Fire and ice

11:03 a.m

There had been a deafening boom, followed by a wall of fire rising from behind the tanks. Matt had stood there helplessly, waiting for the flames to consume him, but he and Terri were miraculously still alive. One of the detonators had gone off, and the fuel can it was attached to had exploded, but apparently the blast hadn’t been powerful enough to ignite the ammonium nitrate. Matt’s plan had worked, at least partially. The Fire and Ice solution had prevented the big bang, but the plastic bags containing the ammonium nitrate were burning now and filling Waterbase with greasy black smoke.

Matt held the one-inch hose and sprayed the Fire and Ice mixture toward the inferno, but the liquid wasn’t coming out fast enough or forcefully enough to extinguish the flames. It wasn’t coming out fast enough or forcefully enough, and then it stopped coming out completely.

It took Matt a second to figure out what had happened. There was no electricity to power the compressor, so once the pressure in the reserve tank dropped to a certain level, there was no air to drive the pump.

“Let’s get out of here,” Matt shouted.

He climbed onto the forklift and motioned for Terri to sit on the pallet.

“What are we going to do? How the hell are we going to get out?” she said, coughing and wheezing between sentences.

“I don’t know, but we have to get away from this smoke before we die of inhalation. Come on!”

Terri climbed onto the pallet, and Matt did a one-eighty and headed toward the time clock. His eyes were stinging, and his lungs felt as though someone had stuffed oily cotton balls into them. He wished he had thought to grab some respirators from the safety office when he’d been in the front building. At the time it hadn’t even crossed his mind, but they sure would have come in handy now. He drove on, trying to take shallow breaths, one hand guiding the forklift and the other pressing the tail of his shirt against his mouth and aching nose.

He slowed down and carefully turned a corner, intending to take a shortcut between the floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves loaded with Nitko products, and when he turned Terri went limp, fell to her side, and tumbled off the pallet like a rag doll. The smoke had gotten to her.

Matt stopped the forklift, got off, and knelt beside her. She wasn’t breathing.

He felt her neck for a pulse. Nothing.

Matt put his mouth on Terri’s, gave her two quick rescue breaths, laced his hands together, and started chest compressions. He performed two full cycles of CPR. As he started a third, she coughed and turned her head to the side and vomited. Terri was alive, but she wasn’t going to last long. Matt stood, dizzy and nauseated from the smoke, the heat, the exertion, and the pain in his leg, picked Terri up and cradled her in his arms, and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other.