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Macy practically shoved Olivia through the door. The girl was crying—Olivia’s impressive stoicism had devolved into exactly what Macy would have expected from a seven-year-old. Maybe she’d finally started to realize her mom might not be coming back, but Macy didn’t have the time to address that potential fear. A madman with a shotgun, who might be just minutes away, took priority.
Slamming the door, she turned every lock, including a chain that she knew wouldn’t stop him. She didn’t think he’d be able to get through a window without her being able to beat him silly first, so the two doors presented the biggest threats.
“Sit on the couch,” Macy demanded. Olivia’s sobs intensified, no doubt driven by Macy’s harsh tone, but the girl listened and threw herself onto the couch like a rag doll.
Macy scanned the room for anything large enough to block the door, but small enough to move with her petite frame. A spindly table took up the bulk of the space between the couch and the dining room. A thin layer of particle board and Formica sat atop four thin, metal legs. It’d be easy to move, but she didn’t trust it to slow down a maniac. Against the wall nearby, though, stood a curio cabinet with a bank of drawers on the bottom and a glass encasement above, full of fancy-looking dishes.
Very breakable dishes.
Putting her full weight behind it, Macy shoved the cabinet towards the front door and stopped a few feet short. He might get through the door. He might even get over the cabinet, but she wanted to make it as painful as possible if he did. She pushed hard on the top, felt the weight start to shift, then smiled when it crashed onto the floor. Shards of glass shattered outward, both from the doors and the dishes. The noise caused Olivia to peek up over the back of the couch.
“Those are grandma’s very special dishes,” Olivia said.
Macy ignored the admonition. “Be careful where you walk.”
Olivia nodded.
With the front door fortified, Macy turned her sights to the back door. It sat just left of the kitchen, and was mostly glass. Damn. No furniture in the nearby area. The refrigerator stood closest to the door, with just a few feet between the two. A relatively small thing that she judged to be shorter than Tanner. Maybe six feet. Taller than she, but not the most massive fridge she’d ever seen.
The counter and lower cabinets blocked access to the side she’d need to push on, but it didn’t sit in any kind of fancy cabinet, so she didn’t have to pull it out. Just over. She climbed up on the counter and tried to shimmy it away. It didn’t move nearly as far as she hoped. She tried again, this time with a grunt. That always seemed to help on television. It wobbled a bit this time, caught on one of the uneven wooden floorboards. She wouldn’t be able to slide it, but maybe...
Crouching on her knees, and folding herself up against the upper cabinets, she pushed hard on the top of the fridge. She managed to lean it over just enough for her to get hands into the space between it and cabinets. Her biceps strained, and the fridge leaned further. She could wedge her body into the space now, which she took advantage of for added leverage.
Then, all at once, gravity took over and the fridge crashed down. She lost her balance and fell with it, but the top of the refrigerator hit hard against the opposite wall and stopped at a weird angle, dumping jars of condiments and bottles of wine all over the floor. Some of them broke. Most didn’t. Macy rolled off and studied her work. With the backdoor opening inward, she felt confident no one would get through this way.
Chest heaving, she considered the next step. Part of her wanted to hide. To find the room with the least access to the outside and hole up in there. If she did that, though, she wouldn’t know if he’d come or how close he was. She wouldn’t know when help arrived.
Her heart jumped at the thunder of a shotgun and the explosion of glass.
Olivia screamed.
Macy rushed to the couch, jerked Olivia to her feet and dragged her towards the powder room at the bottom of the stairs. She shoved Olivia inside.
“Lock the door!” she screamed. “And don’t come out until I tell you!”
Macy shut the door and waited a split-second to hear the lock turn before flattening her back against the wall. She reined in her heavy breathing to listen. She’d lost the gun and the knife, leaving her without even a semblance of a weapon. She could only hope her barricades would hold. Imagining a shootout in an old movie, Macy searched for cover. Something she could hide behind to avoid the buckshot, but not so far away that she wouldn’t be aware of his movements.
She settled for the dining room table. Dragging it to the bathroom door and pushing it over on its side, she hid behind it, between him and Olivia.
Sweat beaded down her forehead. Odd for the cold night. She swiped a hand over it and stared wide-eyed at dark, slick blood. Not sweat, then. The wound on her head must have reopened. The space between her eyes pounded. The room spun again for a second before coming back into focus just in time to hear more glass break. This time, there was no shot. How many bullets did a shotgun even have? Did he have more shells?
“You in there?” the old man’s voice said from outside.
Macy remained silent. She felt dumb just sitting there, but what could she do? She didn’t have a script for this, or the training to improvise a solution. Maybe in a fantasy movie world, she’d turn into action Barbie, but here in the real world she had to protect a little girl from the monsters.
Actual, real, stronger-than-she monsters.
Over the sound of her own breathing, Macy barely heard the scrape of the key in the lock, evidence that he’d be able to at least get through the handle and the first deadbolt. That left the chain, the curio cabinet, and the glass. So much glass.
The narrow window he’d blown out seemed too thin for him to cram through, so his focus had turned on the front door. A loud bang echoed through the cabin. Not a gun this time. Just the sheer weight of a large man ramming the front door. Maybe he didn’t have any ammo left.
He rammed the door a few more times, each crash causing Macy to flinch and stifle a yelp. She’d almost gotten into the rhythm of it when everything fell silent. The brief repose gave her time to take stock of her pain. Her head pounded. Her stomach churned. Her heart beat so hard she could feel it against her ribs.
Just when she started to think maybe he’d gone, she heard a faint click, followed by another boom of the shotgun. Sounds bounced off the walls. Wood splintering. Glass shattering. The panic pulsated in her ears, but she worked up the strength and the courage to peer over the table. The door had splintered into a million pieces. It wouldn’t stop him now. Just a piece of furniture that looked weaker and more ineffective than it had just minutes ago.
Wood scraped on wood as the curio cabinet started to give way. Macy needed a weapon and she needed it yesterday. She scrambled up to her feet, only for the room to spin and send her back down. She could give up. What hope did she have? Kat was already gone, her dad hadn’t saved her, and she didn’t have any options left. She’d made a good showing. Done her very best. Unlike her friends, Macy wasn’t built for fighting. Apparently, she wasn’t even built for running.
The door opened wider. Macy looked up at the bathroom door through tear-filled eyes. If it were only her, maybe she could give up. People would miss her, sure, but no one truly needed her. She provided comic relief. A nice view. Little else.
What a fine time to have an existential epiphany.
But there was a little girl on the other side of that door who didn’t care about Macy’s false bravado. Who’d just lost her mother and faced an uncertain and terrible future... if death didn’t come for her first.
Macy rose to her feet again. The old man crept through the partially opened door. Rage, not a usual emotion for her, now coursed through her veins.
She’d watched a lot of horror movies, and every time a girl ran up the stairs to evade a predator, Macy rolled her eyes, but she had an unorthodox weapon upstairs, and she didn’t know for certain where she might find another. He might shoot her before she made it up, but she took the chance, bounding up the stairs two at a time. The pain and the dizziness almost ended her ascent, but she persevered and made it to the top without any buckshot in her. That seemed a miracle.
Without stopping to see her predator, she bolted into her room and upended her bag. Piles of unfolded shirts and pants obscured various hair and make-up products. She’d never been a very organized packer. Throwing socks and panties aside, she finally found what she was looking for in a purple metal can. Though it wasn’t mace, she’d accidentally gotten enough in her eyes over the years to know that it wouldn’t deliver a pleasant experience.
The stairs creaked behind her. She waited just at the threshold of her room. She didn’t know how many steps lay between them, but she listened carefully to each groan of the wood, waiting for the sound to get close enough to make her move. When his boots clomped up onto the landing, she jumped out, aimed at his face, and shot a fine mist of hairspray straight into his eyes.
He stumbled backwards, giving Macy room to maneuver. She slipped past him and started back down the stairs, but he reached out and clamped a hand on her shoulder before she could get away. She bucked and pulled but he held strong, so she did the obvious thing. She spun and bit him. Hard on the wrist. His grip slackened. He stumbled backwards again, as did she.
Her heel fell off the step. She tried to right herself. It didn’t work. For a few steps she managed to stay on her feet, but she soon lost her balance and tumbled down the stairs. A scream erupted, as she realized that she might not make it to the bottom alive. Each corner dug into her skin, banged up her bones. Pain like she’d never experienced surged through her joints as her knees bent awkwardly, and her elbows twisted weirdly.
Then she hit the bottom.
Not dead. Sitting up, she tried to assess whether she’d broken anything, decided she hadn’t, and shot back to her feet. At the top of the stairs, the old man cussed and rubbed his eyes. For the first time, she noticed he didn’t have the shotgun anymore. She didn’t know if he’d dropped it after the assault or left it at the front door. Without a way to instantly end her life, she felt emboldened and hopeful. With one eye open, he looked down at her.
“I’m going to kill you, you little bitch!”
Sticks and stones. She scrambled to her feet and rushed into Kat’s room to bring on round two.
She could hear him descending, and hopefully he’d seen where she’d gone. She just needed another trap. Another weapon. Another way to delay what seemed less and less inevitable by the second.
Lamps, purses, clothes, and a suitcase. None of them seemed violent enough to put him down. Her eyes moved to the jacuzzi in the corner, her soiled coat inside. Then to the bathroom door, to the shower, and the vanity. And the toilet. Some vague memory pushed its way to the forefront. Advice for staving off an intruder. Moving into the bathroom, she hefted the porcelain lid off the back of the tank. It felt almost insurmountably heavy at first, her aching arms wanting nothing more than to drop it to the floor, but she soon got enough control of her muscles to believe she could wield it.
Searching for a weapon had distracted from tracking the old man. She didn’t hear him on the steps anymore, so he must’ve been nearby. In the bedroom already?
He cleared his throat. “Come out. I’ve got you cornered.”
“No!” she yelled back.
“Does the little girl know?”
Macy herself didn’t even know. “Of course not.”
“I won’t hurt her.”
She didn’t believe him. Macy stepped backwards into the tub and closed the shower curtain. The hooks scraped on the metal rod, surely giving away her location. In this case, though, that played to her advantage.
She didn’t really hear him enter the bathroom, she didn’t think, but she knew he was there all the same, as if his body in the doorway muffled the sound from the rest of the house. She held her breath out of sheer instinct, tensing every muscle in her body and waiting to pounce.
When the shower curtain started to move, she held back, wanting first to see her target. Time slowed. It seemed like he’d never reveal himself. But then she saw his head. Closer to hers than before because of the height of the tub floor.
She moved faster than he could register, the porcelain lid flying through the air, slamming the side of his head and cracking his jaw. It split with the force. His eyes widened, but only briefly, before he crumpled to the floor.
Macy dropped the other half of the broken lid. Panic rose in her. Did she kill him? She bent over and studied his face, then his chest. She thought she saw it moving up and down. As she considered checking for a pulse, though, her vision narrowed, settling on total blackness. Her mind wobbled. Her consciousness wavered.
Unable to hold on any longer, Macy collapsed.
