The smoke room: a novel of suspense - By Earl W. Emerson Page 0,2

firefighter in the department, I managed to get us out the doorway and onto the lawn without either of us falling on our butts. Outside, Stanislow and our earlier victim were gone. I set my victim down on the lawn away from the broken glass and got my first good look at her in the twilight. In addition to the blood and guts, she was covered in soot. I took off my helmet, shut down my air supply, and removed my face piece.

“Oh, God,” she said, holding her arms stiffly away from her body.

“Can’t you do something? Oh, my God. This is disgusting. Get it off me.”

I yarded the hose line out of the house and cracked the nozzle until water poured out in a limp, silvery stream. “Here.”

She cupped water in her hands and splashed it on her face, picking at her hair. “Oh, God. Just pour it over my head. It’s all in my hair. It’s everywhere.”

“It’s going to be cold.”

“I don’t give a damn. Get this off me.”

I opened the nozzle on flush, giving her what amounted to a cold shower. Underneath the gore and soot she wore a T-shirt and jeans. The cold water emphasized the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“Is Daddy all right?” she asked, after we’d sluiced the last of the blood and soot out of her hair. “Have you seen Daddy?”

“He’s over by our engine. Anybody else in there?”

“Just that god-awful head.”

As I turned the Task Force nozzle around and screwed up the pres-8

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sure to knock the crap off my rubber boots, she looked up at me, suddenly bashful. “I must look hideous.”

“No. I think you look terrific.”

Her name was Iola Pederson, she was maybe twenty years older than I was, and although I didn’t know it then, she was the first nail in my coffin.

2. THE FIVE F’S

W AS FIREFIGHTERS AND police investigators dissected the wreckage, the mechanics of the destruction were slowly unraveled. Contrary to expectations, we found no bombs, no exploded water heaters, no downed rockets, and no fallen airplane engines. Clear and simple: an animal had fallen out of the sky, later identified as a breed of hog known as a Chester White. The hog had penetrated the Pederson homestead, punching through the roof, the attic, and the second floor, and then had exploded against the concrete subfloor under the living-room rug. Accompanied by his owner and his owner’s brother, the animal, having just won two ribbons at a county fair on the Olympic Peninsula, had been returning home to Ellensburg, a small college/farming town east of the Cascades. The pig’s owner had modified his Cessna 210 to transport livestock, altering the door, removing the last four seats, and jury-rigging a wooden pen in the rear of the plane. The floor of the pen was lined with straw, old blankets, corncobs, rutabagas, and stale doughnuts to keep the hog occupied during the flight. Despite the fact that their passenger tipped the scales at 947 pounds, total weight for the three of them was still under the allowable payload for the plane.

During the originating flight from Eastern Washington, the hog had become airsick and thrashed about in his pen, his movements tipping the plane from side to side. Fearing another bout of airsickness on the return flight, the pilot laced a bucket of apples with Stressnil and fed it to the creature. If he’d been paying attention, the pilot would have seen the hog spit out the tranquilizers, ingesting just enough to doze off after they prodded him into the plane, but not enough to keep him asleep. Because he’d already weakened the slats of his pen on the initial flight, it took only a minute of thrashing about before he broke the enclosure. 10

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Without hesitation the hog rushed forward and nuzzled the back of the pilot’s seat in a desperately friendly move, thrusting the pilot up against the yoke. The weight shift sent the plane into a shallow dive, which prompted the pilot to shout at his brother, “Goddamn it. Help me here. I’ve got half a ton of pork crawling up my ass.”

“I’m trying,” said his brother, whose seat was also rammed up against the instrument panel. Despite their efforts to discourage the airsick hog, the plane’s dive grew steeper.

“Open the door!” said the pilot.

“Are you kidding? He’ll jump. You know how hard it was to