My husband cooked dinner, and right after my son and I ate, we collapsed Pretending to be unconscious, I heard him on the phone saying, "It's done... soon they will both be gone."

"What the hell is that?!"

Marcus’s voice shrieked across the yard.

Through the dense foliage of the rhododendrons, I saw him drop a red plastic jerrycan onto the gravel. It landed on its side, the yellow screw-cap popping loose, spilling a dark, glistening pool of kerosene across the driveway stones.

From the basement entrance beneath the deck, Daniel burst out, still holding the wire cutters in one hand.

"What did you do?!" Daniel roared, sprinting up the embankment.

"Sirens, Dan! Sirens on the main road! Someone called it in!"

"That's impossible!" Daniel shouted, his face illuminated by the distant red and blue strobe pulses reflecting off the cloud base above the tree canopy. "Neither of them had their phones! I took them out of their pockets myself!"

"They're coming up the hill, man! They're turning onto the lane!"

Daniel’s head snapped toward the kitchen French door. He saw the open latch. He saw the empty deck.

"No," Daniel whispered, his voice carrying through the cold night air with the chilling intensity of an animal realizing it has been outmaneuvered. "No!"

He bounded up the deck stairs, two at a time, and lunged into the kitchen.

Three seconds later, his roar of feral fury shattered the night.

"SARAH!"

Noah squeezed my hand so tightly that his small fingernails cut into my palm. We were crouched thirty yards away, deep inside the hedge line where the manicured lawn gave way to the dense, black timber of the state forestry reserve. The earth beneath our knees was wet with decomposed pine needles, soaking through my sweatpants, turning my skin numb.

"Mommy," Noah whispered, his breath hot against my cheek. "He's coming."

"Don't look back," I whispered, my voice an iron thread. "Follow the deer path toward the creek. Run, Noah. Run as fast as your legs can go."

We broke from the bushes into the black corridor of the pines just as the first police cruiser screamed around the final bend of Oak Ridge Lane.

Its spotlight ignited, sweeping across the front facade of our home in a violent, blinding arc of white. The cruiser’s tires locked up on the gravel, throwing stones against the siding with the sound of machine-gun fire.

Behind us, from the rear of the house, a sudden, concussive WHOOSH shook the air.

A blast wave of superheated wind surged through the trees, fluttering the hair against my neck. I spun around for a split second, shielding Noah with my body.

The entire rear facade of our home had erupted into an inferno.

Daniel hadn't fled empty-handed. Realizing the police were on the driveway, knowing the comatose bodies were gone, he had thrown a match directly into the spilled kerosene on the deck, letting the fire leap into the open kitchen. The drapes, the oak table, the drywall—everything had caught in an instantaneous wall of orange and black fury.

Through the roaring flames licking up the second-story gutters, I saw two silhouettes sprint toward Marcus’s truck.

"Drop your weapons! State Police! Step out of the vehicle!" an amplified voice bellowed from the front lawn over an electronic public address system.

BANG.

A gunshot.

Not from the police. From Marcus’s truck.

The pickup’s diesel engine roared with a high-pitched, screaming whine as Marcus dumped the clutch. The heavy four-wheel-drive vehicle lurched forward, smashing straight through the wooden fence flanking the driveway, tearing across the front lawn, and slamming into the quarter-panel of the lead police cruiser with a deafening screech of crumpled steel.

Shouts. Gunfire—four rapid, popping reports that echoed through the hills like firecrackers.

"Keep moving!" I pulled Noah deeper into the timber.

The woods were pitch black. Roots reached out like skeletal fingers, tripping my sneakers. Pine branches whipped across my face, stinging my eyes, scratching my cheeks, but I didn't slow down. The sedative was still fighting my bloodstream; every five strides, my vision would swim, the trees blurring into an undulating wave of black water, but the adrenaline surged back, burning the chemicals away with pure, unadulterated mother's terror.

Noah stumbled once, tumbling down a mossy embankment. I slid after him, catching him by the collar of his flannel shirt before he could roll into the rocky bed of Miller’s Creek.

The creek was swollen with autumn runoff, three feet deep and freezing cold, rushing over granite boulders with a hollow, rushing roar.

Across the creek, half a mile through the dense brush, was Route 9. And on Route 9 was the Whispering Pines Volunteer Fire Substation.

"Into the water, Noah," I breathed.

"It's cold, Mommy!" he cried out, his teeth chattering uncontrollably as the black water hit his calves.

"I know, baby. I know. Hold my sweater. Don't let go of the wool."

We waded into the current. The water reached my thighs, cold as liquid glass, soaking my sweatpants, chilling the frozen bag of pork pressed against my ribs until it felt like a block of dry ice burning my flesh. But the cold was our ally. It shocked my nervous system awake. It cleared the lingering fog of the chloral hydrate from my brain.

Halfway across the creek, the night sky behind us lit up in a brilliant, terrifying dome of orange.

The roof of our home had collapsed.

A shower of golden sparks drifted hundreds of feet into the black sky, carried by the rising thermal draft. The home where I had brought Noah back from the maternity ward, the home where we had measured his height in pencil marks against the kitchen pantry door, was gone.

Reduced to an ash pit designed to be our tomb.

"Look," Noah whispered, pointing toward the ridge across the creek.

Twin red taillights were weaving erratically through the trees along the old logging road that paralleled the creek bank.

It was Marcus’s truck.

He had cleared the police blockade by cutting across the lawn, but the front right tire was shredded, flapping against the wheel well with a rhythmic whack-whack-whack. Steam was pouring from the radiator, glowing faintly pink in the taillight reflection.