Chapter 11 - The Wall of Flame
The fire caught the dry floorboards instantly, fed by sixty years of floor wax and the dry pine underlying the house. Thick, black smoke rolled toward the ceiling, filling the kitchen with an acrid, blinding cloud that set everyone coughing. Vance fired twice through the flames, the bullets splintering the kitchen cabinets behind Sarah’s head, showering her with white ceramic shards and dry flour.
"Out! The back way!" Thomas coughed, his arm catching Sarah by the jacket, dragging her and the screaming infant toward the shattered frame of the rear screen door. Ruth was already scrambled outside, coughing violently in the pouring rain, her small hands scraping against the porch steps as she pulled herself upright.
Behind them, Cole was screaming, struggling to pull himself out from the heap of broken preserves while flames licked up the pantry doorframe. Vance’s silhouette emerged through the black smoke, his gun leveled, but the heat from the burning oil was too intense, forcing him back into the living room to find another way out.
Sarah, Thomas, and Ruth plunged off the back porch into the torrential downpour. The rain hit Sarah’s face like ice, washing the warm blood from her forehead, but the cold did nothing to stop the pounding in her skull. The baby was crying at the top of his lungs now, the sound cutting through the crash of thunder that rolled over the mountains.
"Where is she, Thomas?" Sarah demanded as they stumbled through the mud toward the machine shed behind the house. "You said Clara was alive! Where is she?"
Thomas pointed through the darkness toward the bottom of the property, where the old logging road crossed the swollen waters of Blackwood Creek. "The old hunter's cabin by the culvert. I left her there with enough dry bandages to last till morning. But the water's rising, Sarah. If the culvert blows, the cabin goes with it."
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Behind them, the front windows of the farmhouse blew out in a violent shower of sparks and orange fire, lighting up the muddy fields as bright as midday.
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