Fear Nothing

enough to sustain me while I found my way out of the house.
        Wherever the carpet was afire, of course, there would be no safe-air zone whatsoever.
        The lights were still out, the smoke was blindingly thick, and I squirmed on my stomach, frantically heading toward where I believed I would find the front door, the nearest exit. The first thing I encountered in the murk was a sofa, judging by the feel of it, which meant that I had passed through the archway and into the living room, at least ninety degrees off the course I imagined I'd been following.
        Now luminous orange pulses passed through the comparatively clear air near the floor, underlighting the curdled masses of smoke as if they were thunderheads looming over a plain. From my eyeto-the-carpet perspective, the beige nylon fibers stretched away like a vast flat field of dry grass, fitfully brightened by an electrical storm. This narrow, life-sustaining realm under the smoke seemed to be an alternate world into which I had fallen after stepping through a door between dimensions.
        The ominous throbs of light were reflections of fire elsewhere in the room, but they didn't relieve the gloom enough to help me find the way out. The stroboscopic flickering only contributed to my confusion and scared the hell out of me.
        As long as I couldn't see the blaze, I could pretend that it was in a distant corner of the house. Now I no longer had the refuge of pretense. Yet there was no advantage to glimpsing the reflected fire, because I wasn't able to tell if the flames were inches or feet from me, whether they were burning toward or away from me, so the light increased my anxiety without providing guidance.
        Either I was suffering worse effects of smoke inhalation than I realized, including a distorted perception of time, or the fire was spreading with unusual swiftness. The arsonists had probably used an accelerant, maybe gasoline.
        Determined to get back into the foyer and then to the front door, I sucked desperately at the increasingly acrid air near the floor and squirmed across the room, digging my elbows into the carpet to pull myself along, ricocheting off furniture, until I cracked my forehead solidly against the raised brick hearth of the fireplace. I was farther than ever from the foyer, and yet I couldn't picture myself crawling into the fireplace and up the chimney like Santa Claus on his way back to the sleigh.
        I was dizzy. A headache split my skull on a diagonal from my left eyebrow to the part in my hair on the right. My eyes stung from the smoke and the salty sweat that poured into them. I wasn't choking again, but I was gagging on the pungent fumes that flavored even the clearer air near the floor, and I was beginning to think I might not survive.
        Trying hard to remember where the fireplace was situated in relationship to the foyer arch, I squirmed along the raised hearth and then angled off into the room again.
        It seemed absurd to me that I couldn't find my way out of this place. This wasn't a mansion, for God's sake, not a castle, merely a modest house with seven rooms, none of them large, and 2.5 baths, and not even the cleverest Realtor in the country could have described in such a way as to give the that had enough rattling-around space to satisfy the Prince of Wales and his retinue.
        On the evening news, from time to time, you see stories about people dying in house fires, and you can never quite understand why they couldn't make it to a door or window, when one or the other was surely within a dozen steps. Unless they were, of course, drunk. Or wasted on drugs. Or foolish enough to rush back into the flames to rescue Fluffy, the kitten. Which may sound ungrateful of me after I myself was this same night rescued, in a sense, by a cat. But now I understood how people died in these circumstances: The smoke and the churning darkness were more disorienting than drugs or booze, and the longer you breathed the tainted air, the less nimble your mind became, until your thoughts rambled and even panic couldn't focus them.
        When I had first climbed the stairs to see what had happened to Angela, I had been amazed at how calm and collected I was in spite of the threat of imminent violence. With a fat dollop of male pride as cloying as a cupful of mayonnaise, I had even sensed in my heart a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.
        What a difference ten minutes can