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anymore. Not yet.
    He pulled on the screen door first, spied a simple disengaged hook and eye closure and reached for the knob of the inner door, which was likewise unsecured.
     He slipped inside. The knife in his right cargo pocket thunked against the doorframe, but the sound was faint, nearly inaudible even to Dave himself. His footsteps weren’t much louder. A two-person dinette set occupied a shadowy alcove on his left, the table covered in papers and bills, the front leg of one of the chairs splintered so badly it couldn’t possibly have supported an adult. From his place just inside the back door, he saw a sofa and one arm of a recliner in the adjoining living room, but he didn’t give any of those things much more than a casual glance. The dark-haired woman stood at the kitchen sink, not ten feet away, and he’d made it halfway to her before the muscles in her back so much as tensed.
    She’d been washing her hands. The splashing faucet sprayed the dish-cluttered sink and most of the countertop around it. A worn washer ring. Dave could have fixed it in a couple of minutes.
    The boy must have been somewhere deeper in the house, his bedroom or maybe a bathroom. Dave stopped in the center of the kitchen and watched the woman shut off the water and dry her hands on an incongruously fancy dishtowel. He hadn’t closed the door behind him—the wind blew it all the way open now, and it knocked against the wall with a single sharp tap .
    Whether the woman was responding solely to that sound or had also somehow sensed his presence, Dave wasn’t sure, but he watched her spin toward him with ravenous anticipation. He’d never come so close to her, never seen her face from less than a hundred feet away. He’d sometimes wondered if she would be clear skinned and beautiful, or heavily wrinkled and haggish. Blue eyes or green? Brown? He almost licked his lips.
    Her nose was a finely shaped wedge, pert with a pair of inconspicuous nostrils, like something out of a fairy tale, elfish. There had been fairy tales when he was very young. They were one of the things he remembered. One of the things he’d been allowed to remember.
    If she had kept her mouth shut, Dave would have gone to her for a closer look at the perfect little nose, might even have given it a friendly kiss.
    Instead, she screamed.
    Her mouth might have been the entrance to a strange miniature cave, her teeth pale, blunt stalactites and stalagmites, her scream the shrill squeal of a million flitting bats. Startled, Dave almost took a step back, but a more basic instinct took quick control, and he stepped forward instead and punched her in the eye.
    He’d meant only to shock her into silence, maybe knock her off balance a little so he could sweep in and steady her, soothe her, but his fist seemed to have the effect of something fired from a cannon, and she crumpled to the floor. Her head bounced twice on the cracked linoleum and then lolled. Dave heard footsteps and heavy breathing behind him and turned far enough around to see the boy, standing frozen in the doorway leading into the living room.
    “Hello, Georgie.” Dave smiled at the boy and knelt on the floor beside the temporarily silent woman. “Don’t you worry about me and Mommy—we’re just having a little talk.”
    The boy opened his mouth in an almost exact imitation of his mother, but the sound that came from his little cave was very different: a single short squeak like the hinge on a rusty gate. On the floor, the woman had come to and gotten herself up on her elbows.
    “Run.” She didn’t scream it, just said it flatly, the way she might have told him to finish his broccoli.
    “Hey now,” Dave said, “let’s not—”
    The boy made a single clumsy move to the right, but Dave flew across the room in two giant steps and caught the kid by his slender bicep before the boy could do much more than shift his footing.
    “Zach!” The woman scrambled on the floor, trying to get to her feet, but