Cold Fire

Everyone was trying to get out fast. A valiant young flight attendant was doing what she could to help, but progress was not easy. The aisle was littered with carry-on luggage, purses, paperback books, and other items that had fallen out of the overhead storage compartments, and within a few shuffling steps, Jim's feet had become entangled in debris.
    The churning smoke reached them from behind, enfolded them, so pungent that his eyes teared at once. He not only choked on the first whiff of fumes but gagged with revulsion, and he did not want to think about what might be burning behind him in addition to upholstery, foam seat cushions, carpet, and other elements of the aircraft's interior decor.
    As the thick oily cloud poured past him and engulfed the forward section, the passengers ahead began to vanish. They appeared to be stepping through the folds of a black velvet curtain.
    Before visibility dropped to a couple of inches, Jim let go of Holly and touched Christine's shoulder. “Let me take her,” he said, and scooped Casey into his arms.
    A paper bag from an LAX giftshop was in the aisle at his feet. It had burst open as people tramped across it. He saw a white T-shirt—I LOVE L.A.—with pink and peach and pale-green palm trees.
    He snatched up the shirt and pushed it into Casey's small hands. Coughing, as was everyone around him, he said, “Hold it over your face, honey, breathe through it!”
    Then he was blind. The foul cloud around him was so dark that he could not even see the child he was carrying. Indeed, he could not actually perceive the churning currents of the cloud itself. The blackness was deeper than what he saw when he closed his eyes, for behind his lids, pinpoint bursts of color formed ghostly patterns that lit his inner world.
    They were maybe twenty feet from the open end of crash-severed fuselage. He was not in danger of getting lost, for the aisle was the only route he could follow.
    He tried not to breathe. He could hold his breath for a minute, anyway, which ought to be long enough. The only problem was that he had already inhaled some of the bitter smoke, and it was caustic, burning his throat as if he had swallowed acid. His lungs heaved and his esophagus spasmed, forcing him to cough, and every cough ended in an involuntary though thankfully shallow inhalation.
    Probably less than fifteen feet to go.
    He wanted to scream at the people in front of him: move, damn you, move! He knew they were stumbling forward as fast as they could, every bit as eager to get out as he was, but he wanted to shout at them anyway, felt a shriek of rage building in him, and he realized he was teetering on the brink of hysteria.
    He stepped on several small, cylindrical objects, floundering like a man walking on marbles. But he kept his balance.
    Casey was wracked by violent coughs. He could not hear her, but holding her against his chest, he could feel each twitch and flex and contraction of her small body as she struggled desperately to draw half-filtered breaths through the I LOVE L.A. shirt.
    Less than a minute had passed since he had started forward, maybe only thirty seconds since he had scooped up the girl. But it seemed like a long journey down an endless tunnel.
    Although fear and fury had thrown his mind into a turmoil, he was thinking clearly enough to remember reading somewhere that smoke rose in a burning room and hung near the ceiling. If they didn't reach safety within a few seconds, he would have to drop to the deck and crawl in the hope that he would escape the toxic gases and find at least marginally cleaner air down there.
    Sudden heat coalesced around him.
    He imagined himself stepping into a furnace, his skin peeling off in an instant, flesh blistering and smoking. His heart already thudded like a wild thing throwing itself against the bars of a cage, but it began to beat harder, faster.
    Certain that they had to be within a few steps of the hole in the fuselage that he had glimpsed earlier, Jim opened his eyes, which stung and watered copiously. Perfect blackness had given way to a charcoal-gray swirl of fumes through which throbbed blood-red pulses of light. The pulses were flames shrouded by smoke and seen only as reflections bouncing off millions of swirling particles of ash. At any moment the fire could burst upon him from out of the smoke and sear him to the bone.
    He was not going to make it.
    No breathable air.
    Fire seeking him on all sides.
    He was going to ignite. Burn like