Only two of my fingers are.
It would be a horrible thing. It would be a desperate, nasty, wrenching act, and it would hurt more than she could imagine, but then she glanced over at the dark figure of Larson Garver in his stupid Deadpool beanie, who’d finished wiping up fingerprints and now stood in the center of the room with his .45 aimed at herself and Jay, and she made a final vow through gritted teeth: I’ll hurt you even worse, Rodent Face. I’ll take your gun.
Then I’ll kill Ashley with it.
This girl is going home.
Tonight.
“I have an idea,” she whispered to Jay, concealing the Swiss Army knife under her unhurt palm. “One last idea. And I’m going to need your help.”
*
Lars saw them whispering.
“Hey.” He raised the Beretta. “Stop talking.”
Darby murmured something else into Jaybird’s ear, and the little girl nodded once. Then she stood up, stepping aside with silent purpose. Now Darby stared across the room at him, eyes rock-hard.
“Stop looking at me.”
She didn’t.
“Turn your head. Ah, look at the floor.” He thrust the Beretta at her for emphasis, but she didn’t flinch. The pistol had lost its menace. It had become a prop. She wasn’t afraid of it anymore.
Lars aimed — but he’d been aiming it this entire time; how do you get more threatening than that? He tried to cock it with his thumb, like they do in the movies, but the hammer was already cocked. It was already in single-action, because it had already been fired tonight. At her. Five times.
Darby kept staring at him, making his guts coil. Something about her eyes. Something had changed. Slowly, slowly, she slid forward, hunched her knees together, and stood up, her mangled hand twisting behind her back. Her hair stuck to her face in black tangles as she rose, like a scary movie he’d seen where a dripping Japanese ghost emerged from the floor.
He wavered, looking back at the door. “Ashley,” he shouted outside into the night. “I . . . did you, ah, find the keys yet?”
No answer.
His older brother was too far away to hear. He considered moving to the men’s restroom, maybe, and shouting through that busted window, but that would require turning his back on them.
“Ashley,” he shouted again, backing up, bumping into the cracked vending machine. “Something . . . ah, something changed. She’s looking at me.”
He wanted to move to the front doorway, but that would also require him to turn his back on Darby. He was afraid to. She was clearly trapped there, helpless, with her fingers locked in a door, but somehow he couldn’t dare to lose sight of her. With her unhurt hand, she was now reaching for something — a little plastic panel on the wall, to which he hadn’t paid any attention to all night, up until this moment—
The light switch, he realized, as the room went black.
“Ashley.” A tremor in his voice now.
Perfect darkness.
Lars knelt to the floor and groped for his brother’s flashlight. His fingertips found it beside the gas can — bumping it, sending it rolling. He chased it down, his heart banging in his ribs, clicked the button, and aimed the blue-white LED beam at the closet door.
To his relief, Darby was still there, and Jaybird, too, both standing in his spotlight, both squinting back at him. Of course they were. Why had he been so frightened? He was sick of this. He wanted to shoot Darby now. Right now. And torch this stupid building with Ashley, and end this hellish night, and get to Uncle Kenny’s and kill some grubs in Gears of War.
“Ashley.” His voice was hoarse. “Can I kill her yet?”
No answer.
Just the rasp of wind outside.
“Ashley, can I please—”
Jay moved suddenly, startling him, and walked around the room’s dark perimeter. Lars aimed his Beretta at her, and his flashlight, tracking her like a searchlight as she walked past Ed and Sandi’s bodies, past the barricaded window. “Jaybird, ah, what are you doing?” She ignored him and stopped at the doorway. Then she grabbed the front door.
She pushed it shut.
“Jaybird. Stop.” He turned back to Darby, spotlighting her with the flashlight. He was splitting his attention now between the two females in the dark room — Darby to his left, Jay to his right. He could only illuminate one of them at a time.
He didn’t like this. Not at all.
He heard a click behind him and whirled back, aiming the beam — now Jay was on her tiptoes, engaging the deadbolt. Locking the door. Then she turned around to face him, squinting in the glare, and he recognized that same frightening look as Darby. Yes, they were both definitely in on it, some veiled joke that Lars didn’t get. This was normal. He never got jokes. Most of the time, they were about him.
A sore cavity in his stomach told him this one was, too. Like the moment before Ashley had hurled Stripes into that campfire two summers ago: Hey, baby brother. Wanna see a shooting star?
“Jaybird,” he repeated.
No reaction.
“Jaybird, you’re . . . ah, you’re gonna get a red card when Ashley gets back,” he said, glancing back left to the closet door, pointing his flashlight back at Darby—
She wasn’t there.
Just the door. A trickle of blood. And a mashed little red piece still wedged in the door, like the juicy inside of a rare hamburger, and it took a half-second to register in Lars’s thick mind as what it really was, what it meant, what had just happened, and what was coming—
*
Darby slammed into Rodent Face hard, from the side, sending the flashlight tumbling into wild shadows. No time for fear. Screaming with pain and adrenaline, something raw, black, and feral.
She got under Lars’s right arm, under the pistol, and knocked it aside, clattering against the brochure rack. She had one chance now, one racing chance — and she also had her father’s Swiss Army knife in her left hand (Congratulations on Graduating College!), its blade dulled from sawing through the bars of Jay’s dog kennel, but still sharp enough — and with it, she throat-punched Larson Garver squarely in his Adam’s apple.
The knife slipped right in.
Blood spurted into her face. Into her eyes, her mouth. The taste of warm nickels. Lars’s hand swiped at her, his sharp fingernails scratching her cheek, but he was going for his own neck. Trying to hold back the bleeding.
His other hand moved, too. Half-blinded by Rodent Face’s blood, she caught a blinking snapshot, a moving blur — gun.
Jay screamed.
That black .45. In a panic-flash, she realized Lars hadn’t dropped it after all — the clatter she’d heard must have been his flashlight — and he still had the weapon in his knuckled hand, twisting the muzzle toward her belly—
Gun-gun-gun—
*
Ashley was kneeling to grab the keys from the snow when he heard a single gunshot thump from inside the building. Like a trapped thunderclap, muffled by flat walls and doors. He couldn’t believe it.
Really?