The roughness of the knife and my motion send blood flying across the floor and walls, the splattering of it threatening to bring up all the lunch I ate before the farce of a wedding. My stupid dress soaks in the warm liquid, the off-white slowly turning red and brown from the dirt and blood surrounding me.
Killing someone with a bomb is not nearly as horrid as doing it up close and personal like this. Feeling the fight leave abody, watching ashisfriends look on in horror before realizing they still have a mission to complete, drowns me in grief that I shouldn't feel, guilt at taking away this person who is clearlyimportantto someone. Likely many someones.
But this is all I can do to survive.
You have to decide your life is just as important as theirs. Can you do that?
Eamons phantom voice reaches me, though I know it's just in my memories. My life isimportant. I am important enoughthat I needto be willing to do whatever it takes to live. It doesn't take awayfromthe guilt, but it's a balm soothing it for now. There will be time to feel bad later.
Mr. Ruptured Eardrum bends down to try to pick me up, but his equilibrium is all fucked up, causing him to tumble to the side slightly. But the third man wraps his arm around my waist, lifting me off the ground entirely, his bloody, broken nose forgotten in the flood of adrenaline coursing through him.
I try to throw my elbow into his face, then the knived hand, but from this angle, there's fuck-all I can do to reach anything important, so I aim for the only spot I can, bringing the knifedown into his thigh, twisting it as soon as it's lodged deep enough I can feel the muscle give way.
We both fall to the ground, hitting it roughly enough that I lose my grip on the knife, using both my hands to brace myself for the impact.Hisgun skitters across the floor, rolling just out of reach. The man screams in pain, scrambling over me as I try to crawl towards it, grabbing my feet. I kick his face, aiming for the already broken nose, wishing I could kick it hard enough to lodge it into his fucking brain.
The two seconds he stops to nurse his injury again are just enough time for me to get my hands on the firearm, spinning onto my back so I can get my eyes on both my attackers. Mr. Broken Nose can't do much now, between the sluice of dark red spilling from his leg and his double broken nose swelling his eyes shut.
But I only have brief moments before Mr. Ruptured Ear Drum reaches me, his form towering over me as he tries toreach me. They have no way of knowing if I'm a decent shot or if I even know how to use one of these, but still, running toward someone with a gun pointed at you is a stupid fucking thing to do.
He leaps to tackle me, and I pull on the trigger.
One.
Two.
Three times.
The thunk of two bullets hitting his vest is only dampened by the roaring in my ears. His forward momentum still brings him down on top of me, if only partially, bringing me face-to-face with the steaming hole in the middle of his forehead.
Two in the chest, one in the head.
Now I do retch, rolling away from the corpse just in time to puke all over the floor, my vomit joining the brain matter and blood flooding the ground around me.
Finished, I climb to my feet, ready to face the last man standing. Well, not standing, not really. But the last man alive in this room. If there are other guards, I only have a few moments before they arrive; there's no way they didn't hear the gunshots going off.
As soon as I turn around, searing pain rips through my abdomen, Mr. Bloody Nose himself grazing a line through my dress and across my stomach. It's not deep enough that my organs are in danger, but the blood loss might be a problem.Might be,who am I kidding?
Another slash lands across my upper thigh, the man blindly slicing at anything that still appears white through his fucked up vision. With my good leg, I kick at his chest, sending him backward and searching for the gun I left on the floor beneath the last corpse.
The firearm is coated in god knows what, slippery and sticky all at the same time. But I aim it at the scrambling man, pulling the trigger again and again and again until it clicks, the bloodied husk falling to the floor.
My head starts to swim, whether from blood loss or the scene around me, I'm not sure. But I need to wake Eamon up right now. Whatever they did kept himcompletelyincapacitated for the entire time it took me to kill them, so it can't be attached to them. Maybe another strange device like the one they used on Fritz.
Barely holding myself together, I search the bodies for something that doesn't look like a traditional weapon. Knives, guns, everything of that nature I can hold, I tuck into the crevices between my dress and skin in case I need to use them again.
Fuck.
Nothing.
Something in the corner catches my eye, and I walk towards it, finding a metal disk on the floor. It has independent piecesthat all spin and latch together, a deep brown rust-like substance smeared in the cracks.
Blood.
Old dried blood. This has to be it.
I have no fucking clue how to dismantle the thing, so I do what I can.
I place it on the ground, using another little pistol to shoot at it until the whole thing falls apart, the shreds of metal flying in all different directions.
