As Mike Zapata shouted for his family to run for their lives, his wife, Tammy, and their 15-year-old daughter, Amanda, tore out of their house on Earl Avenue Thursday evening as a thunderous fireball rose in the sky just two blocks away.

But things were about to get worse.

Just as they were about to jump in their cars, they turned in the driveway to see 19-year-old Joe Ruigomez, a neighbor from down the block, running toward them, his body still smoking from the explosion that burned him and killed his girlfriend Jessica Morales just minutes before.

"Oh, it was something out of a horror movie," Mike Zapata said.

"Please! Help me!" the young man cried.

Tammy and Amanda Zapata steered Ruigomez into the backseat of the family's black Acura and jumped in after him. Mike Zapata left in another car.

"Joe kept saying, 'My girlfriend! She's gone! I couldn't get to her!' " Amanda said, as she and the family recalled the rescue that would save Ruigomez's life.

On Sunday, as the Zapatas and the other Crestmoor families returned to their homes for the first time since the gas line blew up, Ruigomez lay in St. Francis Medical Center's burn unit, where he was transferred, in a medically induced coma to let him heal.

It's not clear that he would have made it without the Zapatas' help.

In the car, his face was gray. He moaned: "I'm in so much pain. It's incredible. I'm so hot!" He tried to close his eyes and succumb to the overwhelming pain. Tammy and Amanda Zapata wouldn't let him.

"I kept saying, 'Keep your eyes open. Find something to focus on. Don't give up! We're going for help,' " Tammy Zapata said.

They were aiming for Seton Medical Center. Too cool him down, Tammy Zapata turned the air conditioning on full blast and opened all the windows as she ran through red lights, honked her horn and skirted around the cars ahead of her.

Amanda held him. "If God got you this far," she said, "you're gonna make it."

The Zapatas prayed out loud, and Amanda asked Joe, "Do you want to say a prayer?"

"He said, 'Yes, please,' " Amanda said, astonished that in his agony, Ruigomez still said "please" and "thank you." He thanked them over and over for helping him as they prayed.

Meanwhile, Tammy and Amanda Zapata each called the emergency room at Seton Medical Center to tell them they had a severely burned patient coming in.

But when they got there and pulled into the ambulance area, uniformed officials ordered them to move. They refused.

Amanda said she had to open the door for Ruigomez.

"He had no fingers," she said softly.

Amanda said the neighbor she's known for four years is a "good kid. Funny and full of life. He loves music and rapping."

The Zapatas, meanwhile, were the right neighbors at the right time. Tammy works as a medical assistant at the Peninsula Pulmonary center. Mike, who works for Foster City in the Public Works Department, is a former paramedic. And Amanda's grown up with it all.

But beyond any medical expertise, the Zapatas believe something else was at work.

"I think God placed him at my house," Tammy Zapata said. "He knew he'd get help."