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He was going to kill her.

His eyes were the crazy animal eyes of a vicious predator, cruel and strange. Amity knew there was a real chance Falkirk was going to kill her, and she intuited that the harder she resisted, the greater the likelihood he couldn't stop himself from murdering her in the most painful way he could imagine. But she wasn't able to stop resisting, either. She wasn't being the courageous girl in a story, wasn't fighting back just because that's what she learned from novels. There was something inside her that she had never known was there until now, a ferocious sense of her right to be respected, to be left alone, to live. This creep hadn't given to her the right to life, so he had no authority to take it from her. No one had given it to her, she'd been born with it, and this life was hers as long as she could defend it. Fighting for your life wasn't just instinct, but also a duty, because life was a gift that came with a mission to fulfill. You were here for a purpose, and you needed to figure out what it was, and to let yourself be killed without a hell of a fight meant you had failed everyone you loved and everyone you might one day have loved. So as this creep dragged her out of the pantry by her hair, she on her back, even though he still held the gun in one hand, she cried out, "Asshole," and reared up and punched him in the balls.

Although her father had taught her the nutcracker technique, resorting to it was of course embarrassing even in these extreme circumstances. She would rather have done something less intimate, like shooting him, but she didn't have a gun. Anyway, although it was an embarrassing move, it was also satisfying and effective. The twist of her hair slipped from his grasp. His face was as contorted as that of a psycho clown, and from him came a combination wheeze and groan that would have been funny if Amity hadn't been fighting for her life.

Her father wasn't here, and neither was spooky old Ed, so she figured somehow they had ported out. They would be back. She had no doubt they would be back. Just maybe not in time.

She scrambled away from Falkirk on her hands and knees, at first with no destination, no purpose other than to put distance between her and him, but then she remembered the gun. Daddy's gun. As they were preparing breakfast, he'd put the pistol on the counter by the bread box. She had never fired a gun before, but it couldn't be that hard. Everyone used them in the movies. In the quick, when either you did the deed or died, the good guy or girl always put a hole in the bad guy or girl.

Abruptly she changed direction, frantically crawling toward the farther end of the kitchen. She almost made it to the bread box. She was maybe four feet from the counter on which her father's gun lay, when Falkirk kicked her hard in the butt and sent her sprawling facedown on the floor.