Chapter Excerpt

Chapter 1

Shawn Simons was a light sleeper, had been since he was this big. Sometimes all it took was the rustling sound of his roommate turning in bed to awaken him. Not surprisingly, the wailing fire alarm nearly shook him out of his skin. Shawn shot up in his bed. "Not again," he said, halfangry, half- bewildered, peering at the glowing green numbers on his bedside alarm clock. It was four thirty in the morning, and the middle of one of the coldest Januarys on record in northern New Jersey. He had gotten about fortyfi ve minutes of sleep, and his toughest class was scheduled to begin in just four hours.

The dorm had been rowdier than usual after Seton Hall's surprising win over its Big East basketball rival, Saint John's, and students had celebrated into the early morning hours with parties all over campus. Shawn had dropped in to one or two of the spontaneous gatherings, then watched a movie with his roommate before finally turning in. Sitting up now, he saw that his dorm room window glittered with frost, and a family of icicles hung from the eaves outside. As usual, his room was cold. Shivering under his heavy woolen blanket, he lay back down and hoped for quiet to return, but the alarm continued to shriek.

In the four months that Shawn had lived in Boland Hall, the freshman dormitory at Seton Hall University, the fi re alarm had been pulled at least once a week. It had happened so often during December finals that he finally went home to nearby Newark to study rather than risk the constant distraction. What irked him most was that it was usually another student playing a prank. What kind of person got his kicks by scaring everyone else? He didn't understand it.

And this time was probably no different. Maybe he would just wait it out and pray he didn't get caught by the dorm adviser. Shawn shut his eyes, trying to encourage sleep, but his mind immediately started to race. Seton Hall had a rule, right there in black and white in the student handbook: if you were caught skipping a fire drill, the fine was a hundred dollars, no ifs, ands, or buts. His mother had worked two jobs all her life so that he and his older sister, Nicole, could wear decent clothing and live in a comfortable apartment. It was because of her sacrifi ces that they had a better life than most of the other kids who lived on their ragged city block. How could he risk her having to pay money she didn't have?

Willing himself out from under warm covers, Shawn climbed out of bed and stumbled over to his sleeping roommate, Alvaro Llanos. He had only met Alvaro four months earlier, when they were assigned to room together on the third fl oor of Boland Hall. Alvaro was shy and quiet, and they shared little in common except for their age and their love of baseball, and even then, they rooted for rival teams — Shawn for the Yankees, Alvaro for the Mets. Nevertheless, they had hit it off. Alvaro often told people that on freshman orientation day, with students swarming around everywhere, he had pointed to Shawn and told his parents, "I think he's going to be my roommate." Sure enough, when they walked into room 3028, there sat Shawn, gabbing on his cell phone. It was meant to be.

"Alvaro!" Shawn said, shaking his bigger, bulkier roommate by the shoulder.

He barely stirred. Alvaro slept through everything. One hundred dollars, Shawn thought, and tried again.

"Come on, Al," he said impatiently. "There's a fire drill. We have to get dressed. Get up!"

"Qué pasa?" Alvaro asked sleepily. Sometimes, when he was drowsy, he unintentionally reverted to Spanish, the language his Colombian- born parents spoke in their home.

"It's a fire drill, Al. Let's go. We have to go outside."

Shaking off sleep, Alvaro fi nally dragged himself out of bed. In the dim glow of a single forty- watt light, the roommates pulled on their jeans and shirts from the night before. They slipped on their socks and sneakers, not bothering to tie the laces, then grabbed their winter jackets.

Shawn was one step ahead of Alvaro when he pulled open the door and stopped short. A fierce wave of blistering heat slammed him backward, and a blast of sour- tasting black smoke stuck in his throat, choking him.

"Oh my God," Shawn whispered, his skin prickling with fear. "My God, Al! This is real."

The hallway was pitch dark and Shawn couldn't see anything. It was eerily quiet, except for the shrill bursts of the fi re alarm. Dropping to his knees, he took a deep breath and crawled to the right, into the blackness, toward the elevator he always took down to the first floor of the six- story dormitory. He glanced back just in time to see Alvaro swallowed up by the smoke. In a building of six hundred students, Shawn suddenly felt alone, even though he figured Alvaro must be right on his heels. He pressed blindly forward on his hands and knees, squeezing his eyes tighter, his chest about to explode from holding his breath too long. The heat was punishing. He felt as if he were crawling on red- hot coals, and his palms kept sticking to the melting floor tiles. Hell must feel like this, he thought.

Then it got hotter.

Shawn ripped at his clothes, throwing his jacket ahead of him to crawl over. He pulled off his sweatshirt and stuffed it in his mouth. He crawled, faster, feeling his way along the hallway wall, trying to find the elevator, feeling for a way out. He wondered if Alvaro was still behind him. He opened one eye long enough to see that his glasses were caked solid with black soot. Shawn tried to wipe the soot away. He still hadn't seen flames, just smoke, but now he smelled burning flesh. Could it be his? Please, God, he prayed. It can't end this way. Not here. Please, not now. I'm just a kid. And what will my mother do if I die?

Scrambling forward, Shawn fought the urge to gulp air. His lungs felt like they were on fire. Tiny stars darted in the spaces behind his closed eyes. Shawn could sense a dark curtain descending, unconsciousness creeping into his head. He willed himself on, on, on. Wait. Was that an opening? Shawn crawled left, toward a gush of cold air. The smoke was thinner there and he could see he was now in someone else's dorm room. No one else was there. A window was open and the screen was gone. Did someone jump out? he wondered. Rising to his feet, he leaned out the window. He realized he was at the back of the building. He looked down. It was a long way to the ground. He devoured a mouthful of the fresh, frigid air, and his lungs felt like rubber bands ready to snap.

"Please!" Shawn cried in the silent night. "Somebody help me! I don't know how to get out!"

The sky was navy blue, and the dark campus was strangely still. What's the use? he thought. Nobody hears me. Nobody's there. Sinking to the floor, he began to pray again.

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil:
For thou art with me.

Then out of the darkness came a quiet voice. "Crawl left out of the door. An exit will be on your right." Obeying the faceless command, Shawn crawled back out into the heat and smoke. It was his only chance, and he had to take it. He felt around with his right hand and, as promised, found another open door. Pushing through it, he slid on his belly down one, then two flights of stairs. He landed at the bottom with a loud thud and felt almost giddy. I'm alive, he thought. I'm alive. He pushed himself up and stumbled outside into the bitter night. Falling on his knees on the hard, frost- covered ground, he looked at his hands. They were cold. And they were smoking.

On the front side of Boland Hall, Angie Gutierrez awakened to the sound of banging on her dorm room door. Alvaro, she thought, hearing the shrill sound of the fire alarm. Angie and Alvaro had been high school sweethearts. They had met in honors physics class at John F. Kennedy High School in the city of Paterson, New Jersey, at the beginning of their senior year and planned to be together forever. Alvaro was dark and handsome, with a quiet kind of charisma, and all of the girls wanted him. But he had eyes only for Angie, a bubbly girl with a ponytail, and they were the envy of the freshman dorm. They took the same classes, studied in each other's room, and worked side by side in the campus computer lab. The frequent middle- of- the- night fire drills had become another chance to be together, and over the months, they had developed a routine: when a fire alarm sounded, Angie waited in her first- floor room for Alvaro to come down from the third floor, and then they went outside to wait out the drill together.

"Wake up!" Angie called to her roommate as she pulled on her robe and sneakers and rushed to the door to greet her boyfriend. Instead, she found two of Alvaro's friends standing there wearing only boxer shorts, undershirts, and worried looks.

"Angie!" they cried. "Come quick! This is a real fire. We have to get out."

"Where's Alvaro?" Angie asked.

Faisal Ali and Altaf Plaique lived next door to Shawn and Alvaro in an adjoining room on the third floor. They said that in their panic to get away from the fire, they'd forgotten to look for their neighbors. There hadn't been time to do anything but flee, and the smoke had been so thick that they ran right into a wall before they backtracked and found the stairway. "C'mon," Faisal said, pulling Angie out of her room. "We'll find them outside."

Angie grabbed her cell phone from the table beside her bed and punched in Alvaro's dorm room number. Busy. She called his cell phone. No answer. It had only been an hour since he had walked her down to her room after they'd watched the movie Armageddon with Shawn. She'd been frightened by the movie, and Alvaro, being Alvaro, had comforted her until she felt safe enough to go to sleep. Where is he? she wondered, running toward the first- floor stairway.

"Alvaro!" she cried, hoping to see him coming down the stairs. "Al! Where are you?"

The boys rushed after her and tried to pull her away, but Angie stood firm.

"Go on!" she ordered them. "Get out! I'm waiting here for Al."

Angie had barely finished her sentence when out of the smoke came a grisly apparition. A boy ran and then tumbled down the stairs toward her. His clothes were burning off his body, and he was hitting himself, trying to beat out the flames. Other students ran after him, tossing coats and sweaters in a desperate attempt to smother the blaze. A screaming girl pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed the boy, covering him with fine white powder. He looked like a monster in a horror movie.

As the burning boy stumbled forward, Angie could see he was disoriented and running aimlessly. She stood there, watching him approach her, too stunned to move. The boy moved closer and she felt her legs start to buckle. He was charred black.

Terrified, Angie no longer resisted when Alvaro's friends tugged at her arm. They pulled her down the hallway toward Boland Hall's front entrance. Before she ran outside, Angie stopped and turned to look one last time. She saw the boy stagger to a couch in the lobby and slump into it. His clothes were in tatters, and he was moaning that he was cold. So cold.

Angie couldn't breathe. Momentarily frozen in place, she stood there and sobbed. Then she joined the others and rushed outside into the frigid night, leaving the boy there. She had really wanted to help him, but she needed to find Alvaro.

"Where the hell is he?" she screamed.

Outside Boland Hall, help was beginning to arrive. Brian O'Hara was one of the first rescuers on the scene. Driving through the university's black iron gates, the rookie paramedic found the campus in chaos. The sights and sounds were hellish. Smoke poured from open windows, and students leaned out, pleading for help. Pajama- clad kids milled around outside, many walking barefoot on the frozen ground. One girl wore teddy bear slippers. Tears had left deep tracks in the black soot that caked her face.

"What the hell is going on out there?" the dispatcher shouted over the radio. O'Hara had no answer.

The paramedic jumped out of the ambulance and walked among the wandering students. He tried to take it all in: A boy whose shorts had melted onto his skin. A girl slapping at her smoking hair. Students screaming for missing friends.

"I had God's arms around me," one dazed- looking boy said as he walked toward O'Hara. "That's why I got out." "There's a boy over there that's burned real bad," O'Hara heard someone say. A few feet away, a student in a police car was kicking at the back windows. An officer had found him wandering outside and locked him in the back of the squad car while he ran back into the burning building, looking for other students. The boy felt trapped and was trying to force his way out. Soon he was in the back of O'Hara's rig.

"What's your name?" O'Hara asked.

"Shawn," he said, gasping for breath.

"How do you feel, Shawn?"

"Scared," he said.

Shawn seemed alert and lucid, but it was obvious to O'Hara that he was gravely injured. His eyes were engorged, and his face bubbled with leathery blisters. His nose and his mouth were packed with soot, and every breath he took seemed to be a struggle. O'Hara clamped an oxygen mask over his face. As he did so, he glimpsed Shawn's hands. O'Hara had never seen anything like them. The skin looked like burned tissue paper, ashily shedding off, and it was smoking. From his training, O'Hara knew Shawn's hands were still burning beneath the charred outer layers of skin. O'Hara doused Shawn's hands with water from a bottle, and they sizzled — like a raw egg hitting a hot frying pan. The medic nearly vomited from the sickening smell. He strapped Shawn onto a gurney, rolled him into the back of his rig, and took off for the hospital, red lights flashing, sirens blaring, not at all sure his young passenger would survive the ride.

O'Hara knew exactly where to go. Saint Barnabas Medical Center had the best burn unit in the state; it was one of the best on the entire East Coast. The worst burn cases were taken there, and the hospital, located in Livingston, New Jersey, was only a short ride from Seton Hall. The trip usually took fifteen minutes. At that time of the morning, with no traffic on the roads, O'Hara made it in seven.

Judging by all the lights inside, the emergency room was already in full swing. O'Hara wasn't surprised. Two nurses met him as he pulled up to the emergency room portico.

"What do you have?" one of them asked.

"The kid's in bad shape," O'Hara announced, swinging open the back doors of the ambulance.

"Are there others?" the nurse asked him.

"We have multiple casualties," O'Hara replied.

The nurses helped roll the gurney off the ambulance and onto the ground. O'Hara looked at his young charge. The boy's eyes had swollen to slits.

"Please don't leave me," Shawn cried.

"You're in the best hands now, buddy," O'Hara said, as a team of men and women in scrubs descended on the boy.

O'Hara willed himself not to cry.

At the same moment, a second ambulance pulled up. The driver, a South Orange police officer who had commandeered an ambulance when the fi rst report of a fire came in, said the boy inside had been found lying on a couch in the front lobby of the burning building. He was still conscious but barely alive. Maureen Warren, a veteran of the hospital's mobile intensive care unit, rushed to the patient's side. His face was charred black, and chunks of his ears had been burned off. He was almost naked and was shivering uncontrollably.

Warren was a kindly woman. She had seen her share of tragedy during her twenty- year career, but she never got used to the kids. She looked into the boy's brown eyes and saw sheer terror. When she leaned in close to comfort him, she could feel the heat radiating from his burned skin. She spoke gently, the way she would to one of her own children, thinking that hers could be the last voice the boy ever heard.

"What is your name, son?" she asked.

"Alvaro," he whispered, a single tear dripping from the corner of his eye. "My name is Alvaro."

The boy on the floor was dead. Two fire fighters crouched over his lifeless body. John Frucci had heard someone say they found the young man sprawled just inside a dorm room door. The fire fighters had pulled him into the hallway to try to resuscitate him. Taking turns, they blew air into his mouth and pounded on his chest, then started all over again, hoping to restart his heart, encouraging him. Come on, son. Come back to us. C'mon now. Come on back . . .

It was no use. As the smoke swirled around them, one of the fire fighters, then the other, picked themselves up off the floor. Eighteen-year-old John Giunta was beyond saving. The fire fighters took a sooty blanket and, sobbing like babies, gently covered his body.

Frucci got a lump in his throat. He felt almost as bad for the fire fighters as he did for the boy. How many times had he watched rescue workers fight valiantly to save a life when it was already too late? It made him both sad and proud. As the on-call investigator for the Essex County prosecutor's office, Frucci had been one of the first officials on the scene, thirty minutes after the call came in. Frucci was thirty- one years old, but he'd been investigating fires for four years and had already earned a reputation as one of the best in his field. The South Orange fire chief had briefed him outside Boland Hall. Possible fatalities, the chief had said. Dozens of students injured. Most of them were already gone, whisked away to area hospitals by a fleet of ambulances a few minutes earlier.

Frucci was horrified by what he found inside. The third floor looked like a dark, smoldering cave. As he walked a few steps down the hall from where Giunta's body was found, looking for more victims, the air suddenly got hotter, and it stank of burned flesh, the stench so hard hitting that Frucci's head flew back. There was no mistaking the odor, and you never got used to it. He gagged and then walked a few more steps toward the heat and the smell.

Frucci stopped short. In front of him were the blackened corpses of two boys. Both had assumed what professionals call a pugilistic attitude. People who burned to death were often discovered in this bizarre position, lying with their knees bent and their arms held upright like a boxer's at the beginning of a prize fight.

Frucci looked around. He guessed that he was in the student lounge and that this was the place where the fi re had started. Three couches smoldered, and the carpeting was melted like wax into the cement floor. It had obviously been an intensely hot blaze. The building's cinder- block frame had held in the heat, and the temperature inside was still smothering. Frucci wiped the perspiration from his face. Ceiling tiles, still glowing red hot, were scattered where they had fallen. The walls were burned black, and electrical wires dangled like snakes from the cavity beyond the scorched ceiling. A holocaust, he thought.

Through the smoke, Frucci saw a man dressed in black approaching. He walked slowly, tentatively. Monsignor Robert Sheeran was the president of Seton Hall University. Frucci knew him right away. As a child, Frucci had served as Sheeran's altar boy.

Sheeran had a commanding presence, but now he looked old and ghostlike. Walking through the wreckage, he went to each of the dead students, knelt down next to him, said a prayer over his body, and blessed him. Without speaking, he then turned and walked away.

"Where's the medical examiner?" Frucci asked a police officer. "We need to have the bodies taken away so we can start figuring out what happened here."

Copyright © 2008 by Robin Gaby Fisher