There were no lights on inside his property. He fumbled in the blue gloom and found his way to the hall. He heard boots on the gravel outside: someone moving around, to the left of the front door, then the right, casing the place.

This was not how he wanted to die. In all honesty, he would have been pushed to make a list of ways he did want to die, but being beaten to a pulp in his own property by a foraging road-mob certainly wouldn’t have been on it.

Drusher crept into the back room. He tried to remember where he’d left his gun. He didn’t like guns, never had. It had sat on the dresser for a while, a paperweight for some ageing migration reports. But it had kept looking at him, so he’d put it in a drawer.

That was it, a drawer. Which drawer?

As quietly as he could, he looked in one, then another. He was on the third drawer when someone came to the door. He could see the front door from the back room. The shadow against the window lights was distressingly big.

The owner of the shadow knocked. Hard. The sound made Drusher jump. It took a big hard fist to make a big hard noise like that. He couldn’t help but fancy he was hearing, for the first time, the very fist that would eventually beat the life out of him.

Idiot, he told himself. That’s it. Paralyse yourself with fear. With fancy. Valentin Drusher’s imagination was his worst enemy. He tried to remind himself of that. He could imagine far worse and more horrible things than his imagination, but that kind of proved the point.

He found the gun. It was under a bundle of expired ration stamps, a broken clock and a coil of fishing wire. Of course it was. The ideal place. It was a small, chunky automatic, a Regit Arms .40 that Macks had given to him years ago. He had never, ever fired it.

Was it even loaded? She’d given him ammunition. Had he loaded it? If he hadn’t, where was the box of ammunition? If he had, were the bullets still good? Did they… go off? Was that a thing?

He probably should have cleaned the weapon too, the way she’d taught him. It was probably so corroded it had seized solid.

Much like his life.

The shadow knocked a second time. Drusher started again. He steeled himself and decided to do the bravest thing he could think of.

He put the gun in his pocket and ran out of the back door.