I shook Gail awake. The second explosion had caused another flaming tear in the truck, this one somewhat larger but just as filled with fire. Again, more oxygen was available, but the flames were drawing it in with lungs more powerful than our own. And now it was becoming academic who would win the battle for the air, because the air was becoming too hot to breathe. We were lucky (within a very broad interpretation of the term) in that there was nothing in the truck to catch fire, with the exception of us. But the metal hull would soon be too hot to stand or sit on.

We were part of a very cruel scientific equation. We desperately needed oxygen. But more oxygen for us meant more for the fire, making its flames and killing heat ever stronger. At the same time, the carbon monoxide that still filled the truck had the power to retard and smother the deadly flame, but not before it would poison us. Between the oxygen, the carbon monoxide, and the fire, it was hard to choose whom to root for.

“Do you want to try going through the flames?” I asked Gail. She shook her head no. Gunther had served us some good, after all, because we’d seen how he’d met his end, and we knew we didn’t want that for ourselves.

“There’s a chance,” I shouted in her ear over the din of the bellowing inferno, “that all the carbon monoxide will put out the fire, or bring it down enough that we can get out.”

At that moment, there was a further eruption of gasoline, and the flames increased.

“But what I’m really banking on,” I added, “are April showers.” The temperature of the metal would soon reach a point where we would end up scorched to death like steak slapped down on a preheated skillet. I was suddenly nostalgic for the good old days of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The door to the back of the truck swung open. We felt the best breeze in the history of the world—cold, laced with gasoline smoke, but sweeter to us than a field of wet clover on the first sunny morning of spring.

It wouldn’t have mattered if the doors had been opened by Martha and Gunther the Second—we would have gratefully embraced them, and so we did as they helped us down from the truck and carried us in their arms away from the flames.