"Hello?" she called, receiving no answer. Through watering eyes she found a stairway leading to the second floor. The stairs cracked beneath her as she ran up, the whole staircase threatening to give way. She made it up to the top to find even more smoke and fire. "Hello?"
She kicked open the first door she found. Inside, fire devoured the lacy curtains and pink walls of a little girl's bedroom. To her relief, Samantha saw the bed was made, dolls and stuffed animals arranged neatly on the pillows. She opened the closet to make certain no one was hiding in there and then plunged down the hall to the next door.
She burst into a guest bedroom, also empty. A door inside the guest room led to a small bathroom, where she moistened a towel in the sink and wrapped it around her head to keep out some of the smoke and heat. Another door led from the bathroom to a teenage boy's room, the posters of supermodels and rock bands turning to ashes. She didn't find the boy anywhere in the room; either he'd already fled or hadn't been here to start with. She pulled her hand back from the hot doorknob; she didn't have much time left.
She took a deep breath and then opened the door with the sleeve of her jacket. There was only one more room to search at the end of the hall. The master bedroom. She charged ahead through a wall of flames, crashing through the door.
On the bed she saw the lump of a body. She peeled aside the blankets to find a heavyset woman lying there, a jagged gash between her breasts. The woman wasn't breathing, but Samantha scooped her up anyway and carried her from the room. She raced back through the flames and down to the stairwell only to find it turned to cinders. "Oh no," she said.
She plunged back into the girl's bedroom. She set the woman on the floor and wrapped her in the comforter from the bed. With the blanket underneath this, Samantha beat at the flames around the windows. Through the smoke, she saw the overhang of the porch below. She couldn't be sure the roof would hold her, but at this point it didn't matter.
She grabbed a ceramic lamp shaped like a unicorn, turning it in her hands a moment. It's so pretty, she thought. The room suddenly grew larger, the lamp becoming so heavy she could barely hold it in her tiny, chubby hands. Where's Mama? she wondered. She can't leave me here.
The ceiling caved in behind her, support beams shredding the little girl's bed. Samantha snapped back to reality, the room and her hands expanding to their normal size. She heaved the unicorn lamp through the window over the porch and then hurried across the room to grab the woman.