The smell of smoke drifts into your bedroom and you wake up coughing. After glancing at your digital alarm clock and thinking groggily for a few moments that ‘it’s not even daylight out yet’, you realize it wasn’t the alarm that woke you. You smell the smoke and walk out towards the living room of your apartment but everything seems normal enough. You can smell it though, something is on fire somewhere and the smoke is spreading quickly. You slip on some shoes, grab your wallet and cellular phone and head out into the hallway. The emergency exit is around the corner, but curiosity gets the better of you and you follow your nose instead. You head in the other direction and open the door to the stairwell on the other side of the hall.

angel

Where the stairs turn, you can see fire. It’s directly above your floor but nobody seems to be awake, or leaving. The sprinkler system hasn’t turned on either. You quickly close the door and run back down the hall. Were you really just that heavy of a sleeper that you didn’t notice everyone else leaving? Or was there no alarm, no warning? Was everyone still in their apartments sleeping?

You bang on your neighbor’s door and she opens it, groggily staring up at you and wondering why you’ve woken her. The building is on fire, you explain hurriedly, you tell her she has to get out. It seems that it wasn’t just you, it was the entire floor. As she runs back inside to grab her dog, you rub back down the hall. Starting at the apartments closest to the stairwell, you scream and knock on each door until the person comes out, or you’re convinced that nobody is home. The air gets thick around you, and you can see the flames curling through the ceiling now, but you make sure to get everyone in your hall out of the building. As you head down the stairs of the emergency exit though, you feel lightheaded and unstable. You struggle to get out of the building but your limbs give way to fatigue. There isn’t enough oxygen in your blood, and you think that maybe this was the last thing you were meant to do before you die. Your eyelids grow heavy and you loose consciousness.

To your surprise though, you wake up in an ambulance not even a half-hour later. You ask a paramedic what happened and he explains that someone had dragged you out of the building and disappeared soon after. You ask if it was a firefighter, and the man tells you that this person was dressed casually.

The paramedic smiles at you and says “Maybe you’ve got a guardian angel.”

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow