Mack doesn’t move.
* * *
—
Ava has a thick pipe in hand. The contours of it fit her palm exactly right, the heft and weight of it comforting. She’d prefer a gun, but this works, too.
“Stay where you are!” she shouts, waving the pipe in the general direction of where she thinks LeGrand is hiding, an overgrown stand of trees. If she’s getting out now, fine, but one of her friends is going to win.
Mack.
She wants Mack to win. Or survive. And she knows Mack will do it, too.
“Ava!” she shouts, running after the other woman. Ava Two is ahead of her on the path, a stumbling shamble of a run, like someone who’s been bitten by a zombie and still thinks they can outrun the infection. Blood trails down her leg, though it’s a smaller path than the blood from her head, soaking into her shirt so thoroughly Ava can see it from behind, now, too.
Ava Two twitches when she hears her name, a puppet with the wrong string pulled, but she doesn’t stop moving. “No,” she moans. “Run! Hide!”
Ava looks over her own shoulder. There’s nothing back there. Nothing. But there—the crunch of a dead leaf. And there, a shuffle of dirt over the cracked and pitted pavement.
The tiny hairs left on the back of her neck rise, and, for the first time in years, she wishes she had hair there, irrationally longs for the false sense of protection a curtain of hair would provide for the base of her skull, the skin at the back of the neck, a cover for the sudden overwhelming sense of her own absolute softness and vulnerability.
Her hand tightens on the pipe. Fuck that. Ava is not vulnerable. Ava is a fucking warrior, and anyone who tries to hurt her or Ava Two or anyone on her watch is going to find that out the hard way. A pipe-to-the-face hard way.
Ava puts on as much speed as she can, her leg screaming in protest. Her knee doesn’t bend much anymore, and her ankle is basically soldered in place, so running isn’t really an option. Fortunately, Ava Two isn’t moving very fast, and Ava catches her, puts a hand on her shoulder.
Ava Two stops so suddenly Ava loses her balance and falls flat on her ass. She holds her hand up to the other woman for help standing, but Ava Two doesn’t even seem to see her.
Ava Two is staring back at where they came from. A low groan, an animal sound of terror escapes from her mouth, and Ava wants to vomit. She knows that sound. She made it when she looked down and saw her leg crushed, and looked to the side and saw Maria gone, body still there but vacant eyes where Ava would never again see herself reflected back in love.
Ava doesn’t want to look at what the other Ava sees, but she does anyway.
There’s nothing.
Nothing is there.
The winding walkway behind them, curved so they can’t see the Lovers’ Hideaway anymore, is empty.
But.
Ava scoots backward on her ass, fingers around the pipe scraping and bruising on the ground, eyes locked on the path. The ivy trailing down from an overhanging tree drapes across something, hanging as though suspended by the wind, or pulled aside like a curtain.
But there’s nothing there.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god,” Ava Two breathes.
“What is it?” Ava demands, her voice high and tight with panic. “I don’t see anything. I don’t see it. Can you see it?”
The other woman’s gore-painted face turns, and she looks down at Ava as though only now realizing she’s not alone. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t want you to get found.”
And then Ava’s world breaks neatly in half, tipping her sideways out of reality and into something new, something worse.
Nothing picks the other Ava up.
Nothing pierces her torso so it blooms with blood as the other Ava screams, a sound like being torn apart.
And then the woman’s head disappears.
Ava’s mind rebels against it, telling her she’s not seeing what she’s seeing. But the other Ava’s head is gone, her scream cut off, her neck gushing blood, her whole body still somehow suspended in the air, and there’s no head, there’s no head, there’s nothing.
Ava scrambles to her feet, watching as the rest of the woman disappears. And still, there’s nothing. Nothing there, and now no body, either. Only the other Ava’s blood on the ground, fresh and hot, so much Ava can smell it.
That’s not all she can smell, though. There’s a musk, something far older than fresh blood. Left to rot day in and day out, a layer of putrescence beneath the smell of the world around her.
Ava grips the pipe. She knows what death smells like, and it’s here for her again, at last.