Ashes, Ashes

27 - Aftermath

I don't know how long I was out. No more than a few seconds, probably. A minute. But time has a way of stretching in a tragedy, and this day had lasted a lifetime, each painful second of it rolling forward into the next like an endless wave of misery.

I felt lightheaded, nauseous. Hungry, incongruously and irreverently. The pain in my arm, sharp and fierce, had become an all-encompassing burning so overwhelming it came out on the other side, like a numbness. My body, too exhausted to deal with the pain, had simply written my wounded flesh off as something no longer worth noticing, like something that didn't really belong to my body at all.

I had a lot of practice with feeling like my body was not a part of me, but this was something different.

Something smelled like gasoline.

I searched for the source, finding a canister -- meant to fuel the power generator at the main office -- tipped over on its side, seeping its noxious liquid out onto the floor. It soaked into the edges of blankets and clothes of the bodies Liza and Richard had dragged inside. I must have knocked it over when the chair fell, I thought.

That was probably why they'd gone through the trouble of bringing all the bodies here: When it was all over, when Liza was through with me, and with Dawn, she'd planned to burn up all of the evidence.

Scatter my ashes to the wind.

I scraped myself off the floor, laboriously making it onto my knees, my arms trembling with the effort of lifting me. Liza lay sprawled nearby, a bloody gaping hole where the back of her head should be, bits of gore matted into her carefully braided dark hair.

"It just went off," Richard said, his voice low, mumbling. His skin, normally a deep tan, was ashy and bloodless. "I didn't...she had it in her hand and I grabbed for it and it just went off."

The gun sat abandoned on the floor between the body and Richard, huddled as he was against the fireplace and its low-burning embers. His clothes were dark, soaked through with blood.

I regarded him warily, glancing down at Liza, uncertain whether to trust this, whether this could somehow be some other kind of trick. Shakily, I got to my feet and went to where Dawn was tied up, tried with clumsy numb fingers to help undo the knots and the gag. Tears were streaming down her face, her shoulders shaking.

"I...Jesus Christ," Richard moaned, as if with dawning realization. "They're dead. All of them are actually dead."

I don't know what expression I made when I turned to look at him, but it felt like weary exasperation.

He wasn't looking at me. "I didn't want this," he said, staring down at his hands. I could see his fingertips trembling. "It's...it's not like on TV. Revenge. Justice. It sounds so good, so right, and then you realize that people...if you kill them, they're actually fucking dead."

It sounded so stupid, so obvious, but I knew exactly what he meant.

"I was so angry when Laurel died. I was pissed at her, for being dead, and I was pissed at myself, for not being better to her, and I was pissed at everybody else for the same thing, and Liza had this whole thing planned and god help me it felt good. It felt good to think about it and it felt good to say it and then we were in it so deep that..." he coughed, then, for a long time, unable to say much of anything as he spluttered fat gobs of blood up onto the floor.

Dawn sniffed beside me, wiping her face. "I don't understand any of this," she admitted. She was woozy, still under the effects of the drugs. She swayed on her feet and reached for me, steadied against my shoulder.