‘What shall we do?’ I whispered.

‘We need to block these stairs off,’ said James.

‘The beds,’ said Lana. ‘And the . . . big furniture.’

There was a sudden loud scream outside – closer, a wordless battle cry. Kate winced and grabbed my hand.

‘We’re trapped,’ she said.

‘They don’t know we’re here,’ I said. ‘We’re safe.’

Lana and James started to move a bed, dragging it from a back room into the hallway. They tilted it on one side and pushed it across the top of the stairs, blocking anything that might come up. The scratching of the heavy wood on the carpet was painfully loud to my ears, artificial and squeaky in the silence of the house.

There was no noise from outside now. We all hunched down behind the bed, waiting for a signal, for something from outside. The house felt suddenly oppressive and weighty. I dragged my arm up and bit on it, to mask the sound of my breathing and the dull thud of the blood pumping in my ears. Next to me, I could feel Kate trembling.

‘We need to see what’s going on,’ I whispered, my voice disconnecting from my mind. I hadn’t known I was going to speak. I hadn’t known I could.

‘No! They’ll see you,’ whispered Kate, holding my hand tighter. Her eyes were wide and terrified.

‘We need to see. We can’t just wait. I’ll stay behind the curtain.’

I pulled away and crawled into the front bedroom, with its still-made beds and its dusty musky smell. Here, too, the curtains were drawn, leaving a twilight of false safety. Between the curtains there was a squeezed sliver of light. I could see only ten metres or so through this gap, but I didn’t want to risk moving it further. There was the empty front garden, with its weeds poking through the cracks in the paving; and there was the quiet street in front, with its waves of drifting sand, but through the thinned material at the curtain’s edge, I could make out blurry movements in the water.

I pulled back from the curtains, so they wouldn’t sway when I breathed. ‘There’s nothing outside us. They don’t know we’re here.’ And I hoped for that moment that maybe it was true. Maybe they hadn’t known how many of us there were? Maybe they hadn’t seen us running? Maybe we’d been too quick for them?

But then there was a jerky movement to the side of the curtain, and I knew that wasn’t true.

I hadn’t seen one close-up. Even though I knew it wasn’t going to be good, I still wanted to see. I eased the curtain an inch to one side, taking a deep breath and holding it while I looked.