One Door From Heaven

high from each point of impact.
        Leilani's best speed was behind her. The cyborg leg might appear to be ass-kicking fearsome, but it cramped sooner than she expected, perhaps because she'd done so little walking these past few days when they had been on the road. She lost the smooth hip action necessary to keep swinging along, and she couldn't reestablish the rhythm.
        The prelude to the symphony of rain lasted only seconds before a Niagara cascaded onto the campground, a concert composed entirely of furious drums. The downpour came so hard that even where the trees arched across the lane, the instantly sodden boughs provided little protection.
        She tried to shield her journal against her body, but the wind whipped sheets of rain against her, and she saw the pressboard cover darkening as it sucked up the water. She was already soaked to the skin, as wet as if she'd gone swimming fully clothed, and clutching the notebook against her chest provided it no protection whatsoever.
        Putting a hand on Leilani s shoulder and leaning close to be heard over the roar of the rain and over thunder that now came in volleys, Polly said, "Not far! That Fleetwood, thirty yards!"
        Pushing the journal into Polly's hands, Leilani said, "Take this! Go ahead! I'll catch up!"
        Polly insisted they were close, and Leilani knew they were close, but she couldn't move as fast as Polly because the cramps in her leg had grown painful, and because she was unable to recover the correct hip rhythm no matter how hard she tried, and because the dirt service lane-generously oiled to suppress the dust-proved slippery when wet, adding to her balance problems. No matter how aggressively she insisted on being a dangerous young mutant every day of her life, she was undeniably a disabled little girl in a situation like this, regardless of how much that galled her. She pushed the journal into Polly's hands, gut-wrenched by the thought that rain was seeping through the pages, smearing the ink, making her elaborate code hard if not impossible to read, gut-wrenched because between these covers were years of her suffering, not merely tales of Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, but so many memories of Lukipela in detail that she might not be able to perfectly recall. On these pages were the observations and the ideas that would help her to become a writer, to become someone, to take her shapeless life and to impress meaning and purpose upon it, and it seemed to her that if she lost these four hundred pages of tightly written, highly condensed experience, if she allowed them to be reduced to meaningless blurs and smears, then her life would be meaningless, as well. On one level, she knew this fear was unfounded, but that wasn't the level on which she was operating, so she shoved the journal into Polly's hands and screamed, "Take it, keep it dry, it's my life, it's my LIFE!" Maybe this seemed crazy to Polly, and in fact it was crazy, absolutely loony, but she must have seen something in Leilani's face or eyes that scared her, shook her, moved her, because maybe twenty-five yards from the Fleetwood, she accepted the journal and tried to jam it in her purse, and when it wouldn't fit, she ran with it. The sky, an ocean coming down; the wind, a banshee whirling. Leilani slipped and slid, staggered and stumbled, but kept hitching forward, propelling herself toward the Fleetwood, relying as much on the power of positive thinking as on her legs. Polly sprinted ten yards, slowed, looked back, still fifteen yards from the trailer, no longer the vivid figure that she had been, but merely a gray phantom of an Amazon, faded by curtain upon curtain of rain. Leilani waved her onward-"Go, go!"-until Polly turned away and continued running. Polly closed to within ten yards of the motor home, Leilani within twenty, every yard a gazelle leap for the woman and every yard a struggle for the girl, until she wondered why she hadn't applied the power of positive thinking as determinedly to the healing of her twisted leg as she had to the growth of her breasts.
        DOWN ON THE FLOOR, Micky was half convinced she could see the rank stench like a faint green-yellow fog eddying in the first few inches above the floorboards.
        She sought the butane lighter but couldn't find it. After less than a minute spent in the search, she took another and longer look at the bizarre walls towering over her, and realized that using fire to undo the knots in