Shiver

the approximate vicinity of where she calculated the shooter might have been standing in the hall beyond it, gritted her teeth, and pulled the trigger.
    The enormous bang bounced off Sam’s eardrums. The bullet tore through the plaster, leaving a pale pockmark on the navy blue wall. The resultant shouts from the men outside told her that it had gotten through and that they had taken notice, which was what she wanted, even if she hadn’t hit one of them. Anything to hold them off.
    “They killed Mrs. Menifee.” Tyler was trembling.
    “They’re not going to kill us,” she promised, thrusting the gun back down into her waistband, and hoped with every fiber of her being that it wasn’t a lie.
    Turning, whipping the curtains open, she found herself looking out at a scraggly honeysuckle bush, the blank side wall of a neighboring garage, and the narrow strip of grass between residences, all shrouded in the deep charcoal of night.
    “Cover your ears,” she warned as she went to work on the window lock. Tyler did, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, “Help! We need help! Call 911!” toward the glass, hoping that it would penetrate far enough for a neighbor to hear, knowing even as she did it that it was probably a waste of breath, because even if someone did hear the people around there had been programmed by many long years of casual neighborhood violence not to get involved and above all, not to involve the cops. Gunshots, screams, shouts for help—they weren’t so unusual that anybody would stick his neck out unless she got very, very lucky.
    “Trey’s coming,” Tyler told her, his eyes big dark pools in his small face. She could feel shivers racking the warm little body pressed against her. “I called him. He’s on the way.”
    That made no sense, but Sam didn’t have time to worry about it. “Okay.”
    “Can you get it open?”
    “Yeah.” As she wrestled the recalcitrant lock the final few millimeters needed to free the bottom half of the window, she tried to sound calm. Which was a joke: her kid wasn’t an idiot, he knew she was scared witless, knew that they could die, but still the mom in her tried to protect him from the full magnitude of her fear.
    “I tried. I couldn’t open it.”
    “I’m bigger.”
    With half her senses focused behind her, on what was going on outside the bedroom door—she could hear nothing, which made her so nervous she wanted to puke—she grabbed the handles at the bottom of the sash with both hands and yanked.
    The window didn’t budge.
    “Hurry, Mom,” Tyler said breathlessly.
    “Get her out of there,” she heard one of the men order as shestrained without success to pull the window up. From the direction of his voice, he was in the hall, near the kitchen. But closer than before?
    If there was a reply, she didn’t hear it.
    Sam thought about snapping off another shot in their direction, but she really didn’t want to ignite a firefight that the other side was sure to win and that would endanger Tyler. Anyway, gunfighting was not her thing; before tonight she had only ever fired a gun at a practice range or in the air as a warning. Besides, she only had—a quick check confirmed it—two bullets left.
    Her stomach twisted into a pretzel.
    That was not enough. Not near enough to save them.
    “Pull harder,” Tyler urged, and Sam did, planting her feet, putting every bit of strength she had into dragging open that window. It didn’t work.
    “I’m pulling as hard as I can.” Her voice was thin and breathless. Probably she shouldn’t have admitted it, not to Tyler, but the admission just came out.
    “We don’t want to hurt the kid,” another man yelled, the words clearly intended for her ears. He sounded closer, nearer the door. “Come out now, and we’ll let him go. You make us come in and get you, and things could go real wrong in that regard.”
    “Mom.” Tyler tightened his grip on her.
    Sam’s heart pounded so hard that it felt like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Whatever it took, she was not letting them get their hands onTyler. Swallowing the panic that rose like bilge in the back of her throat, she shook her head reassuringly at him.
    “You come anywhere near us and I’ll blow you to hell,” she yelled back. They couldn’t know she only had two bullets left. I don’t care how bad they are, they have to be wary of a gun. She figured that the knowledge that she had it was the