And Then There Were None Alternate Ending

Chapter 18

The crash of the marble bear falling from the ropes was almost music to her ears. This meant that Blore, the evil brute, was dead! What a joy after having just found Armstrong's body washed up on the seaside shore. This will soon be over, she told herself, trying to hide the smile on her face from Lombard, whose usual wolfish face had contorted a great amount as sweat dripped down his temples. He ran to check the source of the sound, and Vera trotted along after him, wondering what she should have for lunch on this beautiful day. Her heels began to click as the grassy hillside floor was replaced by gray stone slabs.

They reached the wreckage soon after. It was better than Vera had ever hoped! Blood had spattered around wildly, and dust was still rising steadily from the demolished marble. The body itself was dead, most completely, and although the bear was almost entirely unrecognizable, the head and face stood a tad in front of the corpse, unscathed aside from some scattered drops of blood. It lay at Lombard's feet, and he gave it a strong kick with his steel-toed boots.

Vera recognized them as Red Wing Shoe Company's own. Several men she had worked for in the past had had them. They were known to be quite expensive. She wondered how Lombard was able to afford them. She hadn't known him to be rich...

"Well. This is it then," Lombard remarked. "I hadn't thought you to be the type."

"The type to what?" Vera retorted quickly. "Survive this long? First the men in East Africa, now the ten of us? Eight. Eight of us," she corrected herself. She now wondered why she was still keeping up this act. She could take his revolver in one swift motion and shoot him... through the heart, as she had planned so many times before. Just one pull of the trigger and this would all be completed.

Lombard persisted:

"Do not try to redeem yourself, Vera. Please. I have the revolver now, and the upper hand. You've lost."

"I haven't lost everything..." with that, she lunged towards Lombard and, just as if they had rehearsed hundreds of times before, grabbed the revolver from its place inside his jacket pocket and cocked it. Lombard's eyes went as wide as a deer's in caught in headlights.

"Now, Vera, shan't we keep a level head about this?" his arms drifted up behind his head, his usual cocky grin being replaced by a crooked look of... fear, was it? Vera blinked away the rising dust from the statue and adjusted her hold on the gun.

"Goodbye, Philip Lombard," she said, just loudly enough that he could hear her over the distant sound of waves crashing against rock, and his own loudly beating heart.

"Two Little Soldier Boys sitting in the sun..." Lombard whispered, his voice breaking on 'Sun'. Vera's finger drifted to the trigger and her body was jerked slightly as a result of the blast.

"One got frizzled up, and then there was one," Vera finished the rhyme. Lombard's lifeless body fell to the stone floor and Vera raised the revolver to her nose, inhaling the bit of smokey gunpowder floating out of the tip. She crouched down beside the two corpses, looking at them with thorough joy and contentment. She had done it. There was once again peace, and as the sun shone brightly once more in the sky, a sense of serenity.