This is our dance, you and I.
He could still taste her lips from when he’d kissed her in the restroom. He’d never forget it. The sweet sourness of Red Bull, coffee, and the bacteria on her teeth. The humility of it, the realness of a pretty girl with bad breath.
We’re the cats on the clock.
I’m Garfield. You’re my Arlene.
And hold on tight, because this is our whirling, dark dance.
He collected himself, scraping his thoughts together, his nerves buzzing: “Fine, Darbs. You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight. I’m coming in there, one way or another, and I’ll red-card you both, and by the way, you bitch—”
He caught his breath:
“I counted the shots. I know you have an empty gun.”
*
.45 AUTO FEDERAL, read the golden rim. The cartridge Darby had carried in her pocket all night, ever since Jay had first handed it to her. It was in her hand now, rolling across her trembling palm.
She thumbed it into the chamber of Lars’s black handgun, one-handed, and let the slide clack forward with a burst of captive-spring power.
Jay looked at her.
The gun’s action was closed. The hammer was cocked rearward. It was ready to fire now. She didn’t know how she was so certain; she just was. Guns are visceral. She could feel it.
“Lars,” Ashley howled outside the door. “Baby brother, if you’re still alive in there, please, please, just kill her—”
Darby scooted across the wet floor to Jay and squeezed her into a hard hug. “It’s almost done,” she said. “Tonight’s almost over.”
One brother down, one to go.
Jay was pale, staring with terror. “Your hand—”
“I know.”
“Your finger—”
“It’s okay.”
She hadn’t yet looked at her right hand. She’d been dreading it. She did now — for a split-second — and then she ripped her eyes away, gasping—
Oh God.
She dared to look at the damage again, her vision clouding with tears. Her thumb, index, and middle fingers were all okay. But her ring finger was skinned raw. The fingernail was slivered, half-detached, jutting upright like a cornflake. And her pinkie finger was gone. Everything from the first knuckle up. Gone, missing, severed, not a part of Darby Thorne’s body anymore. Still inside that door hinge across the room, crushed and unrecognizable—
Oh God, oh God, oh God—
Strangely, the actual act of ripping her hand out of it hadn’t hurt at all. She’d freed herself in two sharp, clockwise twists. Just a fuzzy sort of discomfort, blunted by adrenaline. But she was rapidly losing blood now, spurting a ceaseless trickle that ran warmly down her wrist and blotted circles on the floor. She covered it with her other hand. She couldn’t look at it anymore.
Like Ed had said, hours ago: When you’re facing a lunch date with the Reaper, what’re a few little bones and tendons?
And more half-remembered voices, warped and tinny, coming at her in a nauseous swirl: Can you cut a girl in half?
I’m a magic man, Lars, my brother.
My toast always lands jelly-side up, you could say—
Dizzy now, she checked the first-aid box on the floor, leaving sticky red handprints, pawing through the syringes and Band-Aid boxes. Searching for that thick gauze — but it was gone. Sandi had used it all.
“Can they . . .” Jay hesitated.
“Can they what?”
“You know . . . reattach fingers?”
“Yep. They sure can,” Darby said, trying to sound calm. She wondered how much blood she’d lost already, and how much more she could afford to.
She gave up on the medical gauze, but beside the bleach she found something better — Lars’s roll of electrical tape. She ripped off a stretch with her teeth and looped it around her right hand. She wrapped all three fingers into a clenched block, keeping her thumb free.
That took care of the bleeding. But she’d have to shoot the Beretta left-handed. She had never fired a gun before, and she was right-handed. She hoped she could still hit her target. She only had one bullet.
Jay kept staring at the injury with morbid awe, and Darby noticed she’d turned shockingly pale. Gray, like a body dredged up from underwater. “What if . . . what if they can’t find your finger in the door? Because it’s too smashed up—”
“It’ll grow back,” Darby said, biting off the last stretch of black tape.
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know fingers could grow back.”
“They do.” She touched Jay’s forehead, the way her mother used to feel for a fever, and the girl’s skin was cold. Clammy, like candle wax. She tried to remember — what were the symptoms Ed had described to her? Low blood sugar. Nausea. Weakness. Seizure, coma, death. His words echoed in fragments: We have to get her to a hospital. It’s all we can—
“Daaaaarby.” The front door thrashed in its frame and the deadbolt chattered. “We finish what we start—”
“He’s . . .” Jay cringed. “He’s so mad at us—”
“Good.” Darby scooted against the wall and raised the pistol in her left hand, aiming at the door.
“Don’t miss.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise you won’t miss?”
The gun rattled in her hand. “I promise.”
One round in the chamber. Like a grim destiny, she’d carried it in her pocket all night, and now it was finally time to use it.
The door banged a violent thunderclap as Ashley kicked it again. Darby flinched, her finger tightening hungrily around the trigger. She wanted to fire right now, through the door, but she knew that would be risky. She knew where he was standing and roughly how high, but she couldn’t count on the bullet piercing the door with enough power to kill him. She couldn’t waste her only shot.
She’d have to wait. She’d have to wait for Ashley Garver to kick down the door and step inside the room with them, point-blank, whites-of-his-eyes, at a distance she couldn’t possibly miss—
“You’ve shot a gun before, right?”
“Yep,” she lied.
The doorframe splintered. A long sliver of wood hit the floor. Ashley screamed outside, banging his fists, a pummeling animal rage.
“But this kind of gun . . .” Jay fretted. “You’ve shot this kind before, right?”
“Yep.”
“Are you a good shot?”
“Yep.”
“Even without a finger?”
“Okay, Jay, that’s enough questions—”
THWUMP. A sharp, pneumatic sound interrupted her.
The window shattered behind the barricaded table, spilling crunchy shards across the floor. She saw something there, something moving in the three-inch gap between the table and the window frame. It was orange, blunt, like some big, dumb animal outside was sticking its beak in. It took Darby a few heartbeats to realize what it actually was.
Of-fucking-course.
She hurled Jay to the floor, covering her face. “Get down, get down—”
THWUMP. The vending machine’s glass exploded into white kernels. Skittles and Cheetos bags hit the floor.