The fifth vial

CHAPTER 15

The front door flew inward, and Natalie plunged ahead into a wall of black smoke and heat. The thought flashed through her mind that somewhere she had heard that it wasn't wise to open the door to a fire because the conflagration would be worsened, but she really had no choice. Her mother and her niece were inside.

The heat was bearable, but the smoke grew more intense with every step, stinging her eyes, nose, and lung. Halfway down the hallway to the kitchen, sputtering and coughing, she was forced to pull her sweatshirt over her mouth and nose and drop to her hands and knees. To her left, the living room was filling with smoke, and the flowered paper on the wall by the kitchen was smoldering, but there was no sign that the fire had started there. The real trouble was ahead of her.

"Mom!" she screamed as she reached the kitchen. "Mom, can you hear me?"

The curtains on the windows were ablaze, as was the wall behind them, the wall adjacent to the living room, the oak table, and parts of the floor. Acrid smoke, lit eerily by the flames, was swirling through the room. Tongues of fire seemed to be shooting across the ceiling, and flickering up from an area of floor by the table.

"Mom?…Jenny?"

Natalie inched her way toward the bedrooms. The fire had to have started here, she was thinking, her mind forming a vivid image of Hermina, nodding off at the table, hunched over the Times crossword puzzle, a pencil in one hand, a glowing Winston in the other. But where was she? The heat was intense now, and Natalie began worrying about the gas stove. There were pilots going all the time without flame finding its way backward into the pipes, and she had never heard of a massive explosion from a stove unless unlit gas was actually leaking into the room. The pipes to the stove must offer some protection, she decided. It really didn't matter. She wasn't leaving until she found her mother and Jenny.

The heat and swirling smoke were building. Natalie dropped to her elbows to get more relief from both. Now, in addition, there was noise — a crescendo of snapping wood, falling plaster, and hissing flame. She was squinting ahead, peering through nearly closed eyes, when she spotted her mother lying facedown, no more than five feet away. She was wearing a housecoat and no shoes, and was lying motionless in the doorway that led to the bedrooms. Jenny! Unless Hermina had become disoriented, she had to have been trying to get to her granddaughter.

Operating off a surge of adrenaline, Natalie grabbed her mother by the ankles, stood up as high as she could tolerate, and began hauling her, six inches at a time, back into the kitchen. The air was significantly hotter than it had been just a minute or so before. Breathing it was like standing in front of an open furnace. There was no movement from her mother — no reaction to being dragged, facedown, across the floor. Natalie fought the urge to check for signs of life. Maybe a heart attack had precipitated all of this. Instead, she pushed backward some more. She had to get Hermina out of the house, then get back inside for Jenny.

The back door, just beyond the blazing table, was engulfed in a sheet of fire. There was absolutely no way out except back down the hallway to the front door. Had anyone called the fire department? Smoke must be billowing out of that door by now. Would anyone be out there waiting to help?

Twice Natalie's hands slipped and she fell backward, gagging and coughing, trying to clear her throat and chest. Each time, she regained her composure and her grip and dragged her mother another few feet. She was nearing the open front door, when Ramon Santiago, the seventy-year-old upstairs tenant, appeared at her elbow, trying to help as much as he was able.

"Be careful…Ramon," Natalie sputtered, knowing that the man had arthritis and some sort of heart problem as well. "I don't…want you…getting hurt."

"Is she alive?"

"I…don't know."

If anything, Ramon was slowing down her progress to the door. Finally, he let go.

"I think people have called the fire department."

"Go be…sure!"

"It was her cigarettes, wasn't it."

"Ramon, go…get the…fire department!"

"Okay, okay."

He turned and ran off just as Natalie reached the porch. She was coughing nonstop now and gasping for breath. The burning in her chest was intense. There were several neighbors on the front walk. Only one of them, a fifty-year-old man, who she knew wasn't working because of some sort of illness or injury, was young enough to be of much assistance.

"Help me!" she cried, now wondering what she would do if, in fact, her mother wasn't breathing — trust a neighbor to do effective CPR and go back in after Jenny, or pray the girl was at school, and tend to things with Hermina?

Together, she and the neighbor rolled her mother to her back and half-dragged, half-carried her down the stairs to the front walk. She was covered with soot and grime, and her long, raven-black hair was badly singed. Quickly, Natalie knelt beside her and checked for a carotid artery pulse. At the moment she felt one, the woman took a rasping, minimally effective breath.

Thank God!

Natalie pinched her mother's nose shut with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, slipped her other hand under her neck to tilt her head back, and gave her three rapid mouth-to-mouth breaths. After the third, Hermina inhaled again — this time more deeply.

"Ma, can you hear me? Is Jenny in there?"

Hermina's head lolled, but she made no response. Natalie scrambled to her feet, working for every breath. "Keep an eye on her!" she yelled to everyone and no one in particular.

"Don't go back in there," the man cried out as she raced back up the stairs and into the smoke.

From somewhere behind her, she thought she heard a siren, but there was no way she was going to turn back and wait unless she absolutely couldn't move ahead. Her niece had gotten an incredibly raw deal in life as it was. She couldn't be left to die this way.

The smoke, heat, and noise were magnitudes greater now, but close to the floor, there was still breathable air. With her eyes nearly closed and her nose and mouth covered, Natalie drove ahead toward the kitchen. The small, neat living room was ablaze now. Flames had opened a rent in the wall by the kitchen, and embers had set the couch and carpet ablaze. Holding her breath as much as possible, Natalie risked standing. The kitchen was a conflagration, the heat almost unbearable, the noise hideous.

She tried to gauge whether she was in more immediate danger from the ceiling collapsing or the floor giving way. Halfway across the kitchen, her legs buckled and she pitched forward onto the linoleum. She could no longer see and couldn't seem to inhale enough of the hyper-heated air. It was at that instant, prone on the floor, that she heard Jenny's voice.

"Help me! Oh, please help me! Grandma! Aunty Nat! Someone please help me."

Driven by the girl's cries, Natalie pushed to her hands and knees and willed herself forward. She was on the last hundred meters of a fifteen-hundred-meter race, elbow to elbow with another fierce competitor. Her lung was on fire, and her legs were screaming that they could give no more than they were, but the finish line was closing, and she knew she wasn't going to lose. No matter how much the runner beside her had left, she was going to have more.

Blinded and smothering, she hurled herself through the doorway to Jenny's room, and struck heads with the girl, who was lying next to her toppled wheelchair, and whose unbridled hysteria kept her from even registering what was happening.

"Hi, baby…It's okay now…It's…Aunty…Nat."

Jenny's only response was a whimper of Nat's name.

Compared to Hermina, the ten-year-old was a feather, but she was also virtually deadweight, and Natalie was spent. She pulled Jenny's tee up to cover her mouth and nose, hooked her hands under the girl's arms, and pushed back just as she had done with her mother — six agonizing inches at a time. But before she had crossed a third of the kitchen, her legs and her lung would respond no more.

With flaming embers raining down, she pulled her sobbing niece close to her and shielded the girl with her body. Then she closed her eyes tightly, and prayed that the inevitable wouldn't be too painful.