She finds her way to the kitchen where theres an overturned and rusting Formica table and peeling wallpaper with a strawberry vine pattern. Because of the humidity, patches of furry grey-green mould are growing everywhere. She opens the drawers one by one looking for a tool drawer but theres nothing. She looks out the back window. No garage.

Theres a door in the kitchen, and she opens it and finds wooden steps leading down beneath the ground.

She waits at the top of the steps for a moment, listening for any sounds in the house, and then descends slowly.

In the basement theres a different smell, like ammonia, and she sweeps the flashlight around to a table in the middle of the room cluttered with bottles, burners, rubber tubing and one of those old-fashioned scales with a long arm on one side. Some of the bottles are half filled with a yellow liquid. Shes seen this kind of set-up before. Meth lab. They were big a few years before when some people were taking advantage of the slug distraction.

She finds a workbench against the wall and roots around for a screwdriver and a wrench, but what shes really looking for is a pair of pliers.

She sets the flashlight down on the tabletop but it rolls off and falls to the floor where it flickers once but stays lit. Good thing she wouldnt want to have to feel her way back to the car.

But when she turns, she sees something she missed before. By the stairs theres a utility closet, and while she watches, the door of the closet, illuminated in the faint glow of the flashlight, shudders once and flies open as if someone has fallen against it.

Then she can smell it, the flesh-rot, much stronger now it was masked before by the ammonia smell of the lab.

They stumble out of the utility closet, three of them, two men in overalls with long hair and a woman dressed only in a satin slip which has been ripped open to expose one desiccated breast.

Temple has forgotten how bad they smell that muddy mixture of must and putrefaction, oil and rancid shit. She sees a faecal ooze sliding wetly down the back of the womans legs. They must have fed recently, so they will be strong. And they are between her and the stairs.

She puts her hand on the pistol and considers. Her last two bullets.

Not worth it.

Instead she sweeps the gurkha knife out of its sheath and kicks over the man in front, sending him crashing down to the cement slab of the floor. She swings the knife and buries it in the skull of the second man, whose eyes cross absurdly before he drops to his knees. But when she tries to pull the blade back, its stuck, bound up in sutures of wet bone.