He stomped the gas, the Discovery accelerating through pure darkness.

“Jack, how can you see?”

“I can’t.”

He made a blind turn onto the next street, drove for several blocks in the dark.

Dee said, “Look.”

A house burned on the corner up ahead, flames shooting out of the dormers, the branches of an overhanging cottonwood fringed with embers while molten leaves rained down into the lawn.

“What is it?” Naomi asked.

“A house on fire.”

“Whose?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want to see.”

“No, Cole. Stay down with your sister.”

They sped up the street.

“I’m going to run us into something.” Jack flipped on the headlights. The console lit up. “You’re kidding me,” he said.

“What?”

“Way under a quarter of a tank.”

“I told you it was getting low last week.”

“You aren’t capable of pumping gas into a car?”

Three houses down, the headlights swept over two trucks that had pulled onto the lawn of an expansive adobe house.

Jack slowed.

“That’s the Rosenthals’ place.”

Through the drawn shades of the living room windows: four loud, bright flashes.

“What was that, Dad?”

“Nothing, Na.”

He gunned the engine and glanced over at Dee, a deathgrip on the steering wheel to keep his hands steady. Nodded at the gun in his wife’s lap.

“Wasn’t even loaded, was it?”

“I don’t know how.”

The university campus loomed empty and dark as Dee ripped open a box of ammunition. They passed a row of dorms. The quad. The student union. A squat brick building whose third floor housed Jack’s office. It occurred to him that today would have been the deadline for his bioethics class to hand in their papers on euthanasia.

“There’s a button on the left side behind the trigger,” he said. “I think it releases the magazine.”