One Door Away from Heaven

The foul air remained breathable. Yet even before the smoke grew dense enough to clog the lungs, the air assailed with lethal toxins spewed out by burning materials, gases that were invisible compared to the roiling soot, but no less dangerous. The manufacture of paper required numerous chemicals, which fire liberated and transformed into even more effective poisons.

If he were hearing the names of those he killed, he had inhaled enough toxins to half unscrew his mind. He’d better get out of here before he became disoriented.

He hesitated, however, because the sight of the Hand and the Slut Queen, trapped in the blind alley, thrilled him. He hoped they would run the fiery 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 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 torches waiting to be lit.

Edging backward, Noah rapped his head against the ceiling. He froze as the compacted mass trembled under him. Remained frozen until it grew still once more. Then he dropped into the safe passageway, joining the others.

Safe like the Titanic. Safe like Hiroshima, 1945. Safe: like Hell.

The rescue operation had taken at most a minute and a half, but conditions had worsened noticeably in the meantime. Night seemed to have arrived toward the front of the maze, though it wasn’t night: more like a tsunami of black water, suspended by the magical stoppage of time, powerful and roiling within itself, but not yet advancing. Veins of red fire opened in that thick blackness, bled for a moment, closed up, and new veins ruptured elsewhere. And here, the cloying air pressed upon him, heavier with portent than with smoke, pregnant with a sense of tremendous forces rapidly building beyond restraint. Blackened pages of old magazines, little more than large flakes of ash, glided lazily toward them through the air, like stingrays seeking prey, and great schools of tiny lanternfish swam overhead in sinuous parades, sometimes extinguishing themselves when they collided with the maze walls, but in other places sparking small new fires, not yet attracted downward to the hair and clothes that they would eventually find so tasty. The heat demanded a toll of greasy sweat, but then parched Noah’s mouth and cracked his lips and seared the linings of his nostrils.

They were all coughing and clearing their throats, sneezing and wheezing, hawking black spit and gray phlegm.

Cass declared, “Outta here, now!” and led the way, followed by Leilani and Micky.

Last man in line, .38 revolver drawn in case Maddoc still had something to prove, Noah saw the throb of firelight toward the back of the house, where they had encountered none on the way in. Maybe there would be a path around it.

TURN BY TURN, through the convolutions of the labyrinth, as if exploring the gyri and the sulci on the surface of a brain, Preston chose his route according to his understanding of the classic maze pattern imprinted in the human racial memory, to which all ordinary maze-makers unfailingly resorted. Maybe the Toad, in spite of bib and bristle, wasn’t ordinary, after all — subhuman seemed more likely — or maybe Preston’s recollection of what he’d learned in that long-ago logic class was flawed, because he seemed to be getting nowhere, and he suspected that more than once he had doubled back and crossed his path.

Blame might best be placed on the bullet wound, which steadily drained him, or on the quality of the air, rather than on faulty memory or on the Toad’s failure to get in touch with his inner primitive. The Black Hole worried frequently about the ever worsening quality of the planet’s air, which was under continuous assault by barbecue grills and flatulent cows and SUVs and bathroom deodorizing cakes and, oh, so many things, so many. The air in here had gotten more disgusting than the air in a vomitorium. It probably contained more psychoactive chemical toxins than the Hole kept in her entire drug supply. The Hole, the good old Hole, mess that she might be, she sometimes got a thing or two right. Preston had a buzz on, a paper-chemical buzz, exacerbated by heat and by the thin haze of smoke that lent these wooden-Indian catacombs some of the atmosphere of an opium den, though the smell was not as pleasant, and no bunks were provided for those who had toked the pipe and felt wasted, as he felt ever more wasted, step by step.

He attempted to determine which of these coral-reef accretions of trash might be piled against an outer wall of the house, because windows lay behind those stacks, windows offering escape and clean air, or as clean as air ever got in a world full of barbecue grills. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stay focused on the task. One moment he would be searching urgently for concealed windows, and the next thing he knew, he’d find himself standing at a bafflingly complex juncture of passages, muttering, spitting on his shoes. Spit. Disgusting. So many fluids in the human body. Noxious fluids. He felt sick. He felt sick . . . but then he found himself peering warily around corners, searching not for windows but for the mysterious damn, sneaky damn extraterrestrials that had been eluding him for years.

For most of his life, he hadn’t needed to believe in a superior intelligence. His own intelligence seemed, to him, to be as superior as anyone could expect. But he was a profound thinker, a philosopher, and a respected academic whose view of the world had been shaped—and could be reshaped—by other academics, the elite of the elite, whose value to society tin his estimation and generally in theirs, too was of unparalleled importance. Five years ago, when he discovered that some quantum physicists and some molecular biologists had begun to believe that the universe offered profuse and even incontrovertible evidence of intelligent design, and that their numbers were slowly growing, his comfortable worldview had been shaken, had been too deeply disturbed to allow him to shrug off this information and blithely go on with his killing. He continued killing, yes, but not blithely. He could not accept any God hypothesis whatsoever because it was too limiting; it resurrected the whole business of right and wrong, of morality, which the enlightened community of utilitarian ethicists had largely succeeded in purging from society. A world created by a superior intelligence, who had imbued human life with purpose and meaning, was a world in which Preston Maddoc didn’t want to exist; it was a world he rejected, for he had always been and forever would be the only master of his fate, the only judge of his behavior.

Fortunately, in the midst of his intellectual crisis, Preston had come across a most useful quote by Francis Crick, one of the two scientists who won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a crisis of his own, Crick had reached a point at which he no longer believed that a sound scientific case could be made for evolution through natural selection. All life at even a molecular level was so irreducibly complex that it argued for intelligent design, which convinced Crick, who also wasn’t too keen on this God business that every form of life on Earth—all flora and fauna, the entire ecosystem—had been created not by God, but by an alien race of incomprehensibly vast intelligence and powers, a race that might also have created this universe itself, and others.