Nine Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the brick wall behind the glass targets as it took the bullet but the bottle remained intact. He’d missed.
    As his friends laughed, the boy fired twice more in quick frustrated succession. The second shot hit the bottle, scoring a hit and restoring some pride, and the glass vessel shattered, disintegrating into a thousand fragments and sprinkling to the ground like fairy dust.
    As the pair of gunshots echoed around the empty park, the boy turned to his friend, wide-eyed and excited.
    ‘Where the hell did you get this?’ he asked.
    ‘My brother,’ the kid replied.
    ‘Saqib? What’s he doing with a handgun?’
    The dark-haired boy just shrugged.
    He didn’t want to think about it.
    His older brother wasn’t the kind of guy to carry around something like this. Only just turned twenty-three, Saqib had been as straight as an arrow growing up, never in trouble and never causing any. But then the riots of last summer had happened and the boy had watched his brother change. On the second night of the anarchy, their father had been killed, stamped to death on the street by a violent group who’d separated from the mob. His father hadn’t done anything to provoke them, he’d just been trying to get past quietly as he made his way home from work. The group knocked him to the ground and kicked his skull in, causing deep cerebral fractures and a resulting brain haemorrhage.
    He’d died on the street before anyone could even get him to a hospital.
    Despite his age, the teenage boy had come to terms with his father’s passing. True, he felt angry and bitter at what had happened, how unjust and unfair it all was. Not a day went past that he didn’t wish that he’d been there, that he could have at least tried to do something to stop the gang beating his dad.
    But despite his age, he already knew there was nothing he could do to change what had happened. His father had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And any lasting feelings of rage he might have felt at the cruelty of it all were swept away with concern for his mother who’d suddenly found herself a widow. Needless to say, she had taken the unexpected death of her husband hard.
    As had his brother, Saqib.
    Since that fateful night last August, Saqib had become a different man. It was almost as if the incident had planted a seed of hate inside him, and day by day that seed was growing, sprouting weeds that twisted and wrapped their tendrils through all his veins and arteries. His younger brother watched as he drifted away from all his old friends. He started drinking and doing hard drugs; he often wouldn’t come home at night, and his mother would stay up until dawn, worried sick that she was going to lose another member of her family.
    And he was spending a lot of time with a new group. There was one of them in particular whom the boy didn’t like, a guy who called himself Dominick. He’d appeared on the scene a few months ago seemingly out of nowhere, and Saqib seemed to be hanging out with him a lot lately.
    The youngster would never admit it to anyone, but there was something about the stranger that terrified him. He had a look in his eye that was unsettling, a gleam that contradicted all the smart suits and polished shoes that he wore.
    One word came to mind, a word the teenager had picked up from his English class at school.
    Psychotic .
    Saqib had called his brother last night, asking him to bring round a takeaway for him and his friends. For some reason, he claimed none of them could leave the house, so the kid had to go and get it for them. That was all bullshit; they were just being lazy. Nevertheless, the boy had reluctantly headed out and picked up a couple of pizzas, taking them over to an address Saqib gave him over the phone.
    On the way, he found himself praying that Dominick wouldn’t be there.
    He’d been in luck. There were only three people inside the house, his brother and two guys whose names he didn’t know. Whoever owned the