Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [50]
But he thought he also remembered counting exactly twenty-eight paces straight down the corridor from the small hole he’d hacked into the wall with his service axe. And he thought he told them as much, yet Reese said he hadn’t been able to give them any help. If it was true that Cordifis was only twenty-eight steps away, they should have reached Bill in less than a minute with or without Finney’s directions. He’d left his chirping PASS device outside the hole as a beacon. But maybe nothing Finney remembered after he left Cordifis was true. Maybe he’d been hallucinating the entire time.
The doctors said people with very high body core temperatures suffered debilitating weakness, hallucinations, seizures, and coma, roughly in that order. Finney had not escaped the hallucinations, which he knew he’d entertained in the medic unit and later in the hospital. But he could have sworn he was thinking straight when he spoke to Reese and Kub.
God, he wished he could keep from thinking about Leary Way.
Robert Kub was uneasy talking about the subject with Finney, obviously wanting to spare his feelings. The most Finney could get him to say was, “As far as I’m concerned, we all did our best. You could barely stand, and we were lucky to get out of there alive.”
“If they’d only asked me in that medic unit I could have told them where to look,” Finney told his brother, Tony, weeks after the fire.
“Not when I saw you,” replied his brother. “When I saw you, you weren’t making any sense at all.”
In addition to a broken collarbone, heat exhaustion, and burns, Finney had so much carbon monoxide circulating in his system that one of the doctors at the Harborview ER told Tony he wasn’t going to survive. And everyone knew one of the first effects of CO poisoning was confusion.
He’d still been confused at the funeral three days later.
When Finney was released from the hospital long enough to attend the funeral service, of which he recalled next to nothing, he remembered people saying they were sorry, which somehow was the last thing he wanted to hear. By the time Diana Moore approached, he had reached some sort of limit. “How are you doing?” she had asked.
“How the hell do you think? I’ve got enough Demerol on board to knock down a football team. I can’t feel my fingertips. My neck hurts like hell, and I killed my partner.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Diana replied quietly.
“Why don’t you get out of my face?”
“You know you don’t—”
“Just get the fuck away from me. And tell your shit-eating friends to stay away, too.” The words had come out of a generic anger that picked targets at random, Diana the luckless target that day.
The next time they spoke was the day of his appointment with Reese, when he was turned down for promotion.
24. THINGS THAT WENT WORSE
Firefighters went in from the north thinking they were fighting a fire in a group of two-story wooden buildings. Others went in from the south, thinking they were fighting a fire in a large concrete-walled warehouse. It was almost forty minutes before anybody knew the scope of the problem.
It was forty-six minutes into the fire before a crew reported putting water on the fire.
Cordifis’s radio, still in working order, was found buried two feet under his body. Finney’s radio, what was left of it, lay next to the body. A service axe was still strapped to Cordifis’s waist. Another, Finney’s, was found forty-five feet away in what had been another room. Cordifis’s inactivated PASS device was still clipped to the belt of his MSA backpack. Finney’s PASS device was found twenty-five feet from the body under a pile of rubble. It had beeped long into the night and was heard by dozens of frustrated and grieving firefighters outside.
The autopsy found Cordifis had died of smoke inhalation. Prior to death, he’d sustained multiple fractures of his tibia and fibula on both legs and a broken index finger on his left hand. What the report glossed over was that Cordifis died inhaling