Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [87]
A deep sleep. Wouldn’t that be nice? he concluded. He hadn’t indulged in genuine all-night wake-up-and-wonder-where-you-are sleep for half a year.
The band room was clear now, just four walls, or what was left of four walls, a rectangular patch of flooring. In spots the linoleum was intact. On the north side of the room there had been a corridor, and it was along this corridor that much of the smoke and flame from the initial fire had traveled, gradually eating into the north wall, weakening it until it collapsed on them.
Tonight Finney was determined to retrace his escape route from the room.
It was only the second time he’d had the gumption to attempt this.
It took a while to find the place where he’d hacked through the wall with his service axe; most of the wall was gone now, either destroyed by fire or dismantled by work crews. Once again, he marveled at how it was narrower than he remembered.
He’d squirmed through the wall and turned right, found himself wedged up against a large diesel motor. He’d turned back past the exit hole and gone through a doorway into a room that was approximately twenty-five by forty and shaped in the form of an L so that, given the machinery on the floor and the smoke, it was easy enough to see how he’d become disoriented.
He’d been here when Reese and Kub opened the door on the east side of the building, when the fresh air from their entrance fed the overhead gases and caused them to ignite. Had they come in quickly and sealed the door behind them, there would have been little change in the atmosphere, but they left it open, so that gallons of cool air supplied the starving fire with the oxygen it had been craving.
Had he not had his face pressed to the floor in an effort to suck up every last lungful of good air, he would have been burned alive.
Eventually, he’d made his way out of that room via a doorway at the south end. It was cooler in the next room, and he’d stood up for the sake of speed, keeping the wall to his right. It was here that he counted his footsteps from the PASS device, having returned to the point at which he’d started.
Twenty-eight paces.
He remembered that much.
Retracing his path, he made the count again—twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight—and found himself stepping across a pile of one-inch steel pipes under the debris.
The pipes were ten feet long, eighty or a hundred of them. He had no idea why they’d been stored in the corridor. They had made a horrible racket just as he met up with Reese and Kub, a hundred steel pipes weighing hundreds of pounds falling to the floor.
It was clear that had he been a few feet farther back, the pipes would have killed him.
He met Charlie Reese and Robert Kub, gave them directions, or thought he did, then proceeded along the corridor, at the end of which he was later found muttering to himself, making no attempt whatsoever to exit the building.
Now at the entrance to the building, he turned around and retraced the route Chief Reese and Robert Kub had taken. According to their report, they searched one small office before proceeding west along the corridor. Stepping it off, Finney calculated they traveled eighteen paces into the building before they met him.
Finney remembered telling them to listen for the PASS device, which other firefighters later reported hearing as they shot water into the interior. He remembered telling them about the hole he’d chopped. He remembered repeating the number twenty-eight. He remembered it, but even as his memories replayed that night, he didn’t know if they were dreams or memories.
The pair said they’d explored for as long as the heat allowed, and by accounts of independent observers, they were inside ten or eleven minutes after Finney met them.
Finney placed himself at the spot in the corridor where he’d met Reese and Kub. To his left was another, smaller corridor. Kub had told him it was where they’d spent most of