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Because it told her this guy might be out of his mind, but he wasn’t out of control.
“Shoot.” Wagner’s voice cut through the air like cold steel. “Shoot now.”
Scarlet blinked twice, shook her head, not sure if he was suicidal or if he’d already guessed she was an NOC asset with instructions not to kill Wagner.
“Hands behind your head, Wagner.” Scarlet barked out the order again, feeling a sickening dread build in her chest, like her instincts were saying something was wrong, something was off, something was coming. “Damn it, Wagner, do it now or I’ll shoot.”
“Shoot,” said Wagner again, his eyes narrowing even though his pupils stayed dilated from the drug. “Do it now. Pull the fucking trigger.”
Scarlet frowned, shook her head, was about to repeat her command, but the words stuck in her throat when Wagner suddenly dropped to the floor and went down flat.
And then Scarlet realized Wagner hadn’t been talking to her.
“Shoot, Indy!” he roared from the carpet. “Now, damn it! Shoot!”
Scarlet’s eyes went wide as the crash of a gunshot sounded from beyond the open bedroom door.
The bullet smashed into Scarlet’s chest, sending her flying backwards into the living room.
Scarlet choked out a bloody scream as the bullet burned its way through the flesh of her left breast, ripping into her left lung, sending her gasping and sputtering to the carpet.
Scarlet’s vision went in and out as she drew loud wheezing blood-wet breaths. She knew she was dying, drowning in her own blood, that although the bullet had missed her heart she was done for.
“Ice, it’s . . . it’s her,” came a woman’s voice through Scarlet’s blood-red dreamscape. “I swear it’s her, Ice. It’s the woman I saw in my memory. It’s . . . it’s her, I know it. How . . . how is that possible, Ice? Can the drug do that to my brain? It looks so real, like it’s really her.”
Scarlet’s lips moved soundlessly as she looked up through fluttering eyelids.
It’s me, she tried to say. It’s me. But how can it be you? How can you be here in hell? Because this is hell, isn’t it? That’s the only place that’ll take me.
Scarlet exhaled, waited for the darkness of hell to consume her, take her soul back to where it had been forged in those unholy furnaces.
But as she faded away there came voices from above her, from around her, from all over her, holding her back from that abyss, peering over the edge of that bottomless pit between this world and the next.
“Get away from her,” came Wagner’s voice. “Don’t touch her, Indy. She’s still alive. She can still hurt you. Move aside, Indy. Damn it, I said get—”
“Let go of me, Ice,” came her daughter’s voice, a voice Scarlet had never heard before today but knew like she knew her own eternal soul. “I have to go to her. I don’t know what’s happening, don’t know if this is a dream or madness or the drug. But it feels sofucking real, Ice. Let me go to her, please, Ice. Please.”
Scarlet stared up through dimming eyes as her daughter’s face flickered into focus. There was no question it was her, no doubt it was her, no possibility it was anyone but her, no chance it could play out anyway but this.
Her daughter moved close, and now Scarlet looked down towards her own left breast, saw the child snuggle up against the blood-soaked cloth, felt the darkness of hell give way to the sunshine of heaven.
And suddenly Scarlet was talking.
Words tumbling out of her with frantic urgency, names and dates and locations, emotions and feelings and impressions, all of it pouring from the open wounds in her heart, words describing sadness and sorrow, humiliation and heartbreak, vengeance and venom, anger and hatred.
“But not for you,” Scarlet heard herself say as her wide-eyed daughter looked up at her with those big earnest eyes, wide-open windows leading directly to her LSD-unlocked soul. “You were just the symbol of my own shame, my own humiliation, my own stupid innocence, my own hot hatred. It wasn’t you.”
“I know,” came her daughter’s oddly cold whisper from near Scarlet’s left breast. “I see it in you. It’s all right. Now hold on, we’ll get help. It’s all right, you’re going to be all right.”
“Yes, I’m going to be all right.” Scarlet forced a bloody smile and shook her head, knowing that nobody was coming to help her, that she didn’t need any help, that her role was done and this was her exit, her ending, her fate, her destiny.
And as her wheezing breaths began to slow Scarlet felt that scab in her heart fall away, releasing that long-festering emotion into the ether, spinning that sickness off into the darkness where it belonged, sending Scarlet where she belonged, heaven or hell or someplace in between or someplace far beyond.
Either way, it seemed peaceful.
Scarlet’s eyes rolled up in her head as her spirit tried to leave the flesh, but it wouldn’t go, couldn’t go, was somehow held back, paralyzed by a burning need to see something in her daughter’s eyes.
Scarlet tried to interpret what she yearned to see in her daughter’s dark gaze, in that saucer-sized stare.
