREHOUSE CO. Firefighters knew that building, dreaded it, because it sat there like a colossal chimney. No windows interrupted the endless rows of brick, save for a few tiny panes on the second floor, which meant there were no easy vents to bleed out heat and smoke and, if things got really hairy, no obvious escape hatches for anyone trapped inside. Hardly any of the firefighters had ever been in it, except for a few old-timers who'd cleaned up gas leaks or doused spot fires before the warehouse was abandoned in 1987 and, later, a captain named Robert A. Johnson, who got lost in a maze of meat lockers during a routine inspection. "Jesus," he had whispered to himself then. "We'd better never get a fire in here."

They would talk about it now and again the way firefighters will, guessing at a danger that might come to pass and, at the same time, hoping they won't be on duty if it does. Only two weeks earlier, driving through town in his gold Buick, McNamee had nudged his wife and pointed at Worcester Cold Storage. "You see that building?" he asked her, for no reason he can remember now. "It scares me. That building scares the shit out of me."

After Captain Johnson decided the beef had been roasted to a proper shade of pink, Paul Brotherton grabbed a knife from the rack above the sink in the Central Station kitchen and started carving it into neat, thin slices. For Brotherton, this was risky business. In five years on Rescue 1, pulling people (and, once, a parrot) out of fires, he'd never so much as twisted his ankle. But at the station, he could bust himself up good. He'd needed his hand sewn back together once after he lost control of a chopping knife in the kitchen, and he almost tanked his career when he slipped on a patch of ice in the back lot, landing so awkwardly and hard that he tore his thumb clean out of its socket. The doctors thought he might have to retire. Brotherton rehabilitated himself by playing video games with his sons.

Now he had Yogi growling at him. His given name is Steve Connole, but everyone calls him Yogi in homage to his bearish girth and bottomless gut, which once got him booted from an all-you-can-eat buffet before he'd had all he could eat. Yogi likes his meat in big pieces. "For chrissakes," he groused, his walrusy mustache curling with his snarl. "Cut it like a man, will ya? What's with the women's portions?"

"What are you?" Brotherton popped back. "The fuckin' portion police?"

The first tone sounded before Yogi could answer. A second, then a third. "Striking box 1438, Franklin and Arctic..." And fifteen men were moving, stepping into their gear, before the next syllable came out. In three quick motions—step through the trousers and into one boot, then the other, pull up the pants and snap the suspenders over the shoulders—each man was half dressed for battle.

Yogi and four other men clambered onto Ladder 1; Brotherton piled into the back of Rescue 1 with Jerry Lucey, his partner for the night, and three others; and Captain Johnson, whom everyone calls Robert A., hoisted himself into the front passenger side of Engine 1.

The sirens were on as soon as the yellow doors to the garage bays opened. Ladder 1 turned left onto Central Street, the rescue and engine trucks right behind. They roared two blocks to Summer Street, turned right, and screamed into the rotary at Washington Square. Robert A. could see smoke blowing from the top of the warehouse, now less than an eighth of a mile away.

Seconds later, Robert A. hopped down from Engine 1 to the pavement, turned his face to the sky, and saw nothing but clear night air. Maybe his perspective, staring straight up a wall of bricks, was too steep to bring the smoke into view. Or maybe the wind had shifted, blowing everything over the back side of the building. Or maybe the old warehouse had sucked the entire cloud back inside, as if holding back a secret.

"What the fuck?" Robert A. muttered to no one in particular. "Hey. Which fuckin' building's on fire?"

At the turn of the last century, keeping a few thousand sides of beef from spoiling required an enormous amount of insulating materials, layered one on top of another, to hold in the chill generated by massive blocks of ice and the wheezing coils of primitive refrigeration systems. The brick walls for Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Company, then, were laid eighteen inches thick and coated on the inside with a half foot of cork infused with asphalt. Chicago Dressed Beef, down the block at 256 Franklin Street, was constructed in a similar fashion, part of a complex of eleven buildings that a Lithuanian immigrant named Max Jacobson built after settling in the Blackstone River valley with his wife, Lena, in 1905.

As the years went by and the business changed hands, newer and better insulation was added. Polystyrene and polyurethane and Styrofoam, all derived from petroleum, were layered and sprayed over the cork and, in some spots, coated with a smooth laminate.

The building itself was shaped like a stout capital L, 150 feet on its long edge, along Franklin Street, and roughly 100 on the short side, parallel to I-290. A fire wall—solid brick punctured by a handful of fireproof doors—split the building in half where the base of the L met the spine, a line of demarcation drawn perpendicular to Franklin Street.

Inside, though, those dimensions and shapes were meaningless, lost to a jumble of narrow hallways and catacombed meat lockers. The doors were spring-loaded and heavy, designed to fall shut automatically, and the door handles were thick iron rings that nestled into round pockets, leaving the walls flush and smooth. One freezer might open into three others, all with identical doors. Even employees would get lost in Worcester Cold Storage, opening a wrong door that looked like the right door and every other door. Only the lower floors, where the forklifts operated, were different: At the top of the L, in the half of the building left of the fire wall, the first and second floors were open caverns, fifty feet deep and twice as wide, broken only by six cement columns, three on each side.

Chicago Dressed Beef closed in 1983. Worcester Cold Storage limped along for another four years before it, too, was emptied. The building was never completely abandoned, though. As late as April 1999, after firefighters drowned a minor blaze on the roof of an adjacent building, the city's Fire Prevention Unit complained that homeless people could easily find their way inside that building and Worcester Cold Storage, and ordered that both be more solidly secured. By June 7, the owner, a developer named Ding On "Tony" Kwan, had finally sealed the warehouse tight.

Thomas Levesque still figured out a way to get inside. He was a thirty-seven-year-old drifter with a history of mental illness, a veteran of Worcester's soup kitchens and homeless shelters. In the spring of 1999, he met Julie Ann Barnes, a waif with dirty-blond hair and hollow eyes who'd dropped out of Wachusett Regional High School after her sophomore year. She was nineteen when she became pregnant with Thomas's child. The two of them took their meals at the Mustard Seed, a soup kitchen, and spent their nights on the second floor of Worcester Cold Storage, minding Julie's cat and dog. Julie loved animals.

Their relationship was fluid at best, volatile at worst, imploding one day, rekindling the next. The night of December 3, they were officially broken up but still huddling together inside the warehouse against the chill. Thomas wanted to have sex. Julie didn't. They squabbled, then tussled. A candle, the only light they had in the meat locker where they were, tipped over. The wick brushed a pile of clothing. Orange flames began dancing across the cloth, higher and faster, then leaped to a pile of old papers. Thomas and Julie tried beating the fire to death, flailing at it with a pillow. Flushed with air, it only continued to spread. Then they gave up, making their way down a narrow stairway to the street. Once outside, they walked along Franklin Street and under the elevated highway to the Worcester Common Outlet, a mall where the music store has headsets attached to terminals so customers can sample new releases. Thomas and Julie each slipped a pair over their ears and listened to CDs.

They never reported the fire. It burned for nearly two hours before the first puffs of smoke pushed up four floors and out through the roof.

Mike McNamee and George Zinkus were running four minutes behind the rest of the crews, barreling south on the interstate, the Expedition following a rise in the pavement that brought it parallel to Worcester Cold Storage. At that point, the fire was only a one-alarm blaze, meaning only the initial response units—four trucks from Central Station and four from three other stations—had been dispatched. At 6:20, as Zinkus wheeled down an exit ramp and into Posner Square, McNamee eyed the plume of smoke seeping from the roof and considered how bad a building Worcester Cold Storage could be. He decided to strike a second alarm, calling the order over his radio. In fire stations across the city, three sharp tones sounded, followed by dispatch ordering two more engines and another ladder truck to the scene.

The first wave of firefighters was already attacking the building. Captain Mike Coakley and Bert Davis positioned Ladder 1 on Franklin Street, put the jacks down to stabilize the truck, and started stretching 110 feet of high-tensile aluminum ladder from a turntable on the back of the truck toward the roof. Yogi and his partner, John Casello, trotted down Franklin Street to their left, toward a pair of loading-dock doors. To simplify things in the chaos, firefighters reduce the contours of a building to the first four letters of the alphabet, starting with A for the front wall and moving clockwise around the structure. Yogi and Casello headed toward the AB corner, where they forced open two doors near the bottom of a stairwell. They made a quick sweep of the first floor, which was huge and empty and quiet, bounded at the far end by the brick fire wall. No sign of flames. They backtracked to the stairwell and climbed to the second floor, hustling up three short, twisting risers of black steel steps.

Other firefighters had followed them to the same loading-dock doors and were already piling up the stairs. Robert A. and one of his men went all the way to the top, spot-checking for fire at every landing, poking their heads in to look for flames, before forcing open a bulkhead to the roof. Four men from Rescue 1 were right behind. Lieutenant Dave Halvorsen and one of his men stopped at the third floor for a more thorough search. Paul Brotherton told Halvorsen that he and Jerry Lucey were going up to the roof with Robert A.

On the roof, the top of the fire wall poked up as a short parapet, cutting the building in half from the A wall to the C wall and promising to contain any fire to one side or the other. The problem was, no one knew which side the fire was on. Near the back, along the C wall close to the parapet, was a glass cubicle fifteen feet wide and fifteen feet deep, reinforced with wire mesh, that capped a double elevator shaft. It would make a fine vent. "Clean it out," Robert A. told Brotherton.

Every firefighter carries a tool. Some have hoses and ropes, but everyone else wields a piece of medieval hardware—a flat-head ax, for instance, or a Boston Rake, which looks like an old vaudeville hook, except it's made of solid iron and can rip out a plaster ceiling in three swift strokes. Brotherton's weapon of choice was a Haligan, a rod of hardened steel roughly the size of a baseball bat, with one end flattened into a two-pronged claw. The other end, a flat wedge that can slip between a door and a jamb to pry it open, is attached perpendicularly to the shaft. Next to that, also at a 90 degree angle to the shaft, is an adze, a pear-sized steel point that can puncture the most solid walls and doors.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jerry Lucey was carrying a flat-head ax. He and Brotherton destroyed the glass cap in seconds, smashing it to bits before Coakley and Davis even made it up the ladder to the roof. They still didn't know where the fire was, but they knew something was burning: Smoke pulsed out of the hole in fast, wispy streams.

At about the same time, down on the street, Bill McNeil, who runs an all-night diner just on the other side of I-290, grabbed a cop directing traffic. "Hey," he told the cop, "some homeless people live in there."

The message that there might be people inside was relayed over the fire-department radios. Brotherton and Lucey walked back across the roof to the AB stairs, tromped down one flight, and started searching the top floor for people. Routine. At 6:22, only the thinnest haze of smoke hung in the corridors. More than two dozen men were in the warehouse, looking either for homeless people or flames. Each man had a tank strapped to his back filled with oxygen compressed to forty-five hundred pounds per square inch—enough for thirty minutes of relaxed breathing, half as long humping through a burning building—and connected to a plastic face mask. But the air was so clear that no one had bothered to put his on.

If a shift is fully staffed, which few shifts in the Worcester Fire Department ever are, thirty-seven men and seven trucks, plus a district chief and his driver, will respond to every working fire. Each engine truck carries one officer and four fighters. Assuming no one is trapped inside—saving people is always the first order of business—the first engine on the scene searches for the flames and lugs hoses toward them. The second engine taps a hydrant, and men from the third and fourth engines flank the blaze, positioning themselves above, beneath, behind, or to the side, depending on the circumstances.

Two ladder companies bring another ten men, who have two main tasks. One is to open the building—forcing doors, bashing windows, smashing holes through walls—so the engine crews can drag their hoses inside. "We always bring the keys," Yogi likes to say. "And we haven't found one we couldn't get into yet." The ladder crew's other job is to ventilate the building. In any structure fire, the flames generate an enormous amount of smoke, which consists of carbon monoxide and a myriad of poisonous compounds. Because they are hot—plain old cotton cloth burns at roughly 400 degrees—those gases rise, collecting at the highest point in the room. If they aren't allowed to escape through a broken window or a hole sawed through the roof, they will linger, absorbing more heat from below until they explode.

District Chief McNamee once witnessed such a blast. He was in an old millhouse on Jacques Street back in 1982, when he was still a lieutenant on Engine 4, edging forward with a hose toward an orange roar at the far end of a long, narrow room. The ceiling, thick with smoke, quivered with a deep lemon glow and then erupted, a wall of flame racing above and toward him, the way a wave hurls itself upon a beach, and dropping to the floor when it reached the wall at his back. Firefighters call that a rollover because the flame rolls over—or, if the fates allow, above—anything in its way. A decent countermeasure, McNamee found, was to drop flat on his back and point his hose straight up, splashing 250 gallons on the ceiling every long minute until the flames finally washed away.

Even more dangerous than a rollover is a flashover. The principle behind it is the same: Trapped gases are heated until they reach what's called the ignition temperature, the point at which they spontaneously ignite. Unlike a rollover, however, a flashover happens everywhere at once; every molecule of atmosphere, every object in the vicinity, instantly turns to fire. A man at the edge of a room about to flash has maybe two seconds to run; a man inside that room is going to die.

On the other hand, opening a vent in the wrong place can trigger a backdraft, a massive explosion of raw and violent heat. A seasoned firefighter can usually see a backdraft coming. The first clue is the color of the smoke, a sickly shade of brownish yellow. The second is the way the smoke moves, puffing out of windows and under doors, then being sucked back inside, as if the fire were gasping for more fuel upon which to feed. If the wrong door is opened or the wrong window bashed out, the flame will draw in a great breath of air, hold it for an instant, then exhale in one lethal blast.

While the engine crews are attacking the fire and the ladder crews are venting, the rescue squads are crawling through smoke-filled rooms, looking for flames that may have spread and people who might be trapped, and hoping—knowing, really, because firefighters would be paralyzed with fear if they didn't trust their mates to do their jobs properly—that nothing will explode or collapse or flash. Rescue guys move on all fours, sweeping with their hands for bodies, or on one knee, shuffling one foot ahead to feel their way through the dark. It doesn't matter which way they move so long as they stay low, since the difference between two and five feet above the floor can be 400 degrees.

Firefighters like to tease each other about who has the toughest job. "A rescue guy," a man from a ladder truck might announce one night during a game of cards at the station, "is nothin' but a ladder guy who's afraid of heights." "Yeah? Well, fuck you," an engine guy might say, " 'cause a ladder guy ain't nothing but a fresh-air firefighter." And everyone laughs, because everyone has balls big enough to be busted or else he wouldn't survive long in the firehouse. But if firefighting were a war, and some nights it is, the rescue guys would be walking point.

The only thing Jeremiah Lucey ever wanted to be was a Worcester firefighter, and the only kind of firefighter he wanted to be was a rescue man. That's how he got assigned to Rescue 1 to begin with, back when he still carried the green shield of a rookie. After only nine months on the job, he called Randy Chavoor, the captain of the rescue truck, and told him he heard the squad was looking for a new man.

Chavoor took him on. There was some griping, veterans demanding to know what a green shield was doing on their truck. Chavoor had to admit he'd never heard of such a thing. On the other hand, he'd never known a rookie with the stones to call a captain and ask for a job, either.

Lucey was nothing if not tenacious, at least when he wanted something. Like when he was a teenager stocking shelves at the Big Y, the cashiers all giggled about how handsome he was—with his dark Celtic eyes and a tousle of jet-black hair, he was a dead ringer for a young Tom Hanks—but the one he really wanted was Michelle, a brunette who, as is usually the case in such matters, wanted nothing to do with him. After a few weeks, he asked her out, which, at that age, meant drinking a six-pack in a parked Pontiac.

"Can my girlfriend come?" Michelle asked, a question most men would have taken for outright rejection. Jerry said okay.

So the three of them sat in his car, sipping beer and talking. At the end of the evening, Jerry drove Michelle home and asked if they could go on a real date sometime, just the two of them. She said yes. Four and a half years later, in May 1985, they were married.

The fire department had tried to reject his advances, too. In 1990, Jerry scored high enough on the civil-service test to earn a seat in the drill school. But the city of Worcester was planning layoffs for the following year—last in, first out, which meant Jerry's entire class would be out of work the moment it graduated. He had a good job already, driving a truck for Coca-Cola, and, with two young boys, Jeremiah III and John, he couldn't afford to be out of work long. But Jerry wanted to fight fires, wanted action, so he and Michelle calculated how much she could make cutting hair part-time and pared down the family budget. Somehow the numbers worked. Jerry quit driving the truck, learned the basics of fighting fires, and then was promptly unemployed.

He stuck it out for a year, doing odd jobs on the side, until July 1992, when he was called back to the fire department. The job seemed a part of him, like his Irish blood, only one generation removed from the Ould Sod. Firefighting isn't so much a job as an identity, and Jerry wrapped himself in the trappings. If a memorial was to be dedicated—like, for instance, the one in Boston for nine firefighters who had died when a burned-out hotel collapsed on them in 1972—Jerry would march in the color guard. He lined the walls of his basement family room with photos of raging blazes, including one in which he appears as a fuzzy blur, a vague, dark outline behind a sheet of flame. At the bottom of the stairs, he framed a poster from Backdraft, a movie that always used to annoy him. "That's so fake," he would tell Michelle during the fire scenes, all orange light and pale smoke. "That's not what it's like at all."

Then he would tell her what it was really like in a burning building, how the smoke would be so black that he could find his partner only by feeling for his shape in the dark, how sometimes he stopped believing he would squirm out alive.

Paul LaRochelle, Jerry's partner for most of the past decade, remembers crawling through the kitchen of an apartment in a triple-decker with Jerry, the linoleum melting from the flames one floor below. "I can't find the door," he shouted at Jerry, his voice muffled by his mask. "Where's the damn door?"

"I got it," Jerry yelled back, reaching for his partner in the dark. "It's this way."

Jerry and Paul, along with their wives and children, spent as much time together off duty as they did on the job. They developed a shtick, Paul introducing the two of them as Sick and Twisted. "I'm Sick," Paul would say, "and he's Twisted."

Paul wasn't working December 3. Both he and Jerry were assigned to Group III, which was off duty that day, but Jerry had decided to work a swap for a guy from Group II on Engine 1 who was on an early-winter cruise. Another firefighter, an engine man by trade, was filling in for Joe LeBlanc, who was Paul Brotherton's partner on the rescue squad. Early in the evening, Jerry and the other fellow asked McNamee if they could switch, Jerry joining Brotherton on the rescue truck, the other guy going to Engine 1.

McNamee told them that was all right by him.

With the first floor clear, Yogi and Casello went up to the second floor. Yogi could hear the fire before he could see it, a ferocious snapping and popping behind the bricks on the far side of the room. He walked fifty feet to the door in the center of the fire wall and pushed it open into a thick forest of flames. "Hey, chief, I got it," he hollered into his radio. "I need a line up here."

Casello retreated down the stairs to get a two-and-a-half-inch hose. Robert A., meanwhile, followed the stairs from the roof down to the second floor, where he found Yogi wrestling with the door in the fire wall, trying to keep it from being sucked open toward the flames. Yogi didn't know that the only vent, the open elevator shaft, was behind the fire on the C side of the building. With the loading doors open at the AB corner of the building and another door open near the southwest corner, on the C wall, the warehouse was becoming a giant stove, drawing air up the stairwells, across the floor, and through the fire wall, feeding a torch that raced up the shaft toward the sky. All Yogi knew was that the door insisted on swinging open toward the fire.

"Hey, Yoge," Robert A. said, "that don't look too good."

"No, it don't," he told the captain. "Come look what I found." He was smiling, playful, like a kid who'd just found a steep and bumpy hill to roll down on his bike. Sure, it looked dangerous. But that was the fun of it.

Within seconds, Yogi and Robert A. were joined by four other men and three hoses. A crew from Engine 13 had already tromped up the stairs on the C side of the building, next to the shaft that was venting the flame, and started soaking the fire from the south side. "Better put your masks on, boys," Yogi said, still grinning. "This could get ugly." Then he let the door swing open, and he stepped toward the fire.

They moved to their right with two lines, each spitting 250 gallons a minute into the fire. They knocked down the first bank of flames quickly enough, then moved through a burned-out doorway toward a second front, a howling orange wind. The hoses were useless against something this hot; the streams were vaporized into steam only inches out of the nozzle and were whooshed away by flames that moved like the afterburners of a jet, streaked with blue contrails and screaming horizontally into the elevator shaft.

The fire was eating through the ceiling, melting away the staples and joists that held the electrical system in place. Yogi was near the fire wall when a tangle of wires fell from above, knocking him off balance. He stumbled backward through the door, away from the flames, and landed on his back. Above him, he saw smoke streaming into the fire, like thick ribbons of a thunderhead racing into a funnel cloud. "Hey, Cap," he hollered to Robert A. "Something don't look right. Everything's moving the wrong way."

By 6:35, McNamee had four hoses attacking the fire—"Pissing into a furnace, really," Robert A. says—two threaded up the AB stairwell and two up the C stairs. He also had more than a dozen men scattered on other floors, working in groups of two and three, searching for the homeless people who might be trapped inside.

McNamee was working alone. With the lines in place, he climbed to the third floor, pushed open a door, and stepped into a labyrinth of empty meat lockers and freezers. The smoke was still light, just dense enough to be smelled but not to sting his eyes or scratch his throat. He pushed through a second door, then a third. He was wandering deep into a burning maze, with no hose to lead him back if things turned bad, no partner to watch his ass. He told himself, This is a bad idea.

McNamee turned around. In front of him were three identical doors. His stomach tightened. He opened all three doors, one at a time. Behind each, he saw another room. His gut twitched again. He stood stone still, listening for boots clomping up stairs, for men hollering, for axes and Haligans bouncing against railings and walls.

The sounds were loudest through the middle door, which led to another door and, finally, the stairway. The smoke was still only a haze, visibility good, so McNamee turned up the stairwell, planning to search the fourth floor. He took one step, raised his foot to the next riser.

At that instant, smoke began to fall around him, pouring down from the floors above, thick and oily, like a predatory fog. It fell suddenly and without warning. In less than five seconds, everything—the walls, the stairs, even his own hand held less than an inch from his face—had disappeared into darkness.

McNamee had heard no sound, no loud pop or explosion over the roar of the flames. He wondered if the top floor had flashed, if hot gases had pushed into rooms coated with asphalt-infused cork and Styrofoam until everything had ignited. All he knew for sure, though, was that the smoke had pushed into the hallways and lockers, overflowing and pushing, pushing out until it collapsed down the stairwell, a force seemingly overwhelming physics, a searing, noxious mist settling in on the floors below.

"I want everyone on the upper floors down to the ground now!" he hollered up the stairwell. "And I want head counts. I want everyone accounted for." Then he gave the same command over the radio, fumbling for his face piece in the dark.

A parade of firefighters traipsed down the AB stairs and gathered at the bottom. Then Paul Brotherton, still searching for homeless tramps with Jerry Lucey, keyed his radio for the first time, answering his chief from somewhere high up in the warehouse. We're deep in the building, he said, and we don't know which way to go to get out.

"Interior Command to Paul Brotherton," McNamee radioed back. "What floor are you on?"

We're two floors below the roof.

Brotherton and Lucey were counting down from the top, not up from the bottom, where the search teams would have to start. McNamee sprinted out of the loading-dock doors, working his eyes up and down the building. No windows. No way to tell how many fucking floors were in the building. No way to know for sure where two of his men were trapped.

At 6:37, with two men missing, a third alarm was struck. Twelve more men, five on Engine 3, three on Engine 7, and another four on Ladder 2, would arrive within minutes.

Paul Brotherton was supposed to paint the room he shared with his wife in their neat ranch house in Auburn, a bedroom town southwest of Worcester. Denise, his wife and the mother of his six boys, had stripped the wallpaper, and she thought December 3 would be a fine night for Paul to call in sick and start painting.

"Absolutely not," he told her when she called, shortly before five o'clock, from her job as a pediatric nurse. "I'm not calling in sick to paint a room."

He was crankier than usual. He'd worked an overnight shift the night before, then spent the day shuttling his boys from appointments to practices and back again. "You know what?" Denise finally told him. "Go to work. I don't want you home tonight."

It was a minor spat as marital squabbles go. After everything they'd been through, an unpainted bedroom was barely a ripple, not worth the calories required to complain about it. They met in the early 1980s, when she was a nurse and Paul was an orderly at Worcester City Hospital, where, in the spring of 1983, Paul's father happened to be dying of cancer. It was a terrible death, long and slow, and Denise felt so sorry for Paul that she convinced fourteen coworkers to take him out for a night on the town to help take his mind off things.

On the appointed night, June 6, 1983, all fourteen people canceled. "Jeez, Denise," Paul said, "I'm still game if you are."

They went to Tammany Hall, a local juke joint that Denise remembers so precisely because Paul kept the ticket stubs in his wallet for the next seventeen years. Nothing was supposed to come of it. They were both engaged to other people. But that night, something clicked. Somehow, and in similar ways, they both realized they were planning to marry the wrong people. As it happened, a few weeks after their first date, they ended up on separate phones at the hospital, each taking grief from their spouses-to-be. They were in sight of each other, rolling their eyes back and forth. "On the count of three," Paul mouthed to Denise. He raised his index finger, then his middle finger, and when he straightened his ring finger, he and Denise both hung up.

A week after their first date, Paul was appointed to the fire academy. One month later, they decided to marry. They told Paul's mother on July 13, 1983. She was still grieving for her husband, her heart so badly broken she knew it would kill her. "That's nice," she said, managing a weak smile. "But I'm afraid I won't be there."

She suffered a massive coronary the next day and died before the ambulance got her to the hospital.

Paul's sister, Kim, was only ten at the time. The responsibility of raising her fell to Paul, who was twenty-four, and Denise, who would spend the night when Paul worked the evening shift. The wedding was moved up to February 1984, mainly so Paul and Denise could set a proper example for Kim.

The new family—Paul and Denise and Kim—moved into the home Paul's parents had left. If becoming a father to his sister before his own first son was born ever wore on Paul, he never let on. When she was a teenager, Kim's friends used to tell her how lucky she was to be raised by her brother. She would shake her head and tell them they didn't know the half of it. Paul and Denise were still young enough to know what teenagers did in Worcester, about the keggers down in Burncoat Park, about what went on all night after the senior prom. Which is why Paul told Kim she couldn't, and which is why he grounded her for five weeks when she rolled home past dawn anyway.

In 1992, Denise and Paul moved to Auburn. Kim came with them, staying until 1998, when she got married. Paul walked her down the aisle. By then, Paul and Denise had six boys, the oldest twelve and the youngest four. At the beach last summer, Paul lined them all up in a row, from youngest to oldest, with himself anchoring the end, facing the ocean with their backs to a camera, their trunks pulled down below the cracks of their asses. He titled the photo Beach Bums and hung it in the family room.

In the firehouse, Paul's one-liners were legendary. One afternoon in the shower room, he eyed one of his colleagues, working from the top of his bald head down his hirsute back. "Jeez," he muttered, "God sure has a weird sense of humor, huh?"

The other thing the guys knew about Paul Brotherton was how much he adored Denise. "I want you to meet my wife," is how he would introduce her, choosing his words deliberately, because he wanted people to know whom he'd been lucky enough to marry. Every Sunday morning, assuming his shift wasn't on, he brought her breakfast in bed. If she decided a half dozen friends should come over for a Saturday-night cookout, Paul wouldn't blink twice. And if she also happened to mention, as she did on a Tuesday last summer, that she wished they had a deck on which to entertain those friends, he would dig the holes for the footings that afternoon. By Saturday, he'd finished the entire deck, twenty-two feet long and twenty feet deep.

Paul taught his boys about fire. "You need to respect it," he told them. "It can warm your house and cook your food. But it'll destroy you in nothing flat if you don't respect it."

Randy Chavoor left the rescue squad in 1994 when he was promoted to district chief, commanding Group II in the southern half of the city. "The forgotten station," he calls it, because there isn't much reason for anyone except firefighters to pass through south Worcester. The houses are crowded more closely there, the tenants poorer, the wiring and gas older and more rickety. Lots of action down south.

December 3 was a slow night for Chavoor's troops, so Chavoor ran some administrative errands, which took him to headquarters on Grove Street shortly after 6:00. At 6:12, dispatch reached him there and asked if 266 Franklin was in the southern district. Chavoor knew it wasn't. But he also knew his buddy McNamee would steal a call from him in a heartbeat. He keyed his radio, planning to claim the fire for himself, but the battery was out of juice. Thirty seconds later, he heard dispatch sending McNamee and the other crews, including five men on Engine 13, who worked under Chavoor, to the warehouse.

Once he'd finished at headquarters, Chavoor and his driver headed for the southern-district station, following a route that crossed Franklin Street just west of Worcester Cold Storage. Chavoor told his driver to park near the corner. He sat and watched for a few minutes, seeing only a thin tail of smoke escaping from the roof. Bored, Chavoor told his driver to head back.

At 6:37, Chavoor heard the third alarm. He also heard Paul Brotherton say he was lost with Jerry Lucey. Chavoor shook his head, smiled. Tonight he would bust some balls. "Didn't I teach you better than that, Jerry?" he would say once the fire was under control. "Real rescue guys don't get lost." And then everyone would laugh, even if the sting from the smoke made their throats hurt.

A diabetic lifting weights at a local gym on December 3 forgot to eat after taking his insulin and passed out, at which point someone dialed 911. One tone was sounded. Engine 3, from the Grove Street Station, was dispatched. A milk run before suppertime.

Engine 3 was back in the station a few minutes before six o'clock. On the way back, Lieutenant John Sullivan, riding shotgun, had given the air an exaggerated sniff. "There's gonna be a big one tonight," he'd told the firefighter behind the wheel, a thirty-four-year-old bachelor named Jay Lyons. "Yep." Big sniff. "Three alarms. I can smell it." He'd sniffed again, deeper this time, like an old salt smelling the morning tide.

Sullivan did that almost every night. It was sort of a running gag. "Yeah," Jay answered, same as always. "And it'll be on the south side and we won't be going."

Jay wanted to go. Jay wanted the biggest flames, the thickest smoke, the hottest gases. He'd been chasing fires his whole life, ever since he was ten years old and listening to his Bearcat 210XL eighteen-channel scanner, waiting to hear three tones so he could jostle his father and say, "C'mon, Dad, we're going to a fire."

His parents never understood where Jay's fascination with firefighters had come from. Jay's father was a junior high school history teacher, his mother a nurse. But when he was twelve years old, a young lieutenant from the Worcester Fire Department named Mike McNamee bought the house across from Jay's on Saxon Road. Jay would listen for hours to McNamee's stories, and, later, McNamee would take him to the station to hang out with the guys, maybe ride along on a few runs, even spend the night in a spare bunk. In return, Jay delivered McNamee's newspaper every afternoon and baby-sat his two daughters. "If one of my girls ever brings home a boy half as nice as Jay," McNamee's wife, Joanne, used to say, "I'll be a happy woman."

Jay saw his first fatal fire in high school, when a short circuit lit up an old man's house early one morning on the next block over. "I watched these firefighters rush into this house filled with flames and smoke and carry an elderly gentleman from a rear door," Jay wrote in an essay for his application to Clark University in 1983. "Why did these men risk their lives for someone they didn't even know...The answer itself is very simple. This is their life, the life of saving others."

Clark accepted Jay, and in 1987 he graduated with a degree in history. He had no intention of using it, though. He'd already taken the test for the fire department—hell, he took it for the first time when he was still in high school—and a few weeks after graduation, he started a twelve-week crash course in firefighting at the drill school. Mike McNamee was his training officer.

Jay liked taking tests and always scored well. He got a 99 on the test for the New York Fire Department, the Green Berets of the trade. And he'd scored pretty high on the test for the Massachusetts State Police, who offered him a job in 1992.

He agonized over the decision. "Stay with the fire department," his mother advised him. "That's what you've always wanted to do." But Jay wanted a new challenge, never wanted to be stuck wondering if he should have at least tried being a cop, so he resigned from the fire department that year and entered the police academy.

Following graduation, Jay was assigned to the Shelburne Falls barracks in western Massachusetts. But after eighteen months of chasing speeders and patrolling the drowsy hamlets just south of the Vermont border, he was granted a transfer to Martha's Vineyard.

To be young and single on Martha's Vineyard during the swarming summer tourist season is one thing. To be a cop stuck there alone after Labor Day, when only the fishermen and tradesmen and drunkards remain, is quite another. Businesses shut down, the cool summer breezes turn into bitter winter winds, and the island turns into an isolated cage. One year into his stint, Jay was stir-crazy. He requested a transfer to Cape Cod and the suburbs south of Boston. His request was denied. He would spend another winter on the island.

Jay started drinking at about four o'clock that afternoon, throwing back beers in frustration. At ten o'clock, he drove to the corner of Lake and Ocean avenues, in Oak Bluffs, where a man he had once arrested on a drug charge lived. Jay pointed his gun at the house and fired two shots. Both crashed through the siding, one lodging in a couch. Then he drove back downtown and swallowed a few more beers before climbing back into his car and wheeling through the center of Oak Bluffs, waving his pistol out the window and shooting six more rounds into the air.

He was arrested, of course, and suspended from the force. Eventually he was found guilty of assault and sentenced to two years in jail, with all but ninety days of it suspended. Jay was released from the Dukes County House of Correction in February 1997, with twenty-two days knocked off his sentence for good behavior.

He hadn't taken a drink for more than two years by then. He found work driving a school bus, manning the door at a nightclub, substitute teaching. But he still wanted to fight fires.

In August 1997, Worcester Fire Department chief Dennis Budd gave him a second chance. The city manager and mayor signed off on it. Jay told the chief, You won't be disappointed.

A few of the other firefighters were, though. They didn't like having an ex-convict on the job. "Hey, you don't fuckin' like it?" Jay would snap if anyone said it to his face. "Tough shit. I'm here. Deal with it."

Back at Grove Street, Jay Lyons heard the third alarm and scrambled behind the wheel of Engine 3 at 6:37. John Sullivan rode next to him, working the siren and yanking the cord that sounds the horn. Behind them, in a separate compartment rattling with axes and Haligans, were three other firefighters. One of them, Joe McGuirk, was thirty-eight years old but had been on the job only two years. Worcester Cold Storage would be his first big fire.

Most of the men were fully dressed before Lyons wheeled the truck into Lincoln Square, about halfway to the warehouse. They'd stepped into their trousers and boots before climbing into the truck, where their ten-pound heat-proof Nomex coats were draped on the backs of their seats, the sleeves already threaded through the harnesses of air tanks, arranged so they could slide into them with two quick dips of their shoulders. A light is clipped to one breast, and attached to the other is a PASS alarm, or Personal Alert Safety System. If a firefighter remains motionless for forty-five seconds, it emits a shrill chirp. If he doesn't jiggle the system to reset it, it produces a continuous piercing tone that other firefighters can follow. Whacking a panic button on the PASS sets off the same alarm.

Lyons had to wait to suit up, since the driver can't very well steer while he's squirming into the harness of an air tank. As Sullivan buckled up, he kept his ear to the radio, monitoring McNamee's orders. The district chief wanted the third-alarm companies en route, engines 3 and 7 and Ladder 2, to stop a half block from the warehouse until he figured out what to do with them. Lyons pulled over at the corner.

Thirty seconds later, McNamee ordered everyone to the base of the AB stairway to organize a search for Brotherton and Lucey. He told them to bring ropes that could be tied to railings as lifelines, something to hold on to in the dark. And he told them to go up in shifts, three or four at a time, rotating so he wouldn't lose track of anyone.

"Jay, shut it down," Sullivan ordered, meaning the engine. "You're coming in."

"Okay," Lyons answered, grabbing his coat. "I'll take Joe with me."

Sullivan and his other two men headed toward the warehouse. McGuirk waited at the engine while Lyons pulled on his gear.

There was never any question what Joe McGuirk would grow up to be. Ever since he was a kid, Joe knew he wanted to fight fires, just as his father had, just as his older brother did, just as his cousins did.

He knew it by the time he met Linda Howe at a nightclub in 1980, when he was only eighteen years old. He rushed home, called her house at two-thirty that morning, woke her father up, and stammered, "Please let this be Linda Howe's number." Mr. Howe hung up. Joe called back later that morning, at eight o'clock, convinced Linda to go see The Rose with him, and then saw her nearly every night for the next six years. They married in 1986.

Through all that time, and for eleven years after the wedding, Joe took the civil-service test every chance he got, never scoring high enough to earn a seat in drill school. He worked as a handyman for a while, then started painting houses. He studied at night to become a contractor, got his license in 1989, and opened his own business. He called it McGuirk & Son, which made the company sound bigger and was, in fact, technically accurate, since Linda had given birth to Everett two months earlier. A daughter, Emily, came along three years later.

In 1997, Joe passed the test for the fire department. He started training in September and was assigned to Engine 3 out of headquarters on Grove Street. His first week on the job, he worked three fires that were smoky enough to lure the local television cameramen and newspaper photographers, who all managed to frame Joe in their best shots. The guys at the station started calling him Hollywood Joe, but Linda started to worry, thinking maybe firefighting was a lot more dangerous than contracting.

After that first week, though, the job quieted down. If Joe left the station, it was almost always to chase car wrecks and stabilize coronary patients, none of which he particularly enjoyed. Joe wanted the rough-and-tumble of the job. He signed up for scuba classes, hoping he might make the underwater rescue team someday. Short of that, he wanted a spot on a ladder truck, smashing doors and sawing roofs and plucking people from ledges. Maybe when Jay Lyons was promoted to lieutenant, he'd be assigned to a ladder truck, Joe thought. Maybe he'd take Joe with him. Lyons was aggressive, liked the action. "Balls-in," Sullivan used to say about him. Joe liked that. He wanted to be balls-in, too.

Mayday, maday. It sounded like Brotherton's voice. There was no echo of fear, no quiver of panic. But McNamee knew he was scared. Firefighters are loath to use that word, Mayday, ashamed to call for help, to admit that the smoke and the heat and the flames might be tougher than they are. To call a Mayday—or, worse, to hear one—is to know that death is no longer a theory but a probability.

Mayday. We're running out of air, can't find the way out. We're near a window.

McNamee bolted outside and scanned the warehouse walls. No windows.

"Paul," McNamee hollered into his radio, "activate fire your PASS system."

Long moment of silence. McNamee was anxious. Then Brotherton's voice came over the radio again. We're on the floor, he said. We're buddy-breathing. Hurry.

One air tank was dead, leaving only a few wisps of oxygen for Lucey and Brotherton to share, alternating shallow breaths through one mask. When a tank has two minutes of air left in it, the mask vibrates like a gentle air hammer. When the last breath is absorbed, the mask immediately turns into a vacuum, sucking hard against the face and tearing at the lungs, forcing a man to yank it off or die gasping. Once it's off, the only thing left to breathe is smoke, which consists of carbon monoxide and, depending on what's burning, anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand toxic chemicals, including hydrogen cyanide and hydrochloric acid.

A heavy concentration of carbon monoxide alone will reduce a man to a paralytic stupor in five breaths, the carbon monoxide bonding to red blood cells and starving the body of oxygen. The brain, in an attempt to save itself, shuts down the least important parts of the body—essentially everything except itself, the heart, and the lungs.

While carbon monoxide is shutting down the body, the other poisons are destroying the airways. At room temperature, smoke particles irritate the bronchial tubes and lung tissues. Superheated, they scorch the deepest parts of the lungs, burning all the way into the tiniest air sacs. In response, the throat begins to close, swelling shut from the trauma in much the same way a finger swells when it's slammed in a door. The room where Brotherton and Lucey were trapped had already reached 200 degrees.

McNamee knew he had only minutes to find them or they would die. The search teams he'd dispatched were still circling through the building, and the crew from Ladder 2 headed toward the stairs. McNamee locked eyes with Lieutenant Tom Spencer. Behind him, Tim Jackson was tightening his mask. If they were scared, neither man showed it.

Dispatch came on the radio. "Fire alarm to command. We have an emergency alarm going off for radio 6004."

Brotherton had managed to hit the panic button on his radio as he ran out of air, which means he'd likely set off his PASS alarm as well. If he hadn't been trapped in a meat locker and lost behind two feet of brick and burning insulation, one of the search teams might have heard the squeal over the thunder of the fire.

At 6:38, Paul Brotherton keyed his radio one last time. Hurry, he rasped. Please hurry.

The blue spruce in front of Tim Jackson's house is almost fifteen feet tall now and nearly as wide, big enough to block out most of the traffic from Route 16 on the edge of Hopedale, a half hour southeast of Worcester. Tim planted it after Christmas in 1988. At the time, it was only a sapling that he and his wife, Mary, had decorated for their first holiday together.

He'd been a firefighter for sixteen years by then, having qualified for the job after a tour in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne. He'd come home with a tattoo of his company's insignia on his right bicep, pieces of shrapnel in his arms and leg from a mortar shell that pulverized three of his buddies, and a Purple Heart.

He met Mary in 1985 and married her on Easter Sunday three years later. It was Mary's second wedding, Tim's third. After the wedding, they moved into her house on Route 16, a pale-yellow bungalow that backs up to the Hopedale Village Cemetery. It was the first real house Tim had ever lived in. To him, it was a playground. He built a deck under a pergola outside the kitchen and grafted an addition onto the side, next to the dining room, with a planked ceiling and a fieldstone fireplace and a wide window

in the front where he could sit in an armchair and watch his blue spruce grow. "God's country," he called his little plot of land.

Tim kept his magazines and newsletters—Hog Tales and Cruising Rider and the newsletters from HOG, the Harley Owner's Group—in a wicker basket on the floor to the left of his chair. Mary worried more about Tim's riding his bike with his brain-bucket helmet than she ever did about his fighting fires. He rode a Triumph when she met him but then converted to Harleys, trading a blue one for a red one for a black one, a fully dressed Electra Glide. Tim was meticulous with his bike, keeping the chrome on the turnout pipes polished, washing it during the quiet hours at the station house, and blowing the last droplets of water off the engine with the hose from a tank of compressed air.

Winter was the worst time of year for Tim. He couldn't ride his bike, for one thing, and none of his flowers were in bloom. The only thing that he liked about winter was the holidays, when he would drag a plastic snowman out of storage to decorate the front lawn and wrap a long string of blue lights around the spruce. Come spring, Tim was in the garden, digging a hole for a Korean lilac or pruning the azaleas out front. He kept his gardening magazines and books—Essential Shrubs and Family Circle's1996 gardening supplement—on a small table to the right of his chair. And when the new buds began to curl up from the hydrangeas, Tim and Mary would sit on the deck, Tim drawing in a great breath of spring air and smiling. "Well," he'd say, "we made it through another one."

Mary didn't know much about firefighting, mainly because Tim didn't tell her much. "How was your night?" she'd ask him when he came home in the morning. "Long and hard," he'd tell her.

"So you slept all night, huh?"

"Yeah," he'd answer. "It was pretty quiet."

Fire Chief Michael McNamee

McNamee was stationed at the bottom of the AB stairwell, waiting for firefighters as they came down from searching the upper floors for Brotherton and Lucey. Every few minutes, he would scramble outside again, working his eyes up and down the rows of bricks, searching for a clue—a window he'd overlooked, a break in the pattern where a floor joist might be—that might tell him how many floors were in the building, that might help him know for sure where his two men were trapped. Each crew that stumbled down the stairs briefed him on the conditions above, everyone giving the same basic report, which was growing worse by degrees: The heat was hotter, the smoke thicker, the situation more perilous.

Worcester Cold Storage had tried to swallow men for the past hour, erasing instinct and years of training in a ferocious black swirl. Firefighters are taught to maintain their bearings in the dark either by counting their steps—two forward, one left, three forward—and then backtracking, or by feeling for walls that, in most buildings, will lead them back to a door or a window. Robert A. tried the first method on the fourth floor, pacing carefully while he searched for his colleagues. He began retracing his steps even before the alarm on his tank went off, allowing himself more time than usual to find his way out. He would need it. He'd crawled only a few feet when he ran into a column where his memory told him there was clear space. Then a beam. Then a pole. His face mask started vibrating.

"This way! This way out!" Robert A. heard someone screaming over the fire, and then he heard the sharp clang of a Haligan banging against the stairwell. "This way!"

Robert A. took a deep breath. "Keep doing that!" he bellowed as loud as he could. "Keep doing that!" He followed the sound to the stairs. His tank emptied before he made it down to the bottom.

Captain Mike Coakley and Bert Davis tried following the walls to find their way out of the fifth floor. Clinging to each other in the blackness, feeling their way along the wall, they turned one corner, a second, a third, a fourth. "I think we're in a locker," Coakley told Davis. The two men crawled around the square again, the captain groping for the flush-handled door, wondering if he might die. By chance, they were next to the door when a hard puff of heat nudged it open, pushing it in less than an inch but enough for Coakley to feel the edge.

McNamee kept monitoring the stairway as searchers descended, emerging like wraiths from the oily fog. He knew that Tim Jackson and Lieutenant Tom Spencer were making their way across the fifth floor, feeling their way along the walls, working deep into the building in search of Brotherton and Lucey. They were almost to the fire wall in the center when Spencer keyed his radio. We're running out of air, he said. There was no panic, no urgency in his voice; in the chaos, McNamee never even heard the transmission.

By 7:30, McNamee could no longer deny his worst fears. The rescue, he realized, had become a recovery. Brotherton and Lucey were gone. The Worcester Fire Department hadn't lost a man since Tony Annunziata got lost in a furniture warehouse in 1962, and now McNamee was looking at two gone in one night. "We always win," McNamee used to say. "The whole building might burn to the ground, but everyone goes home."

But McNamee had never seen a building deteriorate so rapidly and so viciously as this one. He worried that if the smoke ignited, he could lose more men in an instant. And even if nothing exploded, there were too many ways for firefighters to lose their bearings in the chambers above. For the first time, he considered calling off the search.

But first, he would bolt up the stairs again for a final view of the conditions. When he was between the second and third floors—Kawoooooomph!—something blew up. The sound was the same as when a match touches the pilot light of a stove, only louder and deeper, a spasm of air expanding so fast and hard against the warehouse walls that the whole building shuddered and shook.

"Engine 1 to Interior Command," Robert A. barked into his radio. "Can you confirm or deny that part of this building just collapsed?"

"Robert A.," McNamee yelled back, "no, I don't think so. But I think a large area just lit off."

McNamee scrambled back down the stairs. Then another call came over the radio.

"Ladder 200 to Ladder 2." It was the ladder truck's senior man calling Tom Spencer.

Silence.

"Ladder 200 to Ladder 2," he heard again. More silence. The last anyone knew, Spencer had been on the fifth floor with Jackson, the highest the searing clouds would allow any man to climb in the building.

"Ladder 200 to Ladder 2!" Higher this time, louder, terror in the words. "Ladder 200 to Ladder 2! Ladder 200 to Ladder 2! Answer me!" A scream now, a choking, sobbing shriek. No one answered.

After Tim Jackson strung his blue Christmas lights around his blue spruce, Tom Spencer planned to sneak over to Hopedale, unscrew the bulbs one by one, and replace them with white lights. He wouldn't even have to see the look on Jackson's face the next morning—just imagining it was good enough. Spencer might not have been the funniest man in the Grove Street Station line for line, but he was the most elaborate prankster.

He was a small man, only 150 pounds, but tough and nearly vibrating with energy. He walked up mountains for fun and had ever since he was a boy. In 1999, for their twentieth wedding anniversary, Tom and Kathy Spencer drove to Camden, Maine, and climbed Mount Battie. And when, well into his thirties, he decided to start playing a team sport, he chose fast-pitch hardball. "None of that sissy softball," he'd say. Tom loved baseball, knew everything about it, and what he didn't know he would look up in the encyclopedias in the basement family room.

He also loved to travel. When he was a boy, his family never had much money, and vacations meant day trips to a state park. As a grown man, he wanted to make sure his own kids had the chance to see the world. Last year, he took them—Patrick, Casey, and Daniel—hiking through the Grand Canyon; in 1997, they spent fourteen days in England and France, Tom carefully recording each day's details—the weather, what Daniel had for lunch, the names of their hotels—in a small spiral notebook he carried in his breast pocket.

When his boys got involved in Boy Scouts, so did Tom. He taught his kids to kayak and how to find constellations in the night sky and how to lay HO-scale train tracks on a plywood platform in the basement. "I would never use my job as an excuse not to do anything with my kids," he'd tell Kathy.

He had more than one job, too, working part-time as a stagehand at the Worcester Centrum and twelve hours a week cleaning office suites for a friend's company. And then there was music. He'd learned to play the piano in his thirties, and he became an opera aficionado. He made an annual pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, and some nights he'd take his opera CDs to the Grove Street Station, torturing the men with Italian tenors and sopranos. Some of the guys would retaliate by making up their own opera, belting out the only Italian words they knew, which happened to be types of pasta. Vermicelli, linguine, fett-ah-cheee-nee, they'd sing. They called it The Spaghetti Opera.

Tom took it in stride. He had a gentle nature, drawn in no small part from religion. He was a liturgical minister at St. Charles Borromeo, where Kathy served communion and the kids did altar service. In May 1999, when the annual mass for firefighters in the Worcester diocese was held, Tom was asked to read the names of all the men, both active and retired, who'd passed away the previous year, pausing after each one for the tolling of a bell. Tom showed up an hour early, studying the list and practicing the syllables. Mispronouncing a name, he believed, would be disrespectful.

As the search for Brotherton and Lucey went on, the fire continued to spread, feeding on the fresh air sucked up from below and on cork and polystyrene on the floors above. In one spot, near the front wall along Franklin Street, the temperature soared to 3600 degrees, twice as hot as in a crematorium.

As the heat, smoke, and steam descended, the search was forced lower, floor by floor. The sixth floor had been impenetrable since McNamee encountered the flood of smoke on the AB stairwell around 6:35. The fifth floor, where Spencer and Jackson had been lurching blindly through a miasma of burning petroleum products—the industrial equivalent of napalm—was lost shortly after 7:30. Then, at 8:00, a panting firefighter emerged at the bottom of the stairs. "It's too hot, chief," he told McNamee. "I couldn't make it past the third floor."

McNamee took another look at the smoke roiling above him and ran through the situation in his head. Brotherton and Lucey were probably dead, Tom Spencer wasn't answering his radio, and Tim Jackson was with him. The warehouse was winning, taking his men two by two. Sending another man up, McNamee realized, would be sending him to die. He turned his back to the stairway. Fifteen firefighters were crowded in front of him, ready to climb back into a solid wall of black heat.

"No more," McNamee said.

For one stunned second, no one said anything. The only sound McNamee heard was the deafening white noise from above, punctuated by snaps and pops and hisses. Then the men started yelling, surging forward, bellowing at the chief. "They're still up there, goddammit! They're still in there!"

McNamee stood his ground, guarding the stairs, pushing his hands into the chests of the men. "Listen to me!" he hollered. "You listen to me! We've already lost four. We're not going to lose any more."

McNamee watched as his men collapsed, their shoulders slumping, their heads bowing, as if he had thrown a great crushing weight down upon them. "I want the building evacuated," he told them. "I want everybody out."

Firefighters filed out the door, each marching back to his assigned truck for a head count. Then they fell back into a defensive posture, arranging the ladder trucks on Franklin Street and on I-290 so they could raise their hoses above the warehouse. Nine trucks started pouring seven thousand gallons a minute into the inferno, most of which turned to steam before reaching the building. Flames started shooting through the roof like a torch, illuminating the night sky.

The trucks were still moving into position when Lieutenant John Sullivan ran up to McNamee. "Mike, I can't find Jay and Joe," he said. "I've been around this building three times and I can't find them."

No one had seen Jay Lyons or Joe McGuirk since Sullivan had left them at the truck. Some of the men had heard one radio call from Spencer, saying he'd hooked up with Engine 3 on the fifth floor, which would have been McGuirk and Lyons. But McNamee had ordered everyone to wait at the bottom of the stairs, rotating through in organized shifts so he could keep track of them. Lyons and McGuirk must have slipped past McNamee when he was outside trying to figure out how tall the goddamned building was.

At that moment, Sullivan knew two more were gone. The same phrase scratched through his mind over and over: "They're fucking dead. They're fucking dead. All those guys, they're all fucking dead."

By the time District Chief Randy Chavoor returned to the warehouse, the three-alarm fire had escalated to a five-alarm furnace. Worcester firefighters were being called in on their days off to cover the station houses, Chief Dennis Budd had been paged away from dinner with his wife, and suburban departments were sending reinforcements. A big, nasty fire, sure, but after twenty-three years on the job, Chavoor knew how to handle a burning warehouse. "Surround and drown," the firefighters say—just keep spraying water until the flames go out. Assuming, of course, that you don't think anyone is lost inside.

He walked past McNamee on his way toward the building, never breaking stride as he patted him on the shoulder. "Hey, Mike," he said, "you got those two guys out, right?"

"Randy, no."

Chavoor stopped hard, turned around. He felt like he was moving in slow motion. "What?"

"It's not two," McNamee said, his voice weak. "It's six."

The two chiefs stared at each other, Chavoor trying to catch his breath, trying to form words in his throat. Then he slumped, the same heaviness pulling at his shoulders that McNamee had seen crush fifteen men at the bottom of the stairs. For two decades, Chavoor had believed firefighters were immortal. In one instant, they no longer were. In one instant, six were gone.

Chavoor's mind reeled, but there wasn't time to dwell on it. Chief Budd wanted two teams to make a final sweep as far into the building as they could go, and Chavoor and three of his men were ordered in with a rope. Chavoor told the lead man to tie the rope to the railing on the third landing. All four dropped to their knees and started crawling, moving single file, each man holding on to the one in front, the lead man carrying the rope. Chavoor could hear the fire roaring like an army of dragons, snarling and spitting, all around him. He couldn't see anything except blackness, couldn't feel anything but a sheet of steaming velvet wrapped around his face, swirling around him like a heavy cloth. Thirty feet from the stairwell, he ordered his men to stop. "Let's go!" he yelled. "We don't belong in here."

The crawl was longer on the way out. Chavoor felt the smoke reaching over him, and he half believed it was a giant black claw that was trying to pull him back into the bowels of the warehouse. This is it, he told himself. You're gonna die in here.

Then they were out, feeling their way through the door, tramping down the steps, finding each one by banging their heels against the treads. At the bottom of the stairs, Chavoor found one of Tom Spencer's men sobbing, trying to push his way back into the building to find his lost lieutenant. Chavoor wouldn't let him up. They huddled there for a moment, the firefighter heaving with sobs, Chavoor trying to calm him enough to retreat. They were the last two firefighters to walk out of the building.

Since 7:30, the fire had been playing out live on television, broadcast from microwave trucks scattered on the blocks around Franklin Street. A helicopter hovered above, taking thermal-imaging readings of the inferno's temperature. It was a spectacular scene, an orange plume raging one hundred feet above the interstate. Reporters monitoring the radio chatter already knew two men were missing, and it was only a matter of time before the full body count leaked out.

Official protocol is for the chaplain and the chiefs to deliver the news to the widows at their homes. But as the night wore on, phones started ringing all over the city, worried wives dialing fire stations, nervous relatives trying to figure out who was missing. So fire-department brass decided to gather everyone at a downtown church for a meeting. James Lyons, Jay's father, drove over, as did Kathy Spencer, who'd been told to go there by her in-laws. McNamee and Chavoor, however, didn't know that, so they divvied up the addresses and started making their awful rounds.

McNamee went to the Lyons home first, a tidy white colonial across the street from his own house, the same one he'd seen framed in his living-room window for twenty years. Joan Lyons, Jay's mother, heard the Expedition pull up. She watched from the open doorway as McNamee forced his feet to keep moving across the lawn and up the brick walk. "Michael," she said, her voice already quaking, "do you have bad news for me?" She'd never called him Michael before.

The words stuck in McNamee's throat. "Joan," he whispered, "Jay's missing."

Joan nearly collapsed in shock. Racked with sobs, she tried dialing her daughter's phone number, but her fingers kept missing the buttons. McNamee, moving mechanically now, took the phone from her and dialed. His mind flashed back exactly two years to December 3, 1997, the night he dialed his own sisters' numbers to tell them their father was dead, killed when his car was crushed by a truck at exactly 6:10 in the evening.

He went to Tom Spencer's house next. Kathy had left the three kids at home. Patrick, the oldest boy, charged across the lawn in his stocking feet. "Mike, where's my dad? Where's my dad?" McNamee wrapped his arms around him, the boy screaming the same phrase over and over into the district chief's sooty coat. Behind him, still on the stoop, Casey wrapped her arms tight around her sides and sobbed. McNamee was too numb to cry.

Chavoor went to the other four houses. He took Paul LaRochelle, Jerry Lucey's partner of five years, with him. "No one's going to tell Michelle but me," Paul told the chief. Michelle was waiting inside with her brother and sister, hoping no one would knock on her door, when she heard a noise outside. "Just don't tell me there's a chief's car in the driveway," she said. "Please just don't tell me that."

Her brother sucked in a short, shallow breath. "Oh, my God," he said.

Denise Brotherton had been monitoring the fire all night and had even called the station around eight o'clock, after everyone knew that Paul was dead. "Is he in?" she'd asked the firefighter manning the phone. "Nope," he'd deadpanned. "He's out on a run."

Friends had been trickling into the house all night for support. The congestion was making her more nervous. Still in her green scrubs from her shift at the hospital, she cracked a beer to calm her nerves and snuck a cigarette in the garage. Every few minutes, someone would ask her if she wanted to go to the warehouse to check things out. "No," she'd say. "Paul always told me if anything happens, the fire department will come to the house. So this is where I need to be. So far, no news is good news."

At about ten o'clock, the local news anchor announced that six Worcester firefighters were missing. All the families, the woman on the television said, had been notified.

Denise felt a wave of relief rush through her, her muscles and emotions uncoiling all at once. It lasted less than a second. Before she could take one calm breath, two Auburn police cruisers and the chief's car pulled in front of her house.

McNamee and Chavoor spent the rest of the night at the warehouse, watching a flood of water spraying into the flames, then rising into the darkness in a steamy mist. McNamee stayed straight through the next day, until the fire had been beaten back far enough for a forty-five-hundred-pound wrecking ball to swing into the B wall, starting a demolition job that would last more than two months. The ball swung once and bounced off the wall. After two more mighty wallops against the eighteen inches of brick, a smattering of mortar tumbled to the ground.

Thirty-two hours after the first alarm sounded, McNamee went home and collapsed into an easy chair. The phone rang. He picked it up, heard his daughter's voice, and started to weep.

By late Saturday, most of the B wall had been ripped down to the second floor. Once tons of rubble had been cleared away, some of the building's secrets were revealed. The fire wall was still standing, and the firefighters could count the number of openings spaced vertically along the wall—the remnants of doorways. For the first time, they knew for certain the building had six floors, which meant Brotherton and Lucey had been lost on the fifth. And they knew they'd at least looked in the right place.

It took eight days to recover all the bodies. Chavoor and McNamee worked the deck—which is what everyone called the second floor—watching men dig with their hands through wet ashes and hot bricks, a mountain of burnt offerings ten feet deep. It was miserable work, especially in the December chill, but firefighters from all over the state volunteered to help, and dozens more staffed the station houses so the Worcester men could recover their own. When they had to stand aside so a bucket crane could scoop tons of detritus away, they fidgeted, antsy. The crane would swing clear, Chavoor would yell, "Go!" and a dozen men would sprint back to the rubble and dig like mad. "Ho!" meant the crane was coming back, but no one ran away as quickly.

Cadaver-sniffing dogs, including a Black Lab named Izzie, pawed the ruins. When they smelled something human, they would take one step backward and sit. Most times, they would find only a nozzle or a buckle or a scrap of hose. On Sunday morning, December 5, one of them found Tim Jackson's body. No one can be sure exactly where he died—when the floors collapsed, the bodies slid around—but he appeared to have been about twenty-five feet from the AB stairwell. If the fifth floor had flashed and turned to fire, he might have had one second to take three or four giant strides away from the blast. But then the smoke around him would have exploded into flames, the heat and the concussion crushing him to the floor.

With Jackson's body, the firefighters employed a protocol they would follow five more times that week. All but the Worcester firefighters were cleared from the deck. A body bag and red firehouse blankets were lugged up, the blankets used to fill out the bag if the fire had severely damaged the corpse and to cover the stretcher carrying the body. Four firefighters from the dead man's station—Grove Street, in Jackson's case—lined the sides of the stretcher, an officer walked behind, and McNamee marched in front. They carried each man to the B wall, where two ladders were angled from the ground up to the deck. At the bottom of the ladders, a double line of firefighters formed a corridor to the ambulance. From the time he died until the time the doors closed on the ambulance, only Worcester firefighters touched the body.

They found Jackson's wedding ring the following Friday, the day he was waked, while they were sifting broken bricks and ash through a screen of quarter-inch mesh. The next morning, at the parlor before Jackson's funeral, a firefighter asked Mary if she could describe her husband's ring. "It's just a plain gold band," she said. "But inside, it's inscribed with my name."

The fireman broke into a smile. "I've got it," he said.

The diggers found Jay Lyons on Tuesday night. He died near the front wall, along Franklin Street, on the B side of the fire wall, in the area where the temperature had flashed to 3600 degrees. But the sterling-silver medallion Jay wore around his neck survived intact. It depicts Saint Florian, the patron saint of firefighters. Protect us, it says in relief.

Tom Spencer and Joe McGuirk were found next, near each other on the D side of the fire wall, as if they'd groped their way through the door together in the dark, then couldn't feel their way back. Jerry Lucey was dug out on Saturday afternoon, December 11, near the CD corner. When the building first filled with smoke and visibility was cut to zero, he and Brotherton were as far away as possible from the only stairwell that could have led them to safety, too far for searchers to hear their PASS alarms.

Denise Brotherton had been standing outside the warehouse since 2:20 that afternoon, after she'd heard on TV that Lucey's body had been found. She knew Paul would be nearby. She waited through the afternoon and into the evening, her white coat smudged to black by all the men who embraced her. Darkness fell. High on the D wall, which was still looming, unbroken, eighty-five feet above the ground, a piece of cork sparked to life like a struck match, a tongue of orange flame glowing directly over the men digging. "Oh, look," she said to herself, "it's back on fire. At least it's keeping Paul warm." She considered that for a moment. Yeah, right, she thought, like he needs to be kept warm.

Minutes later, one of the guys working the deck told her, "I think we've got a hit. What should we be looking for?"

"Dog tags," Denise said. "Paul always said to look for his dog tags." They were a souvenir from his four years in the Air Force, which he joined to see the world, even though he never got past Valdosta, Georgia.

Another hour passed. At 9:20, Denise told someone to bring a beer up to the deck. "Put a Sam Adams on the deck and say, 'Hey, Paul, we've got a Sam Adams up here for you.' He'll hear that." She managed to smile when she said it.

Forty minutes later, Chief Budd asked her into one of the tents set up outside the wreckage. "This is the hardest job I've ever had to do," he said, "but I want you to have these." He laid Paul's dog tags in her hand gently, as if they were fine and fragile things that might shatter.

It was nearly eleven o'clock on Saturday night when the procession formed around Brotherton's body. McNamee wasn't leading this time. He was home, collapsed in bed, after eight endless days at the site. As the body neared the ladders at the B wall, the cork flickered; when Brotherton was safely on the ground, it went out, as quickly and quietly as it had ignited.

"People ask us if it's easier now," James Lyons is saying one afternoon in early March, three months after his son, Jay, died in the warehouse fire. "It's not. It's harder. In the beginning, there was so much going on, you didn't have time to think about it. Now we do."

For months, there were luncheons and benefits and honors. James Lyons got mail from as far away as Hawaii and Alaska, huge stacks of condolence cards piled in the den. His daughter, Kathryn, had Jay's Saint Florian medal cleaned and strung on a new silver chain, which she wears around her neck now. Denise Brotherton filled fifteen twenty-two-gallon plastic tubs with the poems and trinkets and notes delivered to her house. When Kathy Spencer accepted a flag at the memorial service, she whispered to a firefighter how Tom had always wanted a flagpole in front of the house. The next morning, a backhoe was digging a hole in her lawn and a flag dealer from suburban Boston was driving west with a twenty-five-foot pole. He wouldn't even tell Kathy his name.

The fire had claimed more than just six men. Captain Mike Coakley inhaled so much poison that night that the doctors think he might never go back to fighting fires. Captain Robert A.'s throat was burned so badly, he couldn't speak for six weeks. Lieutenant John Sullivan transferred out of Grove Street, off of Engine 3, to the drill school. He'd always been an instructor in one academy or another, and Jay Lyons used to tease him about how those who can't do, teach. For now, at least, it's not such a funny joke.

Paul Brotherton's usual partner, Joe LeBlanc, was on vacation on December 3, floating on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. He had a souvenir for Paul: two beaded braids he'd let an islander twist into his short gray hair just to prove he wasn't as uptight as Paul used to teasingly insist he was. He left the beads on Paul's casket. LeBlanc still shoots the shit with the guys at Central Station, still scrambles into Rescue 1 every time the bell goes off, and the adrenaline still courses through him. But on a rainy night in March, he's relieved when a reported fire turns out to be a malfunctioning smoke alarm. "It'll never be the same," he says, pulling off his gear back at the station. "The only fucking fire I want to see anymore is on a Sunday afternoon in my living room. I've been on this truck for twenty-four years, and it'll never be the same."

Mike McNamee doesn't think so, either. He still doesn't know exactly what happened. The contents of all the radio transmissions have been sealed by investigators, and the people who started the fire, who have pleaded not guilty to six counts of manslaughter, won't stand trial for months to come. In the meantime, McNamee's been to every counseling session, every crisis debriefing he could find, mostly so he won't feel a steamy hand on his shoulder a decade from now—the warehouse disaster coming back to haunt him. He knew all of these men too well. He was in the same drill class as Jackson. He trained Brotherton in 1983, and he was the only chief Joe McGuirk had ever had.

His men tell him he was a hero, that he stood up to a crowd of firefighters blinded by desperation and determination and told them, "No more," and that, by doing so, he saved all of their lives. In March, James Lyons wheeled his son's prized possession, a 1995 black-on-charcoal Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, across the street and gave it to the man who taught Jay how to fight fires, the man who was in charge the night Jay died. "It was nice," McNamee says, "to know they don't blame me."

He knows all of this in his head, yes. But he doesn't believe it, not in his gut. "We did everything right," he says. There is no defensiveness to the words. He sounds bewildered, as if he's trying to convince himself more than anyone else. "We entered, we vented, we attacked the fire. We did everything by the numbers," he says. "And the building beat us."