Vertical Burn by Earl Emerson

blinded, choking on smoke, Finney crawled down the dark corridor, his right glove skimming the wall. He’d been without bottled air for some time, and his mouth tasted of blood and burnt rubber and something that might easily have been roadkill. Nothing was nastier than smoke from a building fire.
    Piloting by the dim sounds of a fire engine pump somewhere outside, he made his way forward, but each time he inched ahead, it seemed as if the floor pulled him back, as if the floor were moving. When he finally looked down, he realized he was staggering through dead men tiered up like logs, each burned beyond recognition.
    Then his eyes were open and it took a few seconds to decide whether he was awake or only dreaming he was awake. When he rolled his head on his pillow to check the bedside clock, a mixture of sweat and tears crackled in his ear. It was 0305 hours, almost to the minute they’d been dispatched to Leary Way five months earlier. It was uncanny how some circadian clock in his brain knew what time to bring on the dream.
    Always Leary Way. Always a few minutes after three in the morning.
    Finney sat up and let the air in the houseboat cool him. He knew from experience he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. Sleep would be too great a gift. In an attempt to clear the cobwebs, he climbed out of bed and walked around the boat. He undressed and stepped into the shower, languishing like a drunk trying to sober up. He felt better after he’d toweled off and climbed into sweats and a thick pair of hiking socks. He went outside to the small deck, where he gazed across the black-glass surface of the lake.
    Along with seven other floating homes and a mixture of pleasure craft, his houseboat was moored to a dock just north of Crockett Street on Westlake Avenue North, the second slip from the end. To his east he could gaze out over Lake Union to the freeway and the lights of apartment buildings, condos, and vintage homes residing shoulder-to-shoulder on the western slope of Capitol Hill. To his north were the shadowy, surreal comic book shapes of the old burners and smokestacks in Gas Works Park. To the southwest the Space Needle appeared from his vantage point to be keeping watch over an ever-expanding clutch of downtown skyscrapers, their reflected lights twinkling on the surface of the lake.
    The houseboat had originally belonged to his aunt Julie, who twenty-two years earlier had lost her husband, a mechanic at Boeing Field, to a freak accident, when he was sucked into a jet intake. The event had been captured by some clown with an eight-millimeter camera. The footage ended up on the national news, and it did more to destroy his aunt than the death itself. In fact, she never stopped ranting about the news footage and how cruel it had been to both her husband’s memory and her sanity. The proceeds from the insurance settlement along with a small pension allowed her to hibernate in her bedroom, drugged by soap operas, smoking three or four packs of unfiltered Camels a day, seeking final solace in the bottom of a wineglass. After twelve years of this, her body betrayed her in the same way the world had, and one morning she found she could no longer walk.
    She’d been Finney’s favorite aunt, and when she started her long downhill slide, he was the only family member to stand by her. Where others saw a cynical old woman who crabbed about every little thing, Finney saw the Aunt Julie who’d taken him on pony rides when he was four, to Disneyland when he was ten, on college visits when he was seventeen. Twice a week Finney would buy her groceries, put them away in the kitchen, then sit and chat while she sipped wine. After she nodded off, he’d clean the place up and do whatever odd jobs needed doing.
    She’d had no children, just a battered houseboat on Lake Union and a tailless cat named Dimitri, both bequeathed to Finney when her heart finally gave out earlier that year.
    His initial plan was to neuter the cat and sell the