of them would be well and truly on their own.
He held it tightly in one hand now, and whether or not it was going to be an effective weapon, she could see it was giving him a little confidence - that tooled-up feeling. It was going to be his comfort blanket tonight.
50 Cent, the gang’s unassailable leader, the one whom she’d seen stab that younger lad the night before, had stopped talking, and now in silence, looked towards Leona, then at the house opposite. He was the one making the decision.
Please no . . . no.
He nodded towards the other house and Leona let out a gasp of relief. The Bad Boys turned their backs on Jill’s and headed en masse towards the front door of the house opposite. Leona saw a curtain twitch inside, and in that moment, the name of the family who lived there - the McAllisters, came to her. They had only recently moved in, six months ago. She remembered Mum briefly mentioning them, ‘a nice young couple, with a toddler and a baby’.
She could imagine Mr McAllister inside, just behind the front door and ready with whatever household weapon he’d managed to crudely fashion, trembling so violently his heels would be tapping the floor, but driven by something deep down to fight to the very last for his young family, as Eduardo DiMarcio had done for his wife.
The gang began to smash against the front door, taking turns to kick at it around the handle.
She shot a glance towards their front door, buried behind a barricade of heavy furniture they had hauled across during the afternoon. The barricade would slow the gang down a little. It wasn’t going to stop them though, not if they were determined to get in here tonight.
The McAllister’s front door cracked with the next kick. The next blow caused it to splinter around the handle. A final blow sent it swinging inwards. Last night the Bad Boys had cheered when each front door had caved in, in the same way patrons of a crowded pub might raucously cheer at the sound of a pint-pot being accidentally dropped. Not so tonight. They were less rowdy. More single-minded, more determined.
She saw them stream into the dark interior.
‘Cover your ears Jake,’ she said. He did so obediently.
And then came the chilling, muted noises she had expected to hear - Mr McAllister’s last stand.
It took them an hour to finish what they were doing inside the house. All two dozen of them had pushed their way in. This time there had been no spill out on to the street, no furniture being dragged out and smashed up. No sense of a house-party out of control. It had been much quieter . . . after the screaming coming from inside had stopped, that is.
The light was completely gone from the sky now. When she saw the flickering beams of several flashlights emerge from the front door, she knew it was now their turn.
‘Jacob, go upstairs to our hiding place,’ she whispered.
‘I don’t want to go alone.’
‘Go! Now!’
She could hear his shuddering breath in the dark, or was it hers?
‘Go!’ she hissed.
Leona felt one of his arms reach out and fumble for her, wrapping itself around her waist. ‘Please don’t die.’
‘Shit! I’m not going to . . . die, okay? Please . . . go.’
The arms unwrapped, and she heard his footfall towards the stairs.
Outside, the narrow street was filling up again, as the gang members emerged single file from the house opposite. 50 Cent and several others seemed to be nursing minor wounds. She could hear one or two of them crying out intermittently from the pain of their injuries.
A vague hope crossed her mind that the young father opposite, Mr McAllister, had knocked some of the fight out of them before going down. But after only a few moments, and a few words of discussion, she saw the gate to Jill’s garden being pushed open and a party of half a dozen of them walking up the path towards the front door.
Her grasp tightened on the bat.
The first blow came quickly and sounded deafening, a heavy thud that made the barricade of furniture stacked against the inside of the front door rattle worryingly. She heard a sharp crack after the second blow.
If only Dan was here.
Several more hard and focused blows landed against the door, and all of a sudden she could see a shaft of torchlight piercing through the tangle of stacked furniture.