The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 47

John Bigelow was having a nightmare. He was being threatened by some terrifying danger. He struggled from sleep and lay half awake.

The dream was lost; he couldn’t remember What it was. He lay in bed, fuzzy from sleep, his mind still fogged by alcohol. He rolled once on his side and brushed against Deirdre. Automatically he nuzzled her hair, spitting out some stray strands that held the acrid taste of perfumed hair spray. Still half asleep, he could feel the press of love and pushed his face down on hers, then turned away, disgusted by the sick-sweet odor of her breath. After that, sleep came easy and he dozed off again.

The faint sounds of sirens far below pulled him back to a half-intoxicated consciousness. He coughed lightly, ignoring the faint, smoky taste to the air. The smoke from the grill was still light, thanks primarily to the heavy north wind that penetrated small chinks in the building and pushed most of the warning haze to the south end.

In addition, he had smoked a great deal before they had gone to bed for a few desultory hours of mechanical lovemaking. His lungs were still filled with the biting tobacco tars and his mouth felt raw and seared.

His nostrils were completely blocked and his breath rasped from his mouth as he wavered between a light sleep and heavy snoring.

It was minutes before his mind equated the sound of the explosions with reality. For a long time they seemed a part of the nightmare he had been having. Then he sat up, his mind still fogged, and stared about the darkened bedroom. It was another minute before he realized that he smelled smoke. The room, he realized with vague alarm, was getting warm. He was still very drunk but the sudden combination of the odor of smoke and the feeling of unexplained warmth sent a prickle of fear through his body. He fumbled for the lamp by the sofa bed and snapped the switch. Nothing happened. Unplugged, he thought. He threw back the sheet and staggered from the bed to the wall, groping for the overhead light switch. He found it but still nothing happened.

He was wide awake now. The electricity must have failed. He couldn’t remember if they had a flashlight in the suite; he knew they didn’t have candles. Then he remembered the electric lantern that Krost had left behind on the counter. He fumbled his way over to the counter, felt along it, and found the lantern. He turned it on and came back to the bed.

“For Christ’s sakes, Turn that damned thing off, will You?” Disgusted, Deirdre pulled the pillow over her head.

“Bitch,” Bigelow muttered. He stumbled against the bar, almost knocking over his trophy. Then he saw the tendrils of smoke creeping from under the door to the outer office. He turned back to Deirdre.

“Wake up, damnit! The place is on fire!”

“You’re crazy,” she said sleepily and burrowed deeper into the pillow. Bigelow set the lantern on the end table and Yanked the sheets from the bed. “Johnny,” Deirdre whined. “Lemme sleep.”

“Come on,” he insisted, kneeling on the bed and almost falling on top of her. He pulled the pillow away from her and dragged her half off the mattress. “Come on, put on something. We’ve got to get out of here!” He hopped from foot to foot, pulling on his trousers and hastily wriggling into his half-buttoned shirt. He ignored his socks and tugged on his Gucci shoes.

“What a creep,” Deirdre said, solemnly drunk, and crawled back into bed to lie there on her stomach. She had managed to put on a slip some time during the night.

There was a long tear in the rear, exposing her back and one buttock, and Bigelow wondered for a second how that had happened. He tucked his shirt half into his trousers and tightened his belt, then debated pulling her off the bed again and trying to slap her awake.

The smell of smoke decided him; he ran to the suite door and pulled it open. He staggered backward before the blast of heat and smoke and threw his hands up in front of his face. The outer office was the very substance of his nightmare.

On the far side of the storeroom, the banks of salesmen’s small offices were blazing; their thin wallboard partitions blackened as he watched. The heavy floor-to-ceiling draperies on the other side were alive with flames while burning wooden office furniture added to the shimmering heat.

In the middle of the room where the displays were neatly piled, the fire-breathing gargoyles of his dream had become a reality. It took him a moment to realize that the long ranks of polystyrene displays were melting under the heat. The elves slumped as he watched, their features sagging and growing cancerous patches, their cheeks and noses becoming long and pendulous, evil in the-orange-red light from the flames. The reindeer became frighteningly alive, their plastic coats gleaming wetly, their delicate legs and thighs oddly elongated, their tails sweeping the floor as they seemed to run swiftly forward.

The Santa Claus figures were now humpbacked and bent, their knuckles brushing the wood below, their chubby, jovial faces now hollow-cheeked and vicious.

Bigelow slammed the door, shuddering. There was barely time, he thought frantically. He ran into the bathroom and drenched a heavy towel to wrap around his face. Then he did the same with a terry-cloth robe and pulled it on. Back in the suite, he tugged at Deirdre once again. “Goddamnit, leave me alone!” She pushed him away and snuggled under the pillow again.

Bigelow’s eyes were stinging with the smoke. “Damnit, come on!”

he shouted in panic and pulled at her arm.

She rolled away from him, giggling. “All right, baby,” he muttered.

“It’s your funeral.”

He turned and ran for the door, then suddenly stopped by the bar.

The only trophy he had ever won in a lifetime of competition. It weighed a ton, but he knew he couldn’t abandon it to the flames. He tightened the towel about the lower part of his face, grabbed the trophy under one arm, and opened the door.

Outside amid the flames, the ranks of melting, threatening figures waited for him. He saw a clear path through the terror to the inner door of the office reception room and what he desperately hoped was escape It probably wouldn’t stay open long, however. Then he looked more closely at the wooden floor between the displays. It was wet with the guck of melted plastic. He suddenly remembered the story of the Roman historian forced to walk across a lava flow during an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

Well, his feet were a lot better protected than those of a Roman.

He walked to the edge of the slick and stuck a foot tentatively into the melted plastic. The stuff was sticky and formed thin, glistening threads when he pulled his foot back. But his shoe protected him; he felt warmth but little more.

He sucked in a breath of hot air, coughed at the smoke, and started across the deadly slick. It was slow going.

He had to be careful not to spatter his legs with the stuff; it would burn right through his pants. Step by step he walked across the pool.

He was finally beginning to feel heat through the soles of his shoes.

For a moment he considered dropping the trophy; it was too heavy and the metal was already warming from the radiant heat.

Then he realized he was only eight feet from the door.

A wild elation started to build within him. He could see nothing through the frosted glass of the door to the outer office. Perhaps it wasn’t on fire yet; the door itself didn’t seem charred. A few feet more and he would be through the door and to the elevators or stairwells. only a few more feet …

He could feel his right shoe sticking. He tugged at it impatiently and his foot slipped from the loose shoe. He was already off balance because of the trophy; for a second he wobbled uncertainly on his left foot, then, unthinking, thrust out his bare right foot to keep from falling.

It touched the pool of plastic.

He cried out in agony as the scalding plastic spread over his foot.

He pulled it back, trying desperately to master the pain; then he was off balance once again.

He fell forward, frantically clutching at the draperies that hung on the storeroom side of the partition between the outer office and the storeroom. He grabbed a handful of cloth, tried to pull himself up, then fell forward again as the draperies gave way. His trousered knee thrust through the folds of the wet bathrobe and slid along the floor as though it were on ice. Pain clawed through the trouser leg. He thrust out his left arm to keep from falling flat but his fingers found no purchase in the scalding slick as he slid face forward into the pool of plastic.

He screamed once and rolled over, trying to escape, still clutching the trophy and the handful’of drapery cloth.

The drapery rod overhead suddenly snapped under the pull. The rest of the draperies, including the folds that had started to burn at the far end, slid along the dangling rod and enveloped him. Where they touched the pool of plastic they flickered into flames that quickly danced over the surface, igniting the bundled draperies that covered Bigelow. It hadn’t worked out, something within him thought sadly. It hadn’t worked out at all.

The flames roared across the room. The walls became tapestries of fire, as the display figures slumped into the burning pool of plastic.

Near the heap of charred draperies by the door, a blackened trophy jutted up into the smoky air of the room. The metal figures of the trophy were already beginning to flow.