3000 Degrees by Sean Flynn

gallons of fuel dumped on his head.
    Sometimes a building went bad for reasons no one could predict. There were too many variables in a fire. Maybe the flames would tickle a hidden stash of propane or maybe the wind would shift direction or maybe the rafters were rotted with age and moisture and would burn away twice as fast as the men chopping through the roof had guessed. Sometimes, the fire just got a head start, ran wild before the engines, ladders, and rescue could scream out of their stations, devoured the walls and the floors and the furniture, turned everything orange and hot and black and choking. Sometimes the men had to stand back, let the flames feed, corral the fire with the spray from a dozen hoses until there was nothing left to burn.
    The worst fire in Worcester, Massachusetts, the inferno that killed the most people, eleven civilians, happened in the hours before dawn on July 11, 1973. Mike was a rookie, six months on the job, working Ladder 7 out of the Winslow Street station, a decrepit old wreck a few blocks west of downtown. There had been a shower late the night before, a light and misty rain, not hard enough to wash away the sticky summer heat. In a flophouse at 728 Main Street, five stories framed from timbers cut a hundred years earlier and faced in brick, the tenants kept their windows open to the breeze that blew in from the west. They were poor folks and low-rung working stiffs, janitors and transient laborers, aged shut-ins and welfare cases, the same demographic mix as the rest of Main South. People paying nineteen bucks a week to a flophouse landlord didn't get air-conditioning.
    At about two-thirty on the morning of July 11, two teenage girls climbed a wooden porch attached to the second floor on the backside of 728 Main. Below them was an alley and, if they looked off the porch toward the horizon, the breeze would have brushed against their faces. Each one had a can filled with gasoline, which they splashed around the decking, and matches, which they lit and tossed into the puddles. Fire raced across the porch, a jagged seam of orange flitting and twisting on a blue cushion of hot gas, almost as if it were floating, hovering a centimeter above the floor. A tentacle of flame licked at the railing, then bit, found a hold, and started to climb. A lovely sight, beautiful and hypnotizing. They wanted to see the porch burn, but only the porch, wanted to watch the tangerine flickers and sparks, to gawk at the firemen who would stomp up the stairs with their hoses and axes, the night and the alley throbbing red and white.
    Such fires were not unusual in Main South. Firemen on that side of Worcester had scrambled from one scene to the next for months, starting one night in February when a surly drinker threw a Molotov cocktail at a waitress in Longo's Lounge. From then on, it seemed that something was always burning, and quite often several things at once. On one day in April, two kids lit up an abandoned flophouse, a toddler with a pack of matches burned up his family's apartment, a bathroom was set on fire at 667 Main Street, followed by a garage on Charlton Street. The rooming houses on Main were favorite targets: the building across the street from 728 was destroyed on May 27, and the rear porches on the one next door had been set on fire twice that spring.
    But this one, a kicky little arson on a run-down deck, overran the building. The wind from the west pushed the flames toward the brick facade, fed them fresh oxygen, teased them higher. At an open window, the fire reached inside, felt for something to cling to, grabbed hard and pulled itself in. Then it nearly exploded. The interior turned into a blast furnace, fresh air huffing through the windows, the bricks holding in the heat, the two forces complementing each other, the flames mating and multiplying. Five minutes before three o'clock, as the heat shattered glass and smoke clogged hallways, tenants started choking awake. The flames were