One Door From Heaven

gauntlet before their sole escape route closed forever. Maybe they'd misjudge the moment, be caught by the shifting flames, and go up like torches-a spectacle he was loath to miss.
        The vodka-sucking whore pulled the girl against her. She seemed to be trying to work out a way to use her body to shield the kid when they made their run for it, as if a few burn scars could possibly render the Hand any uglier than she already looked.
        Abruptly, a section of the stacks on one side of their passage collapsed onto the floor between them and Preston, releasing clouds of sparks like fireflies and great black moths of paper ash. They could no longer exit without wading through knee-deep, furiously blazing debris.
        Fate sealed, the woman and the girl retreated to the back of the cul-de-sac.
        They would live another three minutes, five at most, before smoke flooded through here in smothering tides, before they became a pair of animate candles. Preston dared not wait for the final act, lest he be trapped in the house with them.
        A heavy weight of disappointment lay on his heart. Their final throes, witnessed firsthand, would have given him much pleasure and thus would have added to the total amount of happiness in the world. Now their deaths would be nearly as useless as their lives.
        He consoled himself with the thought that the Black Hole's batch of lumpy cupcakes was baking in her oven.
        As Preston turned away, leaving these two wads of living tallow to the mercy of the fire, the woman began to cry out for help at the top of her voice. Excited by the note of desperation in her pleas, he lingered a moment longer.
        An answering shout, arising elsewhere in the maze, startled he had forgotten the three loud blows, likely the sounds of someone breaking down a door - further proof that the polluted air was already affecting his thinking, clouding his judgment.
        Heartened, the woman cried out again, again, making a beacon of her voice.
        Another answering shout rang above the rapidly rising chant of a million tongues of flame, and to Preston's left, about ten feet away, a big man in a colorful Hawaiian shirt appeared out of the mouth of another passageway. He carried a revolver.
        With a shocking disregard for ethical conduct, the sonofabitch shot Preston. They were strangers; neither of them had the informed perspective necessary to judge the other's usefulness to the world; yet the ruthless bastard squeezed the trigger without hesitation.
        When he saw the stranger raising the gun, Preston realized that he should fling himself backward and to the right, but he was more a man of thought than action, and before he could move, the impact of the slug punished his hesitation. He staggered, fell, rolled onto his stomach, and scrambled away from the shooter, away from the cul-de-sac in which the woman and the girl awaited burning, around a corner, into another run of the maze, shocked by the intensity of his pain, which was worse than anything he'd experienced before or had expected to be forced to endure.
        'WE'RE HERE!" Noah shouted to Micky and the girl. "Hold on, we'll get you out!"
        Only a few minutes old, the blaze had grown astonishingly fast throughout the front of the house. Not a man who had often - or ever - suspected that uncanny forces were afoot in the world, never having gotten so much as a single nape-hair bristle at a scary movie, Noah Farrel couldn't shake the feeling that this fire was different, that it was somehow alive, aware, cunning. Prowling the maze with strange purpose. Seeking more than just fuel to feed its bottomless appetite. He knew that firefighters sometimes felt this way, that they called it the Beast. When flames hissed at him, when from morn distant and fully involved corridors rose what sounded like grumbling, snarling, and thick-throated cackling, Beast seemed a fitting name.
        The door to the enclosed porch and the back door between porch and kitchen had been left open when he and Cass broke in. Interior doors had been removed a long time ago. Now the superheated air in the house sought the cool day beyond the bottle collection, and the accelerating draft drew smoke and ashes and hot embers through the labyrinth, and coaxed the conflagration toward a richer supply of oxygen.
        Largely, the fire remained confined to the front half of the house. That wouldn't be the case much