The shout bounced past them, echoing, as if their assailant had repeated it.

‘They’ll never find your bodies down here, you know?’

They lay on their fronts, facing back the way they’d come. They lay between the tracks, covered in dirt, feeling the cold seeping into their bones. Karl, at least.

‘So your wife is pregnant?’ Liz whispered.

‘What?’ he whispered back. What kind of question was that right now?

‘I’m gonna gut you both, right down here, and leave you for the rats.’

The shout sounded no closer than the first, thankfully. Which meant their prayers had been answered: the fork in the tunnel had halted their pursuer out of fear of choosing the wrong route.

‘I think you were about to say it before that man came in the shop. How far gone?’

He didn’t understand what she was talking about – at first. And then he understood. He had tried—

‘Last chance, Seabury. I’ll ruin your world or save it. You don’t even have to give up. Just knock that bitch out and shout me and you can run and I’ll do the rest, and you can live your life.’

—to distract himself to the mood once or twice with a joke, and he figured she was doing something similar now: acting as if everything were normal, pretending that there wasn’t a madman down here in the dark with them. So, he went along with it.

‘Six months,’ he said, voice low, head close to hers.

‘What are you having?’

‘I want a boy. She wants a girl.’

‘You don’t know yet? Why not?’

‘Seabury, this is your absolute last chance.’

‘There’s two ways to find out. One is when you hold a new baby in your arms and see him or her in the flesh. The other is to see what basically looks like a chalk rubbing on a screen. You got kids?’

He knew she didn’t even before she said so.

‘Ron didn’t want them. I’m not sure. I like children, but as for my own…’

‘He didn’t want them entering his lifestyle, eh?’

A slice of verbal Tourette’s there. But she didn’t seem to take offence.

‘No, nothing like that. I don’t think he thought he was the settling type. But you have to think of the old people’s home, that’s what I said to him once.’

‘I’m going to make you suffer like you wouldn’t believe, Seabury, unless you bring her out right now. No fucking silly gadget’s gonna save you down here.’

‘The what?’ He was finding it hard not to be distracted by the man chasing them. Liz was looking at Karl, but Karl could not ignore the lethal threat just 160 feet from them.

‘You have to think about the old people’s home. That’s where we’ll be one day. You don’t want to be one of those old ones that gets no visitors. I’ve seen them before, when I was visiting my father when he was—’

‘I see you, bitches. Here I fucking come!’

‘Still alive, and I felt sorry for them. They look sad.’

‘Like they were thinking, shit, I should have had kids?’

Despite his claim, their pursuer hadn’t moved towards them. An idle threat, then. A trick designed to make them break cover.

‘Exactly.’ Liz spoke too loud, and Karl watched the tunnel carefully, fearing that the man was going to come running at them.

What happened instead was worse.

A flash of light ahead, and in the next instant a cracking sound. It raced past them like a train, impossible to ignore. Liz let out a moan, covered her ears and planted her face in the dirt. Karl put his hands out ahead of him, as if foolishly believing he could stop a bullet that way. If the gunman had been seeking a sliver of movement to latch onto, he’d now got it.

Another gunshot. Another flash, which framed the gunman like a horror-film villain during a burst of lightning. He was aiming right at them.

Then a third gunshot, but this time the gunman was lit in profile, and Karl felt his choking terror abate. The man had fired down the other tunnel this time. He didn’t know where they were. He was firing blind, hoping for a lucky hit.

There was silence. Karl reached out and put his hand over Liz’s mouth. The gunman was obviously listening, hoping to hear them running, fleeing from the bullets. So, they stayed silent and they stayed put.

A few seconds later, he started shouting again. Loud, fast, a million threats, a billion imaginative scenarios involving suffering and death. But his voice came no closer. This was a chance to put more distance between them.

Karl got up slowly and helped Liz climb to her feet. Their faces close, he stared into her eyes and whispered to her they were going to walk slowly, carefully. But one misstep, one noise, and they would be caught. She nodded her understanding. They turned, giving him their backs. And started walking.

The distance grew. There were no missteps, no noises. There was no sense of forward movement either because they could see nothing ahead. But the gunman’s voice began to fade. The darkness condensed behind them, like a series of curtains pulled between pursued and pursuer, and soon his ranting was nothing but a background whisper.