First, there was a frozen hydrant then, something seemed wrong with some of the hoses themselves.

And there was another problem: The men didn’t have working hoses. The men were trying to make their way to the source of the heat surge, but among the locks and the walls and the smoke, they couldn’t seem to get there. Random walls and carelessly thrown-up partitions created a maze. This place had been chopped up, probably illegally. Brendan Cawley, the probie with just a month on the job, kept seeing padlocks on the doors of every room and was confused he hadn’t been around long enough to know how many apartments in this neighborhood had been converted into cheap, crowded rooming houses.

Now they were in Apartment 4-L, feeling their way along the walls from room to room-six men loaded down with gear, sucking in air from their tanks-and soon they got turned around, lost in the smoke. When the six men got to the fourth floor, they started searching from apartment to apartment, but they’d found no civilians (except the skinny guy and naked fat lady one of the guys saw hightailing it out of there just as they came up the stairs).

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