The stairwell was an inferno, and the bottom half of the staircase was virtually gone. Melanie’s heart sank. She screamed for her family, listened for a response. There was none.

Then, as if an angel had whispered it, Melanie had an idea. She got to her feet and made her way to the powder room. She turned on the faucets, soaked the guest towels. She staggered back to the area where the steps used to be. Tapping into her last ounce of strength, she screamed, “Greg!” and flung the towels as hard as she could, upward into the rising flames, in the direction of the kids’ room.

Had he heard her? Had he answered? She couldn’t tell.

 

 

Emergency personnel arrived just four minutes after the 911 call was logged. Neighbors, hearing sirens, gathered in the street and watched in horror.

Later, when reconstructing the events at the scene, firefighters determined Greg had made it to the children’s room, opened the window, and hung a sheet from it to alert rescuers to the location. He’d had the presence of mind to gather both girls in his arms on the floor beneath him before dying.

Firefighters entering the bedroom through the window were impressed to find wet towels covering the girls’ faces. This is what saved their lives that night, they decided, though one of the twins died later on, in the hospital.

 

 

“Son of a bitch,” Augustus Quinn said. “You are one tough son of a bitch, I’ll give you that!” Shakespeare it was not, but Creed should have been dead by now and wasn’t. “Let’s call it a night,” Quinn said.

They were on opposite sides of prison cell bars, sixty feet below the earth’s surface. It took a while, but Donovan Creed staggered to his feet, a vantage point from which he now grinned at the hideous giant manning the torture device. “What was that?” Creed said. “Eight seconds?”

The ugly giant nodded.

“Give me ten this time.”

“You’ll die,” Quinn said. Though the two men had worked together for years, Quinn’s words had been uttered simply and gave no evidence of warmth or concern.

Creed supposed that for Quinn it was all business. Creed had paid his friend to administer the torture, and Quinn was expressing his opinion about continuing. Did he even care if Creed died tonight? Creed thought about that for a minute.

The ADS weapon had been created as a counter measure to the terrorists’ practice of using civilians as human shields during the Iraq War. Effective up to a quarter mile, ADS fires an invisible beam that penetrates the skin and instantly boils all body fluids. The idea was simple: you point the weapon at a crowd, flip the switch, and everyone falls to the ground in excruciating pain.