Emma hugs her retriever’s white face. “I love you.”
I love you too, Mom.
Then she scrambles upright, races to the bedroom’s sea-facing window, and opens it. A cold blast of salty air gusts inside. She punches out the bug screen.
Outside the barricaded bedroom door, she hears Howard’s footsteps still climbing, his huffing breaths. Then six inches of jagged steel pierce the door—a remnant of his shattered katana, now as compact as a prison shiv. Mutilated to a hideous new form.
It stabs again.
Again.
Again.
He’s breaking through. And Emma isn’t sticking around.
“Fuck this whole house. We’re leaving, Space Dog.”
The second-floor window opens only a few inches. Too narrow. So Emma lifts the nightstand—letting Jules’s lamp shatter on the floor—and carries it across the room, holds it legs outward, and rams them through the glass. Shards spray out into the night.
With a whoosh like a pressurized air lock, the full fury of the storm races inside. The wind screams. She lifts Laika’s sixty-pound body, hoists herself over the windowsill, and scoots outside onto the second-story roof. One leg at a time. Her shoes slip on wet shingle.
Laika squirms in her arms. Not a fan of this, Mom—
“It’s okay.”
The roof’s incline is frighteningly steep. Rain explodes off shingle in a blinding spray. It pounds her shoulders like rocks. Her face stings where Howard’s katana sliced her—she’s not yet sure how bad it is.
On her first step outside, she nearly loses her balance—twelve feet down to barren flowerbeds full of hard-packed sand. If she breaks an ankle, she’s as good as dead. But if she can circle the slippery rooftop and jump with Laika off the north side, Jules’s overgrown hedges might break her fall.
Maybe.
She scrambles along the roof’s edge, leaving the window behind, gripping Laika in a bear hug. The keys are still between her teeth. The animal is growing heavy in her arms, but she won’t dare set Laika down. Forked lightning crosses the sky in a writhing crackle. She can feel the electricity in her bones.
Being atop a roof again gives her a startling pang of sadness.
She remembers the odds the obstetrician gave them that day: a hundred to one. She remembers crying until her throat hurt. She remembers sitting on the roof’s edge in Salt Lake City with red eyes and a burning cigarette inches from her lips, certain she would never, ever be a mother, before Shawn crawled outside to join her and tell her he’d named a star after her. Because if the obstetrician said they couldn’t create life, he’d create something for her.
Emma’s Star is still out there somewhere.
Wherever it is, she can’t see it now.
The sky is a black downpour. Rain cascades off the inclined roof in a dizzying current. Emma can’t keep her paces straight. Her right foot twists off-balance and the gutter snaps away underfoot.
“Shit.”
Laika thrashes again but Emma holds her tight. The broken gutter tumbles down to the flowerbeds below. She knees herself upright and keeps scooting along the slick roof, sideways now. The wind rips at her clothes.
Back in the bedroom, a splintering crash. The door is down.
He’s inside.
Racing to the window after her.
Emma reaches the roof’s far edge. Twelve feet down, she sees the hedges. Not nearly as overgrown as she remembers. This is where she must jump. She lowers herself into a sitting position, her legs dangling over the overflowing gutter. A brittle creak. With Laika in her arms, she can’t look down. She’ll just have to take it on faith. All of it. Dizzying faith.
She kisses the top of Laika’s head. “Trust me.”
I absolutely do not.
She takes a breath. And jumps.
By the time Howard reached the broken window and aimed the Smith & Wesson out into the driving rain, Emma was already gone over the roof’s edge. He heard snapping sticks as she landed somewhere in the hedges below with her retriever in her arms. He’d lost sight of her, but he was unbothered. He still had four shots.
He didn’t know where she was, but he knew something better.
Where she would be.
He spun around, vaulted back through the cratered bedroom door, and raced down the stairs, taking bounding leaps down the steps. At the bottom he stepped over Jules’s hog-tied body, ignoring her wailing sobs. On into the kitchen, and through the small window above the sink he glimpsed Emma running toward the driveway. He aimed and fired—the window exploded—but she was already out of view. A canine yip of terror pierced the night.
Too slow. He’d missed.
Three shots left.
His ears rang and the kitchen stank with scorched gunpowder. The Smith & Wesson’s double-action trigger was difficult to control and didn’t have the pixel precision of Call of Duty. Howard was legally barred from possessing a firearm and woefully inexperienced. He couldn’t rely on his marksmanship. He needed to kill Emma up close.
This was fine.
He could do this.
Frightened by the gunshot, Laika bolts. Emma lunges to grasp at the retriever’s collar—too slow—and rips off her bandanna instead. Laika disappears.
“Laika!” she screams into the storm. “Come back.”
She stops at the driveway’s edge, still holding the frayed Don’t Stop Retrievin’ bandanna Shawn bought so many years ago. She wipes rainwater from her eyes as another gust of razor wind snaps the tall grass.
“Laika. Recall.”
She’s running out of time. Howard is coming. His gunshot’s echo fades into the distance as she shouts again: “Recall.”
Only wind, rain, and darkness. No sign of Laika at all. More than ever, she wishes her retriever had a voice, that it was ever anything more than her own lonely imagination.
Run, Mom, she would say.
I’ll be okay.
I’ll see you on the other side.
On his way to the front door, Howard heard Emma shout for her spooked dog. This was good. Anything to slow her down. He couldn’t let her reach his mother’s car in the driveway. If she reached the Lincoln, it was all over.
He sprinted through the foyer, thumbing the Smith & Wesson’s hammer. In single-action, the trigger pull would be easier to control.
Outside, he heard a metal clap.
A car door shutting.
But this was fine, too. He’d already reached the front door and elbowed through it hard enough to crack the frame. Now descending the porch steps into the blinding rain, he hurried down the stone path toward his mother’s Lincoln.
Emma jams the key into the ignition.
Ignoring Howard’s crunchy footsteps, she twists the key. Her fingers are slippery with rainwater. Her mind races—this is the part of the horror story where the car fails to start. Just like the truck in Murder Mountain. If this had been a shitty H. G. Kane novel, the engine would sputter and cough and die, and the enraged killer would storm to the driver’s window and jam his revolver to her temple and blow her brains out because the author is God—
The engine starts.
A satisfying, visceral roar.
This is real life.
Howard approached his mother’s 2019 Lincoln Town Car from the left, raised the revolver, and fired directly into the driver’s window where Emma’s head would be. Another blinding flash and tooth-rattling blast. Glass fell out of the window, revealing an empty driver’s seat.
Emma wasn’t there.
The car was empty.
Eighteen months ago, as Emma sat with Shawn on the roof of their Salt Lake City home with their legs hanging over the driveway, she brushed away drying tears and said something that surprised her husband.
“You know what? Forget the odds.”
She tossed her cigarette to the pavement below.
“We’ll keep trying.”
His guard was down.
Rain was in his eyes.
He didn’t see Emma coming up on his left, inside Jake Stanford’s FedEx Ford Transit snarling out from behind the garage with its headlights off. The van struck Howard at twenty miles per hour and bounced him over the hood. He pinballed hard, kicking off a sideview mirror as the van raked doors with Jules’s Lincoln in a grinding metal scrape, fiery sparks leaping into the night with dizzying streaks of color.
In another heartbeat, the vehicles separated and Howard hit the driveway with gravel in his teeth. He’d forgotten about the delivery van belonging to the man he’d murdered. Perhaps, somewhere, Jake Stanford got the last laugh after all.
And in the aftermath, Howard had dropped his gun. By the time he found it, Emma’s red taillights were already fading into the darkness, too far away to shoot and still going, the heroine of tonight’s story escaping into the night.