Think, girl.
Forward, I think. Picked up the checkerboard with the other hand and stepped to the door. My legs felt loose and detached. I stood there, listening to the TV, trying to discern where he was sitting.
I rattled the pieces in the closed checkerboard and called something brightly, forcing what was meant to sound like a chuckle but came out as a light cry from my dry throat.
I turned the key, wincing as the door disengaged with a clunk. My right arm pinned the gun to the wall by the door jamb and I opened it, trying to delay shakes.
The Troll was sitting behind the table to the right, a wrap in his hand, some cans in front of him. Also, a pistol. I couldn’t see the other automatic weapon.
“How do I look?” I said, trying to be bright, but it came out as a tremulous quaver, like I was crying.
The Troll had his mouth open for a bite of wrap and looked dead-faced at me, trying to process the information before him.
I took one step into the room. No one else there – I couldn’t have been sure – and let my right arm with the weapon swing through to join me, still smiling a rictus grimace to maintain perhaps a second’s continued confusion in the Troll’s slow mind.
What must have been the familiar slap of its leather sling on the metal drew his eyes down to the gun and he started to rise.
I took two or three steps towards him – it’s as vivid as if I was making a witness statement – holding the weapon in front of me like a child offering it to him and curling my finger into the trigger guard.
There was a thud that seemed to reorder the air in the room and a piece of the Troll’s upper left breast to the shoulder flew away and a lump of plaster fell from the wall by the door.
As I looked through the mist, the Troll had disappeared backwards over his chair, but was rising to his feet again. I pointed it over the table and pulled the trigger again.
Nothing. I pulled at the cocking lever and the second live round ejected from the side.
The Troll was up, wide-eyed, slack-jawed and taking a step towards the table with an atavistic groan, the chair tangled between his fat legs.
I threw the rifle at him and grabbed for the pistol, fumbling it round at him in hands slippery from blood and sweat.
I hadn’t time to wonder if it was loaded. I just didn’t want him getting to it first if it was. But his expression confirmed that it was. He stopped on his front foot, shook his jowls and opened his mouth to cry out, pieces of wrap spilling out.
Holding it with both hands across the table, I pulled and turned my head away, as if pulling a cracker. A much louder bark this time that bounced off the walls and back into my head, kicking my arms up and throwing me back on my heels. When my forearms fell down in front of me, clearing my vision, the Troll wasn’t there any more, just a stippled pattern of crimson across the door and half the window beside it.
I moved crab-like, making whinnying sounds, round the table and his bulk lay motionless on its back. I threw the gun aside – stupid – and moved to the head of this island of flesh.
The eyes stared sightlessly in the way I’d seen in feeding stations and one side of his checked summer shirt was turning deep and dark and wet.
The neck sash suspending the door key hung into the dry armpit. I grabbed it, clearing the sash from the back of his head with a jerk.
The two bolts on the door came back easily enough, but the key in the mortice only seemed to turn one way and to no effect, the door remaining resolutely barred, until I paused, took a grip, took a step back from delirium and realised I was double-locking, so moved it to the middle and tried the handle.
The door moved back towards me and all I wanted in the world was to be the other side of it. Whatever was on the other side, whatever greeted me, hell or eternity, I’d shot my bolt, it was finished – so whatever I met, more guards, a hail of bullets, rabid dogs in searchlights, whatever, it was OK, if only I could be out.
A rush of cool air and I was at the top of a flight of stairs that doubled back on itself into a front yard. Of course, the stairs; I saw them as if from a dream.
An indoor light turned on in a window to my right, perhaps in response to the sound of gunfire, perhaps the door was alarmed, perhaps not.
I started down the stairs and into the yard. No lights on the ground floor, but I expected, kind of knew, that I’d be grabbed at any moment by unseen hands.
There was a baby crying somewhere, I remember.
A front gate, metal vertical bars. A combination spring-lock and a high, neatly painted corrugated fence on either side, framed with brick.
Back down the side of the house. High waste bins, maybe two metres high. Up on to the rim of the first one and I could see over the side fencing.
Some kind of vehicle port. I dropped over the fence into the forecourt, past some parked cars, and stepped over a low wall and into a tidy street, newly built, with security gates shielding the maisonettes similar to the one I’d just emerged from, with parking areas next to them.
Streetlamps and two figures walking my way on the pavement. But not running.
I couldn’t be found here.
I crossed the road and walked briskly away from them. I heard music from one house, saw a family eating in another.
Maybe five gates down, the unbroken
