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She saved me. That’s all I can think. I came here to get her, and she just picked up a chair and saved me.

Her cousin’s on the floor again, by the wall, holding his face. The one I elbowed is bent over by the hallway, wheezing. The big one’s on his side by the counter, groaning, trying to get an elbow under himself.

I could keep going. I can feel it in me, still, how much I want to. I want to pick her cousin up off the floor and finish it. I want to make sure he never gets up again.

And I look at her.

The handprint. The neck. Her bitten finger curled into her chest.

And for the first time in my life, my brain does the right thing before my hands do.

Get her out.

“We’re leaving,” I say.

My voice sounds wrong. Thick. I spit blood on the carpet without thinking about it.

I take her arm. Carefully. Above the wrist, where it isn’t red. She doesn’t pull away.

She looks at the floor. At her things, everywhere. Books and clothes and the little gray mailers.

“My bag—”

“Leave it.”

I walk her out.

But the old woman is already moving. She comes out of the hallway, hands shaking, bending down to gather things off the carpet and shoving them into a black duffel.

My car’s in the street with the door open and the engine still running.

I get her to the passenger side. I open the door. She gets in.

The old woman comes running out with the duffel held out in both hands toward Tessa, and I step in front of her.

It’s an old woman in a bathrobe with a duffel bag. I know that, and I do it anyway, because I just watched a man sit on Tessa’s back in this woman’s living room while she stood in the hallway and screamed his name and didn’t pull him off.

The old woman stops. She looks up at me. And I watch her understand what I just did. I watch it dawn on her, right in the middle of her face.

She doesn’t say anything. She just holds out the bag, and I take it.

“Grandma,” Tessa says behind me. Her voice is wrecked. Scraped raw. “Grandma—”

And something moves behind her. Through the front window, past the curtains. Her cousin’s gone from the wall. He comes outside, goes to the gray sedan, with the trunk open. And the one I elbowed is next to him, and he’s pulling something out of the trunk, long and pale. It’s an aluminum baseball bat.

That’s it. It’s over. I’m not doing this.

I throw the duffel past her into the back, shut her door, and go around the front through the headlights. I’m in, and I hit the locks.

The bat hits the car right behind her head. The back passenger door. A sound like a gunshot, metal on metal, so loud it goes through my whole body, and she flinches so hard her head knocks the window.

I put it in reverse.

I don’t look. I just go. The tires catch and squeal, and we go back fast into the dark, and somebody throws himself out of the way into the neighbor’s yard. I yank the wheel. I throw it in drive. I put my foot down.

Something hits the back window, hard, and doesn’t break it.

In the mirror, they’re running after us down the middle of the street, two of them, one with the bat, under the flickering streetlight. For a few seconds, they’re right there.