Lost Girl by Adam Nevill Page B

immobilizer option, and fired from the top of the steps as the moving bulk below turned the bottom corner of the
stairwell, Bowles’s big hand bringing a sound of splintering wood from the newel post. Halfway down part of a wall erupted like wet chalk.
    The father bounded down the stairs, three at a time, the torch handle between his teeth, his eyes not moving from the white disc of light that guided his booted feet.
    He caught Bowles in the back with the next shot as the big man bustled through the kitchen. Bowles flinched but barely slowed. The father didn’t think the handgun was up to such a task,
and re-aimed for the black streak ahead of him, moist and sticking to the shirt, taut across the broad back, and he pulled the trigger twice more.
    The ogre at the far end of the kitchen lost his air after those two shots, as if winded by a blow to the gut, and grunted liquescent, before stumbling against the refrigerator. But
Bowles’s big legs were not to be stopped and they kept on going, though with less decisive steps upon the patio, where he needed to rediscover his centre of gravity as if he’d just
risen on old feet from a chair.
    Despite merely walking through the hall and kitchen, the father found himself gaining on his quarry. His gun slapped again, a crack echoing against mould-speckled walls, the tinny sink and
laminate-cupboard hollows, and a fresh small hole punched itself into the beast’s flanks. Slap of a rivet. That bullet really punctured the leviathan, kidney or liver shot through that bled
black and fast. The ogre had tried to move his bound, pudgy, tentative hands behind his body as if to touch the newest wound.
    The father fired again and caught the side of the man’s neck. A smoking hole dimpled the fatty ham, wet-slapping like a hand against a bug inserting a tube to drink. Bowles finally lost
his balance and fell heavily, without a word, sideways into something metallic that clanged and scraped across the patio.
    When the father came out of the back door, Bowles was already on one knee and about to push upwards like a weightlifter tugging a load onto his shoulders. The father aimed for the base of the
big head, fired twice, maybe three times, he couldn’t remember. But there were visible holes, big grunts, and Bowles lurched to hit the fence. His fists punched a plank out. Beneath his chest
the cement pooled dark-oily. He made no further attempts to rise and only shivered in the warm morning air, while his cheeks and lips moved as if he was talking in his sleep.
    The father returned to the kitchen so he would not have to look at what he had done outside. That morning was the first time in his life that he had fired a handgun: a device that no citizen
should even hold, but that was something he realized too cruelly in retrospect. He had not been able to stop once he’d started; that was how it had felt, like he was an excitable baboon
amusing itself with a deadly advantage happened across in a hunter’s tent.
    In trauma, his mind had become a red-black carousel, emitting rusty iron music, played backwards. The father had pulled up his mask. Nape and scalp pinpricking icy, his stomach had splashed all
of its matter onto the lino. Bowlegged with nausea and punch-drunk from shock, he’d then gone outside and swayed about the filthy yard, aiming his body for the rear fence. Surprised by the
neighbour when only halfway there, the father had tried to turn away when he realized his mask was gone, but had lost his balance and fallen.
    The father had risen from his stinging knees and moved more quickly, to force himself through the split fence panels. By then his breath was a wind all around his head, and his eyes were
flitting to the sky, the houses, the trees, the tarmac, his spattered boots, and would not be still. All of his clothes were wet through with sweat.
    He still had the gun in his hand when he reached the car. The hand loosely cradling the torch swung limp under the planet of