One Door From Heaven

longer.
        With smears of wet blood from his oozing scalpel wound, Noah had left markers on the stacked-paper walls along the route they'd followed. He was afraid that if they didn't begin to retrace their path soon, smoke would blind them to those crimson signs.
        He squinted into the mouth of the dead-end passage where but a moment ago Maddoc had been posted. About ten feet long. The first four feet of both walls were afire. On the floor, a deep threshold of burning debris barred entrance. Micky and the girl, visible beyond shimmering curtains of fire, couldn't be reached from here.
        Grabbing a fistful of Hawaiian shirt, Cass pulled Noah to one side and pointed out that only one of the cul-de-sac's flanking walls towered all the way to the nine-foot ceiling. The other wall, shared with the parallel corridor that she and Noah had recently followed, was two feet shorter.
        Returning to that passage, out of which he had stepped before shooting Maddoc, Noah bolstered his revolver and allowed Cass to give him a boost. She was tall and strong, and with an assist from her, he levered himself onto the top of the barrier that separated them from the dead end where Micky and the girl were trapped.
        Going up, acutely sensitive to the stability of the stacks, Noah prepared to drop away at the first indication that his ascent might cause the trash to collapse upon the very people he hoped to rescue. The construction wasn't as supportive as a concrete-block wall, but it didn't shift under him.
        At the summit, in the narrow space between the stacks and the ceiling, with his feet sticking out in the aisle- where Cass waited, with his chest flat on the top of the wall, he was in thicker-though far from blinding-smoke that irritated his eyes and pricked tears from them. Better hold each breath as long as possible. Minimize the amount of crap he sucked in. He couldn't, however, perform the entire operation on a single inhalation.
        In the Valley of the Shadow. Every second, a tick closer to Death.
        A coiled bramble of pain twisted its thorns back and forth in the scalpel wound. He almost welcomed the pain, hoping it would help compensate for the sense-dulling effect of the fumes, keeping him alert.
        Gingerly but quickly, he eased forward until he could peer down into the dead-end passage. One yard to his right, seething fire ate at the floor and fed all the way up the vertical surface of the cul-de-sac. He flinched from the heat, and felt the sweat stiffen on the skin of his right forearm as it flash-dried in an instant.
        The portion of the seven-foot-high wall directly below him had not yet caught fire. As Noah appeared and at once reached down with both arms, Micky looked up. Wheezing. Her face less than two feet from his. Right profile stained with thick dried blood, hair matted with blood along that side of her head.
        Without hesitation, Micky boosted Leilani, and Noah could see from the woman's wrenched expression that the effort unleashed tribes of tiny devils that jabbed their pitchforks in her scalp wound.
        He grabbed the girl. Muscled her up toward him. She helped as much as she could, seizing his left shoulder as though it were a ladder rung, clutching at the top of the partition. Pulled from above, pushed from below, she squeezed between Noah and the corner of the cul-de-sac, up and into the smoky crawlspace between the stacks and the ceiling.
        As he felt Leilani squirm past him toward the passageway where Cass waited to lift her down, Noah hooked his hands under Micky's arms, and she followed the girl's example. She was heavier than the child, and no one pushed her from below. She gave herself as much of a boost as she could by toeing off the wall once, twice, then again, and each time she did so, Noah felt the stacks shudder under them.
        Now he held his breath not merely to minimize smoke inhalation, but in expectation that the wall would shift and collapse, either burying Micky in the burning cul-de-sac or crushing him, Cass, and Leilani in the passage that they were trying to reach.
        Aware of the danger, she eased quickly but judiciously past him, eeling across the two-foot-wide top of the palisade.
        To his right, bright teeth of fire chewed through the stacks, almost a foot closer than when he'd first come up here. The hairs on that forearm, stiff with dried sweat, bristled like hundreds of tiny