Free As Night Falls by Jenny Milchman Page B

although they almost never used it. Maybe she’d even light a few candles, put on one of the CDs Ben had reminded her they used to enjoy.
    Sandy smiled at her husband. “Let me fix a dish for Ivy before you put that away.” She began to fill a bowl from the serving platter in the middle of the table.
    She was reaching for a chunk of garlic bread when the front door slammed against the entryway wall and a blast of cold air shot in.
    Ben frowned. “Did Ivy go out?”
    “She’d better not have…” Sandy began.
    The fact that it wasn’t Ivy registered in some low column of her brain. An oozing, primordial cluster of cells that lay beneath thought, beneath sensory input even. Long before Sandy heard the two sets of footsteps thudding toward their kitchen—and parsed that they were too heavy for Ivy or even some male friend of hers—she knew they were in danger.
    Sandy lifted her head. It felt as if she did it slowly, in discrete steps. First her eyes came off the bread plate with its gloss of butter upon the china. Her gaze sought out Ben, finding him by the fridge. And only then did she take in the two bodies that suddenly occupied her home.
    In truth, mere seconds must have passed, for both men were moving fast, one knocking over a chair with the bulk of his hip before the other appeared from behind.
    Everything inside Sandy came to a stop. Her blood turned to sludge in her body; her eyes were unable to blink. The muted light of the kitchen showered sparks across her line of vision. When she could finally see again, the second man was staring in her direction. His gaze pierced her like a spear. Then something came down in her mind—a garage door rumbling shut—and Sandy was able to turn away.
    A forest now filled her kitchen—brown stumps and green stalks—the color of the intruders’ clothes. Plus a strange, shocking slash, appropriate to autumn woods. Fierce scarlet painted across one of the coats, still tacky and glistening.
    Blood, recently spilled.
    Dimly, Sandy registered the fact that Ben hadn’t wasted a moment on any of the things people usually did when faced with a reality they couldn’t process. There was no protest or denial. Not a single
who the hell are you
or
what are you doing in my house
came from her husband’s lips. Instead he seized the closest weapon at hand, a bread knife lying on the counter, and leapt forward.
    The man he was trying to jump was enormous, but Ben had intuited the physics of the situation. He thrust the serrated edge of the blade out at a sharp angle, arm raised high above his head.
    The big man leaned down and wrapped his fist around the knife’s handle, stopping it in midair. In the next instant, the knife was in the big man’s hand and Ben was looking down at his crumpled fist. He didn’t seem able to open it, to uncurl any of his fingers. Ben bit back the howl that must’ve been building, but his eyes had gone muddy with pain. Sandy could see her husband suffering, and it made her want to weep.
    She started forward and the second man turned.
    His eyes were like bits of ash, cold and dead and gray. They were the eyes of a nightmare from which you never woke up.
    Sandy’s step faltered and her vision wavered, along with her hold on place and time. This couldn’t be the year 2015, and she couldn’t be a grown wife and mother, in the kitchen of her recently completed home, a house built with so much love and devotion by Ben for his family. A place to grow old in, to finish raising their child.
    Ivy.
    Sandy felt a fizzing in her hands, her wrists, an itchy sensation she almost remembered for a second, then just as suddenly was gone. She whirled around, Ben coming into sight. He ignored his injured hand to face off with both men.
    Sandy had the mad idea to pretend she simply didn’t see them. Maybe she and Ben could make it to the second floor, still have their night together. Unlike Ben, who had adapted so instantly to their new circumstances and acted so fast,