Woman in Black by Eileen Goudge

fists hammering futilely against the exit doors. Ever since the step-up in production, the jefe had kept them chained shut during work hours to prevent slackers from slipping outside for unauthorized breaks. In all the confusion, no one had thought to unlock them.
    Concepción was gripped with a paralyzing panic. They were all going to die, trapped in here like rats! But a part of her, the part that had refused to give up in the wake of all the tragedies she’d endured thus far—the deaths of both her parents, the stillborn babies before Milagros, and the betrayals by her husband and Angel—came to the fore now, commanding her sharply to remain calm. If she succumbed to panic, she might very well die. And she would be of no use to her daughter dead.
    Without stopping to think, she snatched a half-sewn pillowcase from a basket on the floor. Holding it over her nose and mouth to filter out the worst of the smoke, she forged on in search of her daughter. But even with a layer of protection, each breath was a searing attack on her lungs. Worse was the panic clawing inside her like a caged beast. It was all she could do to stay focused on her goal of finding her daughter and, if need be, guiding her to safety. For Milagros, she would have headed straight into the flames of hell.
    And hell was where she appeared to be right now. Amid the ever-thickening smoke, she could now see flames leaping, orange tongues licking greedily at the piled-up scraps of fabric around her. As she stumbled blindly about, her eyes burning and the tiny hairs on her arms crackling with the heat, the cool voice of reason in her head instructed her to get down on her hands and knees. Then she was crawling over the concrete floor, where the smoke wasn’t quite so dense. She negotiated her way through a thicket of table legs and the iron pedestal of a steam press, as big around as a tree trunk. Dimly through the smoke, she could see the people gathered by the nearest exit, men and women bawling like frightened cattle as they kicked and pounded in an effort to batter down the door. A chair sailed by overhead, and she heard the shattering of glass as a window gave way. But the windows were all secured from the outside by wire mesh, so it was to no avail: The desperate move only succeeded in letting in a gust of air that sent the flames ever higher.
    Concepción gasped for breath, fearing for her own life now. Long ago, after burying the last of her stillborn babies—a little boy—she had imagined that she would welcome death. At the time, she’d had nothing to live for but a husband who’d stagger home from bars only to impregnate her with yet another baby that wouldn’t survive to draw its first breath. But that had been before Milagros. The day she’d become a mother to a perfect, healthy child, she’d begun to see death as the enemy. The one time Concepción had been seriously ill, after a cut on her foot had become badly infected, she’d had but one thought in her head: Who will raise my daughter if I die? And that alone had been enough to send her crawling from her sickbed, gritting her teeth from the pain as she’d hobbled off to see to her child.
    Now she sent up a prayer— Ayudame, Dios! —that she would find Milagros among those clamoring at the exit. For it seemed that hope wasn’t lost after all. Amid all the shouting, she heard the rattle of a chain, followed by the sound of metal scraping over concrete as the door was shoved open.
    At that moment, she faded from consciousness. In some distant recess of her mind, she was dimly aware of a hand roughly grabbing her by the arm and dragging her across the floor. The next thing she knew, she was outside, lying on the ground, staring up at the sky and gulping in fresh air. Her eyes and lungs burned, and the flesh on one side of her body was scraped raw. All around her, people in similar states of dishevelment and confusion lay sprawled on