Superstalker: A Lady G Thriller

Chapter 24 - Blaze

The fire engines and a pounding on his door woke Doc Granith.

He'd come back to his attic room in the house right after Gaga's service for Simone, skipping the reception afterward since he didn't have a date and wasn't feeling that good. Had taken a couple of Nyquil along with a stiff nightcap and had passed out on the sofa, still in his clothes.

He rolled his head now and could see that the cramped room was starting to fill with smoke.

More pounding on the door. He'd locked it out of habit, house customers sometimes liking to prowl and occasionally take stuff (not that he had that much to take).

He pushed himself up off the sofa, went over and unlocked the door, and when he opened it there was Patty, the new girl, panic all over her face.

"We gotta get out," she said. "The stairs are blocked."

"What are you talking about?"

"The fire for crissake. Go look."

Doc stepped out onto the attic landing and looked down the stairs.

Flames, big and orange and working fast, were down there below the third and second floor landings, cutting off the lower half of the circular stairway. Smoke was billowing up thick and hot toward him and Patty. The whole lower part of the house must be on fire. 

One of the other girls and a man who was naked were backing up the stairway toward them (the girl and Patty part of a skeleton crew who'd stayed behind from the service to take care of customers who couldn't be rescheduled). The girl and the man were moving slow, feeling with their feet behind them for the next step up, like the flames had them hypnotized. Then a piece of something big came loose down there, crashed and broke the spell. The two of them spun and ran the rest of the way up the stairs and stood with Doc and Patty.

Doc ducked back into his room and came back out with a raincoat. "Here," he said, and gave it to the man. The girl at least had a little thong and a cutoff T-shirt on.

The outside of the house was brownstone and the foundation was concrete and granite. But most of the interior was wood beams and paneling that were at least a hundred-and-fifty years old. Along with all the old furniture and rugs, the place was a tinderbox. In no time it was going to be one big roaring furnace. It almost was now.

Doc sensed that the firemen, who he could hear outside pulling up in their trucks and yelling, weren't going to be able to get through to them in time. "We have to go back down," he said.

The man in the raincoat stared at him. "Are you nuts?"

"There's a back stairway, but it doesn't come up this high. We can go down it if we use the third floor."

Doc took Patty's hand and pulled her stumbling down the stairs, turned around at the bottom and yelled back up at the couple, "Come on!"

The couple had no choice but to follow them down into the swirling heat. 

On the third floor now, Doc kept hold of Patty's hand and felt his way along the smoke-filled hallway toward the back of the house. He could tell there were already flames behind some of the doors they passed, hoped any girls who'd been in there had gotten out.

If they had, they were luckier than his group.

Because when he got Patty to the back stairwell and started down with her, he had to pull her back when he saw tongues of flame licking up from the landing below. The fire had beaten them here, had raced through the bottom two floors to cut them off again.

The man in the raincoat and the girl in her thong had started down behind them. Now with flames coming from where they were going, they all had to turn around and quickstep back up.