I froze, pressing my face to the burning carpet.
Through the crack beneath the door, slipping past the towel Leo had so carefully placed, a sickening, bright orange glow began to violently flicker across the hallway floor.
Chapter 3: The Inferno Revealed
The violent orange light danced wildly across the cheap, singed fibers of the hallway carpet. It was no longer just a faint glow; it was a hungry, pulsating presence practically breathing underneath the door sweep. The thick towel Leo had shoved into the gap was starting to smolder, emitting a sharp, chemical sting that burned my eyes and clawed at my raw throat.
I didn’t think. I threw my entire body against the solid wood of the door.
My shoulder collided with the frame with a bone-jarring crunch, but the deadbolt didn’t even rattle. I scrambled backward on my hands and knees, ignoring the jagged sting of the carpet burns tearing at my flesh, and threw myself at it again. “Leo! Mia!” I screamed, the words dissolving into a violent, wracking cough as I inhaled a mouthful of toxic black smoke.
I hit the door a third time, sobbing blindly in the suffocating heat. My blistered palm slapped against the brass doorknob, hoping against hope that the locking mechanism had melted or failed, but the metal was so scalding hot it left a fresh, agonizing brand across my skin.
Then came the sound.
It wasn’t another crack of warping vinyl. It was a massive, concussive boom that shook the very foundation of the fourth floor. The pressure in the hallway instantly plummeted, sucking the smoke from under my door back into the apartment for a fraction of a second, followed by the deafening roar of oxygen feeding an open flame.
The sliding glass door on the balcony had just blown out.
“No!” I shrieked, knowing exactly what that meant. The fire had breached the only barrier between my children and the inferno.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. Desperate for a single gasp of oxygen, I army-crawled away from my front door, dragging myself down the dark corridor toward the small, rectangular window at the far end of the hall that overlooked the courtyard.
I reached the sill and pulled myself up, pressing my blistering face against the cool, single-pane glass. I wiped a streak of oily soot from the window to look down at the ground, silently praying to see a rescue net, a ladder, anything.
The scene below had violently fractured.
The smug, jeering mob had completely evaporated, replaced by a chaotic stampede of pure panic. The explosion of our balcony door had sent a lethal shower of jagged, molten glass raining down onto the courtyard asphalt. People were screaming, covering their heads with their jackets, and sprinting away from the center of the complex.
From my vantage point, I could see the massive, horrifying plume of thick black smoke billowing out from my apartment’s balcony, violently twisting into the afternoon sky. The harsh glare of the sun was entirely blocked out by the toxic cloud. The fire was no longer a secret. It was a roaring, undeniable beast, vomiting ash and burning debris down onto the exact spot where Greg had been standing.
Greg wasn’t gloating anymore. I watched him stumble backward over a landscaping timber, his iPad tumbling from his hands and clattering uselessly onto the concrete. He was staring up at the fourth floor with his mouth hanging open, his face pale and slack with sudden, undeniable terror. The viral narrative he had spent the last twenty minutes constructing for his internet audience had just blown up in his face, replaced by the damning evidence of his own criminal negligence.
Through the thick glass of the hallway window, a new sound finally pierced the roar of the fire.
Sirens. Not one, but a massive, overlapping wail of air horns and heavy diesel engines screaming down the main avenue.
“They’re coming,” I choked out, pressing my forehead against the glass. “Hold on, Leo. Please, God, hold on.”
Suddenly, the heavy metal door leading to the third-floor stairwell burst open behind me.
Two massive figures clad in heavy yellow turnout gear and thick air tanks shoved their way into the fourth-floor corridor. The sweeping beams of their flashlights pierced the black smoke.
“Fire department! Call out!” a booming, mechanically muffled voice echoed through the hall.
“Here!” I screamed, waving my arms wildly from the end of the corridor. “My kids! They’re on the balcony of 4B! You have to get to the balcony!”
The lead firefighter rushed toward me, dropping to a crouch as he assessed the heavy smoke condition. “We got a civilian trapped in the corridor!” he shouted into the radio clipped to his shoulder. He grabbed my arm, his thick Kevlar gloves surprisingly gentle as he pulled me away from the window. “Ma’am, we need to evacuate you right now. This floor is compromised.”
“No!” I fought against his grip, pointing frantically back at my door. “My ten-year-old son is holding my daughter over the railing! The glass just broke! The fire is on the balcony with them! Get through that door!”
The second firefighter didn’t need to be told twice. He stepped up to the door of 4B, unhooking a heavy steel Halligan bar from his belt. He wedged the forked end right above the deadbolt and slammed it with a massive flathead axe.
Crack.
The wood splintered instantly. He swung again, driving the steel deeper, and wrenched the bar backward. The doorframe exploded in a shower of pulverized wood and twisted metal.
The door swung inward, and a literal wall of rolling, orange flame blasted out into the hallway.
The heat was instantly unbearable, singing the stray hairs on the back of my neck from twenty feet away. The apartment was gone. The living room was a hollow, roaring cavern of fire.