When She Was Bad

8

Lily stared in horrified disbelief as Fano’s lower limbs twitched feebly for a few seconds, like a frog in a biology experiment; then he was still. Behind her, she heard hollow, uneven footfalls crossing the porch, descending the plank steps. The clearing spun dizzily around her; she felt the strength draining from her legs, and had to squat on her hams to keep from toppling over.

“Why?” she moaned as Lyssy approached her, holding Mick MacAlister’s stealth-black nine-millimeter pistol at his side. “He wasn’t going to say anything-he gave me his word.”

“Better safe than sorry,” he replied, his voice high-pitched and almost cheerful as he stuffed the pistol into the waistband of his jeans, then reached down and helped her to her feet.

“But-but he was my friend.”

“News flash, baby: we don’t have any friends anymore, except each other.” He glanced from the body lying facedown in the dirt, to the cabin window from which he’d fired, and back again, estimating the distance. “You have to admit, that was one hell of a shot.” Then, offhandedly: “He didn’t have any family, did he? Or a girlfriend, somebody who’s going to notice he’s among the missing?”

Momentarily stunned by a sudden, heart-sinking realization, Lily could only shake her head no. It wasn’t his voice that had clued her in-the voice was perfect, the voice was Lyssy-but rather the casualness of the afterthought, the utter lack of compassion, even humanity, that told her what she’d rather not have known.

“Great. Let’s get him out of the open before somebody else comes bopping a-What’re you looking at me like that for? I only did what had to be done, what you were too chicken to…Hey, what the…?”

She had tried to keep the fear from showing in her eyes; it was her feet that betrayed her, taking a backward baby step, then another.

“It’s only me, Lyssy. Just Lyssy-no reason to be scared.”

Still shaking her head-no, no, no-she retreated across the clearing, her eyes wide and her heart pounding. He limped after her, swinging his artificial leg out wide for more speed. She fumbled for the pistol sticking out of the waistband of her jeans-and dropped it onto the carpet of fallen needles at the edge of the firebreak.