‘It’s me,’ Cindy whispered, keeping the phone close to her mouth and her eyes on the store window. The mall filled her senses. She could hear water gurgling somewhere – a fountain. Britney was done singing; now it was Bono and U2. ‘With Or Without You’. She felt cold tile under her knees, and her arms were sticky with someone else’s blood she’d dragged into the store. She smelled leather and death.

‘Cindy! Where are you? What’s going on?’

‘I’m hiding at Wilson’s. You need to get in here right now. He’s killing everybody he comes across.’

‘Can you see him? Do you know where he is?’

‘No, but he’s close. He was firing inside one of the stores near us just a couple minutes ago. People are dying, Jonny.’

‘HIDE IN THE BARN, NICKY.’

‘What the hell is that?’ he asked.

‘There’s a woman freaking out in here. You need to hurry.’

‘Get in the back of the store and hide. We’re moving on all of the entrances right now. We’ll be there in less than sixty seconds.’

‘NICKY, LISTEN TO THE CROWS.’

Cindy waited desperately for the clatter of doors and guns as the police stormed the mall, but instead, like the rattle of bones in a cemetery, she heard the solitary march of boots again. His boots, clapping the floor in a sing-song rhythm. Tap knock tap knock. He was heading for the leather store.

He was almost here.

‘We don’t have sixty seconds, Jonny,’ she said calmly.

‘Hide! We’re coming!’

She shut off the phone. There was no panic now for her and no terror. If he loomed over her, if he fired, she would be dead in seconds; she knew that. It didn’t matter. Calmness ruled. Calmness became her. Sixty seconds became fifty. She glanced at the store, draped in jackets and purses, and saw the frozen shapes of the others sheltered there. At the back, behind the sales counter, she could buy time for herself. A few seconds, but that was all she needed.

Jonny was coming.

Fifty seconds became forty.

She willed herself to move and save herself, but then everything changed for her. On the opposite side of the mall, she saw the doorway of a Victoria’s Secret store. Models of crazy perfection wore almost nothing in the window posters, but the spatter on the glass made them look as if they were covered in blood. In the doorway of the store, standing up, terrified, was a teenage girl.

It was the girl who had innocently sat in the food court, making out with her boyfriend. The sweet half-Asian girl reading about Harry Potter. The girl with her sister’s name. The girl with an entire amazing life ahead of her.

Laura.