Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [103]
When he looked up, he was alone. No Diana. No doorway.
He spun around in a circle trying to figure out where she’d gone, or if she’d ever been there.
He’d been within ten feet of an exit, and sure, maybe the smoke got heavier and obscured it, but if he stood still long enough, surely the smoke would lift and the door and the woman would reappear.
He saw something. He wasn’t sure what. A movement. A sliver of light. He moved toward it.
He felt a hard shove from behind and dropped to keep from stumbling, striking the concrete hard with his knees. When he put his hands out to push himself back up, he realized he was on the lip of a deep shaft, a shaft somebody had tried to catapult him into. He rolled to the side and crawled along the edge of the shaft in the blackness.
Switching the PASS device on, he flung it across the floor. Twenty-five seconds later the device began emitting a high-pitched wail. He heard movement, scuffling boots heading in the direction of the PASS. A burning timber crashed nearby, and when sparks flew off, he saw two helmeted figures in full bunkers. He couldn’t tell if they saw him or not.
After some time he realized he was staring at the ceiling light in a medic unit. The firefighter paramedic, an intense woman in a white shirt, was bending over him asking questions.
Naked except for a pair of wet boxer shorts and socks, Finney lay on his back under what felt like a giant sticky spiderweb. An electric fan somewhere blew air across his torso. He was thirsty, his teeth as dry as pebbles in the desert.
For some reason he knew he was still on scene. Put an address on it, he thought, straining to make his mind function, but he couldn’t come up with the day of the week or even the name of the president when they asked him. He couldn’t identify the unit he’d been riding or his partner. “Bill Cordifis,” he finally muttered, when they asked, but even as he said the words he knew he’d flunked the quiz.
He was drifting in and out of his own life.
Although he realized even as he was speaking that he wasn’t making sense, he felt he had a story to tell, one they needed to hear. He found himself jabbering about victims, female firefighters in raincoats, unknown assailants; even as he tried to get the tale out, he knew the odd-shaped lumber in his sentences was not building a structure that would stand. He knew his words conveyed nothing but his own befuddlement, and the worst part of it, now that he’d begun talking, was that he couldn’t stop. And when he did stop, he couldn’t start again.
Determined to compose a single sentence that would convey all of his desperation, he fell silent, straining to muster the right sequence of words. The faces over him were as somber as if they were peering into a casket.
When he moved his head from side to side ever so slightly, it seemed as if the entire medic unit tipped. The effect was so bewildering and wondrous he continued rolling his head back and forth for some minutes.
The medic who’d been working on him, a short-haired, broad-shouldered woman with a chest that, from Finney’s angle, all but obscured her face, stood up straight and, with a certain amount of deference, addressed someone at the rear of the van.
“We’re putting ringers into him, Chief. This is our second bag. When we got him, he had a rate of one fifty-eight and his blood pressure was eighty palp and falling. We cut everything off and put this damp sheet over him, but he’s not cooling down. We didn’t think to take his core temperature until maybe ten minutes into it. It was a hundred six. Hallucinations start at around a hundred five. You want to talk to him, fine, but he’s not making any sense. Right now we need to get more fluids on board and stick him in a hyperbaric chamber.”
“John? How are you, old pal?” The voice was directly over him, deliberate, cool-headed, and noticeably more affable than it had been with the medic. This was a man who knew what he wanted. “John?”
Finney stopped rocking his head and peered down between his feet through the open back doors