The Cool Room by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 54

Arriving at the funeral home, Frank entered through the rear door so as to not be seen by Jonathan or Emily, who were busy in the cool with a rather difficult client. This incident proved to be severe enough to appear in the media throughout three counties. According to the police report, the unidentified man entered the parking lot of a corner store, displaying irrational behavior. Once there, he sat with a gas can rocking back and forth. One of the things most people fear is the unpredictably of mental illness. They shuttle their children away from the homeless fearing a psychotic outburst. They move to a different seat on public buses in fear of something that may exist only in their imaginations. This, however, was different and as those few who were present fled to the store the man saturated himself with the contents of the gas. Flicking a lighter, he became consumed by flames rising high enough that those watching from a distance may have mistaken him for a bonfire. And as is common with most people, no one went to his in spite of there being a fire extinguisher within easy reach in the store. Although several people called 911, there were no heroes that day – no one to muster their courage and put out the fire that threatened to snuff out the man’s life.

The police arriving first retrieved a small extinguisher from the trunk of their car and moving in put out the flames. However, by this time the fire had significantly died down, leaving the man as an exposed mass of melting skin and charred bone. Within moments of exposing what could longer be discerned as human, the ambulance sped up to the scene. Leaping from their vehicle, the paramedics found one officer vomiting near the front of his car. The other, his back leaning against the side panel, stood frozen, his face unmoving in an expression of catatonia. No one in law enforcement or emergency services had ever seen such a horrific scene. And the smell was something no of them would forget. But it was the paramedics who were able to keep themselves together long enough to do what was necessary and within ten minutes their patient was transported to Nathan Littauer Hospital where a medivac helicopter was soon to arrive.

Flown to Albany Medical Center, the still unidentified patient was rushed to trauma, where his condition was assessed. Doctors were quick to determine that the hot gases produced by the fire had destroyed his lungs. Use of a heart-lung bypass machine was considered. But even with the massive amount of steroids needed to prompt healing, the finest doctors the hospital could provide could not prevent the inevitable. The shock to his body proved too much for his life to be sustained and as in similar situations one question was spoken. “Alright, any ideas?”

The room fell silent as equipment was rolled away and bandages disposed of. There was one more duty to perform. Three nurses volunteered to transfer the unknown man’s scorched remains to a body bag. It should have been a straight forward procedure, but even the nurses – each, with more than twenty years of experience – were not ready for what would soon occur. Normally, the body of the deceased was washed, their wrists and ankles were bound, and the body wrapped in a nylon shroud before being moved into a body bag. Following procedure, the nurses turned the burned body, only to discover that in doing so the skin on their back had peeled off. The fire had been thorough in the damage it had caused, and what had not become charred had bubbled up. The body’s weight forced the skin to adhere to the sheet of the gurney, and turning it pulled it away, leaving it clinging to the white fabric beneath.

The sheet was discarded for incineration. The nurses, however, were asked to leave early that night and all three agreed that the trauma of what they had been involved in required a strong dose of alcohol. Arriving to work the next day, they were ordered to be debriefed by a psychiatric nurse as is policy. In a private room, each unloaded their emotions and promised to seek out professional help. They are, in fact, only human. But from that day forward, none of them would be the same, as some part of their lives had been destroyed by an act of irrationality.