Ashes, Ashes

23 - Subterfuge

This was impossible. There was no way. I had seen her! I had seen her mangled body and strewn-out guts. She was dead. Liza was dead. There was no way she was here, now, standing over me. 

It was a hallucination. Or else this whole thing was a bad dream. 

But if it was a bad dream, where had it started? At the car, with Parker's dismembered body? This morning, when the killings began? At the funeral? 

With Laurel? Had her death just been an awful dream? Could I just wake up and call her, hear her voice, reassure myself that the whole thing had just been a terrible nightmare? 

A hard slap across my face snapped me back to the present. 

"Don't fall asleep on me, Logan." Liza grinned, her face so close to mine that it consumed my vision. "You'll have plenty of time to sleep when you're dead." 

Richard tittered behind her. He sounded nervous, that edge of hysteria where everything is funny. 

"What's...going on?" I managed to sound out the words, speaking slowly but clearly. "I don't...understand." 

"Don't you?" Liza pulled away, backing up enough that I could see her body. Her clothes were still torn-up and stained, but through the gaps in her tattered shirt I could see that her belly was whole. There were no glimpses of wounds. There was blood on her hands, though, bright crimson smears of it, and dark brown crumbles of it dried under her nails. 

"You were dead," I said, uncertain even as I mouthed the words. Everything from before felt hazy. My memories fuzzed together and had started to evaporate, like being black-out drunk the night before. 

"My dear Logan," she said, with a haughty affectation. She drew herself to her full height, holding a bloody hand to her chest and thrusting her chin up. "Surely you've heard of acting." 

I stared, uncomprehending. Nearby, Dawn let out a low, muffled moan. 

"I wasn't sure it would work, to be honest," Liza continued, looking down at her blood-crusted nails. Her eyes were rimmed in white, wide and crazed. Her face had contorted into a cruel smile, an expression of cold satisfaction so unlike her usual meek demeanor. "It's hard work, controlling your breathing like that. I had to count on assuming that none of you would bother to look too closely or try to hard to save me if I looked beyond help." 

She pulled away, beginning to pace, as if overcome with restlessness. 

"But I knew I could count on you all to be selfish. Not giving a damn about anything but yourselves -- that's what you're all best at." 

"You faked being dead." I was still hung up on this detail, my brain refusing to accept what was happening enough to make sense of any of the awful things that followed. There were too many possibilities in my mind. A painful, swooping hopefulness squeezed my chest. Maybe it had all been a trick. Maybe Parker and Abby were alive, too, waiting just out of sight to jump out and yell "boo." 

"A bit of stage blood here, some sausage links there, an accomplice on the inside...it's not exactly hard." 

Richard, perking up at the mention of an accomplice, beamed. He looked like an eager puppy hopeful for a pat on the head. 

I remembered the gray jelly of Abby's brains sliding free from her crushed-open skull and felt the bite of vomit at the back of my throat.

That part hadn't been fake.

"You killed them." I didn't want to admit it out loud, didn't want to believe the words even as they were leaving my throat. "It was you. Both of you." 

"Finally!" Liza cried, clapping. Her gaze landed on me, hawklike. "Now you're starting to catch up with the class." 

"I don't understand." I wished I could wrap my head around it, make sense of what I was hearing, but my brain was still sluggish from the drugs. "Why? Why are you doing this, Liza?" 

Liza, who had always been so quiet and quirky and shy. Liza, who had wept inconsolably at Laurel's funeral, who had never once missed a book release. Liza, who had always lingered around the edges of our group like some skulking jackal, always watching but never a part. 

Liza, the actress. 

Had any of us ever truly known who she was? 

"Why?" That cold smile stayed fixed to her lips, white teeth bared. Every word she spat out seethed with "Do you think this is the part of the movie where you can distract me by making me tell you my clever plan?" 

Something flickered at the edge of my vision, like a lick of flame, but nothing was there when I turned to look. The ketamine was still rumbling through my system, short-circuiting my consciousness, threatening to drag me back under. I could barely think clearly enough to form words, much less an escape plan. 

"We're not here to confess anything," Richard added, with a hint of swagger in his words. With bravado, he drew his pistol from where it had been tucked into his belt, gesturing casually with it pointed toward me. "That's your job."