A thump. A bang. A crunch.

And the crystaline sound of glass hitting the floor. In a second he knew it’d found him and he was no longer safe inside.

He was no longer safe anywhere. It was over and, as they say, the gig was up. It was time to turn in the white towel.

He was bleeding from a gash on his arm. He was crying, sweating. But he wasn’t a surrenerer.

His mind flicked backward, in freeze-frame photographs, and he pictured the car, sitting there, unmoving in the middle of the road. It had been as though the car were gripped in an invisible vice, and, as sick recognition dawned upon them all, the screaming had started.

He remembered getting out of the car, running the two and a half blocks back to the house, all the way with a scream in his throat and that sound of that breathing (that terrible breathing) in his ear.

The phone was broken. (All gone…) And the window had shattered. And he knew (he knew) that he had seconds before it would come crashing into the kitchen.