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Joseph Carver wakes in darkness, to a hand shaking his shoulder.
As always, the first moments of consciousness belong to thebeforeand not thenow. As always, he bites down on the name forming on his lips before he spills it. Joseph feels his heart plummet into depthless chasms before adjusting for its boomerang return.
That all this occurs in the space of heartbeats, far quicker than it once did, amazes him, appals him – love and loss and sheer brute willpower pulling in different directions until the ragged strata of his waking mind grow taut.
Finally, he takes a breath.
‘Joe.’
He frowns, concentrates.
Cool air on his face from the fan. Erin’s hand, still shaking him. He smells her perfume, her night breath. ‘Mm,’ he says. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘There’s someone downstairs.’
A gap in the curtains admits a lick of moonlight, revealing the bedroom’s vague contours. His first question: ‘Where’s Max?’
‘He’s staying at a friend’s tonight,’ she hisses. ‘Remember? And his car isn’t here.’
Hearing that, Joseph drags himself upright. He’d closed those curtains tight before coming to bed. Erin must have parted them, peered down at the driveway, checked.
‘But he’s not insured,’ he says. Nor will his son’s Honda even qualify for insurance until it passes its MOT. Still, that’s hardly a thought for right now. Joseph reaches out to the fan, switches it off, waits for its blades to fall silent.
He hears something, then, or thinks he does, even if he can’t describe it. Maybe he just senses it. A wrongness about the house. A feeling that something chaotic has crept in while he’s been sleeping. Something ruinous and wicked.
His chest tightens. Instantly, he’s wide awake. Because he knows that overcoming the threat, however it manifests, ishistask; and because the role of protector is one for which he’s uniquely unsuited – a role he’s failed before, with spectacularly painful results.
In a blink he’s spun back five years. To thebeforeand not thenow. To a different bedroom; a different night; a different wife. To a nightmare that had begun much the same way. Back then, he’d believed that home was a safe place, unassailable. He doesn’t believe that now.
A clinking from somewhere deep inside the house, a creaking. A shushing, as if of wind. Hard to explain why those sounds seem so insidious, but they do.
‘Where’s your phone?’ Erin whispers.
‘Downstairs, I think. Yours?’
‘Charging, in the kitchen.’
‘Shit.’
Joseph swings his legs out of bed. He places his feet on the carpet, carefully so they don’t thud. Adrenalin lightens his stomach, shortens his breath. Naked except for his underwear, he pads to his wardrobe. Opening the door, he reachesin. Erin doesn’t know what he keeps in here, behind the shirts and the suits, the ties and winter scarves, the bereavement box still too traumatic to open. A man haunted by past failures is wise to plan ahead.
Just last winter a doorstep seller – some coin-eyed addict who flashed a homemade ID – wedged his foot inside the front door until Joseph handed over twenty pounds for three squeegees and a pack of J cloths. Erin wasn’t home, but Max and Tilly were in the living room, watching TV. If the guy had tried to force his way inside, Joseph couldn’t have stopped him. His adversary had been stronger, fitter, far more aggressive. Joseph, by contrast, had never fought anyone in his life; he wasn’t even sure he knew how.
Failing his family once had been devastating enough. To have failed a second time would have been worse than inexcusable – an utter dereliction of his duty – and he’d just come perilously close.
Immediately afterwards, he started investigating home defence options. His research led him to a YouTube channel dedicated to the subject. The host – a ripped and balding American around Joseph’s age – exploded a lot of myths and talked a lot of sense.
No point buying a full-sized baseball bat if you didn’t have room to swing it. No point buying a machete if you couldn’t imagine cutting flesh. Calling the police was always a priority, particularly if you couldn’t escape. But planning for a confrontation was vital.
Americans, of course, could arm themselves pretty much how they pleased. Even when using deadly force, they faced little danger of prosecution. Here, the law seemed to favour the intruder. Keeping any kind of weapon for self-defence classed a homeowner’s actions as premeditated. The only legal products, Joseph discovered, were rape alarms and criminal identifier aerosols that dyed an assailant’s skin.
The YouTube host’s advice for his British viewers was characteristically blunt –Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.The axiom lent itself readily to adaptation for Joseph’s purposes:Better to face jail than bury another loved one.
Packages started arriving at the house soon after. Joseph didn’t stop buying until every room was stocked with something he could use in an emergency. Whether a screwdriver tucked beneath a sofa cushion, or a ball hammer hidden inside the cloakroom cabinet, each new purchase helped him feel marginally more prepared, marginally more capable of shouldering the awesome weight of responsibility for the safety of those he loves.
Here in the bedroom, hidden in his wardrobe, he keeps his two most lethal purchases, bought after a week of nightmares where he repeatedly watched his wife, his son and his stepdaughter being cut down around him: a five-shot pistol crossbow and a midnight-black tactical tomahawk with a carbon steel axeblade and spike; stored beside them, a set of police-issue cuffs and a torch that produces a 4,000-lumen beam designed to blind and disorientate any attacker.
Now, though, when it matters, Joseph realizes that the confidence his preparations gave him was false and fleeting – because he isn’t a buffed and combat-ready YouTube host. He’s a guy who’ll get a screwdriver torn from his fingers and buried in his head; a guy who can’t recall how to assemble his crossbow or load arrows into the speedloader – and certainly won’t manage those feats in the dark.