“I tried – did you not see me stab her like five times in the back – not to mention once in the kidneys?! The bitch is still alive. I’m telling you – I’ve been telling you for like, months – there’s something wrong with her!”
“Listen, baby, I’m sorry she hurt you, it totally sucks, but this is like kidnapping now, which is messy. I mean I was totally willing to stand by you if you just wanted to get your revenge and be done with it, but this is…well this is a whole other thing. We should get out of it, now.”
“Leave if you want, but I’m finishing things with her. However it goes down. She ruined my life and I won’t allow her to just walk away and go on with hers like it never happened.”
“Whatever. I’m out of it, call me when you’re sane again, okay babe?” A door slams shut.
“Jerk.” There’s a pause and then footsteps come my way, up some stairs and then straight into my room.
I look at her. “I’m sorry I ruined your life, Sharon. If I could take it back I would.”
“See, I knew you wouldn’t be dead,” she spits her words and throws her hands in the air dramatically. “And you’re talking now I see…real convenient. I knew that was bullshit all along, you and your stupid mute act.”
“It wasn’t an act…I just…I was empty.”
“Oh wow, and now some of the first words out of your mouth are lame apologies? You should have stuck with the mute thing,” she says, leaning against the wall across from me.
“I’m sorry. It’s all I can say,” I trail off quietly.
“You’re only sorry now because you’re all helpless and tied to a chair, I don’t think you’d be saying those things if I let you out.”
“I would, I really would. I’ve felt terrible about hurting you. I never meant to get so carried away…you just made me so angry.”
“HA!” she snorts, stepping forward and shoving her finger in my face. “You sound just like my stepdad blaming my mom and me for when he would hit us – it was OUR fault for making him mad. I’m sure he thought it was our fault when he killed her, too.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I mean I was wrong. I don’t know what happened. I lost control. I haven’t hurt anyone since that day; I promised myself I wouldn’t.”
“Hmm. Well, I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” She walks toward me with a hammer in her hand.
This is going to hurt.
Without even blinking, she swings the hammer at my face, shattering my jaw. My face explodes in pain as the vibrations ricochet through my whole body.
“Broken jaw. Hurts, doesn’t it?”
My head lolls backward on my neck as if no longer attached and I choke on bones and blood. I try to pull my head up and do so just in time to see her swinging the hammer at me again, this time she hits my pelvis and I feel it splinter inside my body, sending ripples of pain all the way into the strands of my hair. My hands tear free of the makeshift handcuffs instinctively, pulling off most of my skin in the process. I fall forward in the chair. Sharon is already coming at me again with the hammer, aimed for my shoulder, I think. I reach up with one of my bloody skinless hands and grab the head of the hammer mid-swing. “Ennnougggh,” I say through my broken jaw. Sharon looks at my horrifying hand, shed entirely of its skin, and crumples against the wall; I think she’s fainted.
I watch her for a moment and when she doesn’t get up I turn over and free my ankles from the wire, kicking the chair into little wooden shards. I reach up to my jaw, which seems to be knitting itself back together ever so slowly and painfully and look at my hands, which look more like an anatomy chart of muscle groups than someone’s hands. I crawl away from the remains of my chair, my hip too shattered to stand, but halfway to the door darkness takes me anyway.
•
I wake up naked in the desert, my head pounding and my skin covered in filmy orange desert dust. It’s not quite noon judging by the sun and the already Vegas-level hot and dry all around. I put my hand up to the back of my head, where the ache seems to be emanating from and bring back a gooey sticky mess of partially dried blood. I’m starting to remember how I got here.
“That bitch,” I say out loud to the tumbleweeds. Felice had hit me with a tire iron, I remembered that. But I seriously doubt that was enough to put me down long enough to get my butt dumped in the desert, and then I remember the knife. I look at my stomach and see a ragged looking red scar across my abdomen where Melvin’s knife must have ended up. So the good news is, I can cross ‘tire iron to the back of the head’ and ‘being gutted with a nine-inch blade’ off my list of things that can possibly kill me. The bad news is I am definitely going to have to go back and kill all of them. Adrian too. This is what I get for being nice and wavering on killing them in the first place.