second time. The impact knocked the wind from Steve’s lungs but also broke them apart. Spinning, Steve swung the rifle with all his might. It cracked against the man’s shoulder. He cried out in pain and sank to his knees, holding onto the table to remain upright.
Steve raised the rifle over his head. He was going to bring it down on the fucker’s head, he was going to crush him like an insect, he didn’t care if he killed him, he was half insane right then and in a fight to the death, and he was going to—
Steve sensed someone behind him. He spun to find the hard man a foot away, machete at the ready. The man didn’t say anything. He didn’t smile. He showed no emotion at all.
Steve opened his mouth, to plead for his life, but the blade ended it first.
Jenny heard the reports of two successive gunshots. At first she thought it was Steve firing through the window, but then she made out the commotion of a scuffle. They’re inside! Her first impulse was to rush downstairs and offer Steve whatever assistance she could. Yet reason nixed that idea. The men were both armed. She was five-foot-five, one hundred twenty pounds. She couldn’t help. She could only die, and she didn’t want to die. More than anything she’d ever wanted in her life, she didn’t want to die.
Glancing frantically around the bedroom, Jenny searched for a place to hide. There was nowhere—nowhere but under the bed. She contemplated returning to the hall, fleeing down the staircase, out the front door. But it was closed and locked. She wouldn’t be able to escape before the men captured her. She had to hide.
She dropped to her chest and wormed beneath the bed. She lay perfectly still. She was so afraid she felt simultaneously flushed and chilled, headachy and nauseous, almost as if she were in the initial stages of the flu.
Something loud crashed downstairs. Steve cried out, what sounded like a roar.
Of triumph? she wondered. Was Steve winning the fight? Should she return and help him after all?
She listened, but heard nothing except the blood pounding in her head. No—she heard footsteps. Coming up the staircase, quickly. Only one set of footsteps.
Please be Steve, please let it be Steve, please God please.
The footsteps stopped outside the bedroom. They moved away, into the room across the hall. Jenny’s hope was already curdling into doom. If it were Steve, he would have called her name by now. So it wasn’t Steve. Steve was dead. Just like Noah was dead and she was going to be dead next. As soon as the man finished searching the room across the hall he was going to come into this room and he was going to—
The footsteps returned to the hall.
“Darling?”
The word iced her blood. It wasn’t spoken with singsong cockiness but softly and monotonously, almost as if it were a scolding.
The man entered the bedroom where she hid. Jenny’s left cheek was pressed flush to the floorboards. She could see his black boots. He took three steps into the middle of the room and stopped.
Jenny became acutely conscious of her breathing. It sounded far too loud. It was going to give her away. She bit her lip and tried not to go insane as she waited for the man’s face to appear upside-down, peering under the bed at her. He would grab her by the hair and drag her out and kill her.
Abruptly Jenny found herself praying for a quick death. She didn’t want to experience it. She didn’t want to lie there, bleeding out, in excruciating agony, waiting. She didn’t want to see her life flash before her eyes. She didn’t want to think about never seeing her mother or father again, her two older brothers, her friends. She didn’t want to think about everything that could have been. She wanted a painless bullet in the head—
The black boots shuffled in a circle, then left the bedroom.
Jenny knew she couldn’t remain beneath the bed. It had been stupid to hide there in the first place. She had trapped herself. She needed to get out of the house, make for the trees.
She wiggled out from the small space and went to the window. The upper sash appeared fixed in place. The lower one, however, slid vertically in grooves in the side jambs. She tried to shove the sash upward. It didn’t budge. Had sloppy paint sealed it shut? Had the wood swelled or