Robert Walker - Final Edge

Slowly, cautiously, the barefoot Meredyth tiptoed over the carpet, moving within striking distance, raising the neat little earth turner with its three razor-sharp prongs over-head. She could stab the woman in the back of the neck and end it now and shed no tears, but a small voice held her in place. Can you do this? Is it murder? How will it play in the cold light of day to the outside world, to the police, to a D.A…, a grand jury, a judge? Was she justified morally and legally to murder the murderer? Lucas would not hesitate. It's either her or Lucas, her mind screamed at the instant one of the cell phones in the room went off, causing Lauralie to start and turn just as Meredyth let the mini- pitchfork fall. The fork bit into Lauralie's neck just as she had turned. Lauralie tried to bring the big gun around to bear, the pitchfork swinging wildly around with her, Meredyth having let go of the handle. The trio of teeth at the end of the spear had bitten deep into Lauralie's jugular vein, spraying the air with her blood, causing her grip on the rifle to steal away. The deadly weapon hit the win- dowsill and thudded against the garden tool, which had already released its stinging bite on her, leaving her fatally punctured. Lauralie's eyes had gone wide, her nostrils flaring, bleeding, and her gaping mouth swallowed repeatedly, desperate for air, choking on her own blood, struggling against the pain in a pirouette of horror about the room that painted Meredyth's white bedclothes red. Even dying so, Lauralie fought to speak.

"Mommie? Is it…you? 'Ave you…come back…for… for me?"

She fell forward into Meredyth in a paroxysm of cold trembling, and Meredyth, overwhelmed, took Lauralie's hand as she lay dying in Meredyth's ams. Meredyth's muddy feet had left a trail from the doorway to here, and Lauralie's blood commingled with the muddy tracks in a starburst of purple spreading over the carpet.

Meredyth eased the now-silent girl from her embrace, and she rushed to her bathroom, finding and tearing into her state-of-the-art first-aid kit to the sound of a gurgling death rattle beginning a slow roll that welled up from Lauralie's depths. She tore into the case, tossing aside creams and syringes, bottles and pills to get at the Fresh Flesh textured bandage wrap, an item developed in aerospace technology for stopping blood loss in a battlefield wound. She rushed back to Lauralie Blodgett and worked the bandage into the wound, allowing the blood to coagulate around the porous synthetic weave of the bandage to eventually stem the blood flow.

Lauralie spat up blood as Meredyth worked to save the life of the multiple murderer. On her knees over the woman, Meredyth caught a glimpse of herself in a full- length mirror. Her features and body caked in dried mud, she realized that the lunatic Lauralie had driven her to become an assassin herself. "Christ, what am I doing? Saving you for what? To give you just what you've wanted all along? A media-circus arrest and incarceration, a jury trial, a forum for your twisted mind? A lifetime in a federal facility for the criminally insane?"

Meredyth's action to stop Lauralie's bleeding to death here and now had simply been an automatic response to help the wounded animal at her feet. But now she slowed for a moment in her ministrations over the weakened, wounded Ripper, allowing the ramifications of saving Lauralie to sink in. "I should fucking let you die. Damn you… damn child of Satan."

A moment's hesitation more, and then Meredyth's instinct to save the young woman took root, as she yanked tightly at the bandages and tied off the porous, textured spider's web of nylon threads that acted as an effective seal, a dike and a tourniquet at once. The blood flow at the wound site ended.

Blinking, her brain getting more oxygen now, Lauralie looked up into Meredyth's mud-caked features. She painfully choked out a handful of broken words. "Hooow'd you…clim' owt… hell?"

Meredyth realized for the first time that the girl, in her pain-induced hallucination, mistook her muddy appearance here in the dark for that of her mother's cemetery ghost, returned to drag her into eternity with her, finally a family. Lauralie then fell unconscious.

"Go ahead, die, Lauralie Blodgett. Go with your mother," Meredyth said, and thought: Justice it isn 't, your going out so peacefully, but maybe now Mira Lourdes and the rest of your victims can rest in peace.

Meredyth lifted the bloodied rifle and went to the window with it in her hands. She called out to Lucas down below, unable to actually see him. "I've ended it, Lucas! You can come out now! She's dead! The wicked bitch is dead! Here's the rifle!" She hurled the Remington as far as she could. It responded with a thunderous clatter down the tin roof of a shed situated below the window, and then it slid to the earth into a clump of bushes to do no more harm. Atop the shed, the night breeze twisted a black, wrought- iron windmill in the shape of a greyhound, reminding her of the two hounds Lauralie had poisoned and posed at Arthur Belkvin's feet.

Lucas emerged from the bam, riding bareback and guiding a second horse, saddled, by the reins. He lifted his war club table leg overhead in the melancholy, soft sapphire moonlight, looking like an ancient warrior, but then his club slipped from his grasp and he slowly, painfully, slid down the side of Yesyado. Meredyth screamed, seeing the blood smear down the side of his horse, the one she had gifted him with that afternoon. Somehow Lucas got back to his feet, and limping, he started toward the house, but only a handful of steps and he fell, rolled onto his back, and loosed an audible grown to the heavens.

"Oh, my God! Lucas! Hold on, Lucas! I'm calling nine- one-one now! Hold on! I'm coming!"

In the same instant, Meredyth felt three sharp blunt punctures strike her nude back at the bra line, but the blow proved weak and failed to puncture her deeply.

'Turn roun', Ma-me dear'st," came Lauralie's chilling voice. "Wanna see y'r eyes."

The sharp pain in Meredyth's back did not slow her from wheeling to protect herself, throwing up her hands to block the next blow from the dead woman who'd somehow slipped back from death's hand. Short attention span, Meredyth thought, finding the prongs of the long-handled pitchfork inches from her eyes. "Damn hellion! I should've let you bleed to death."

Lauralie jabbed and Meredyth feinted left, grabbing the handle and wresting the garden tool from the wounded woman's faint grasp, the weeding fork falling once more to the floor between them. Gathering all remaining anemic strength, screaming, Lauralie lunged now with Lucas's bowie knife, using her weight and catapulting her body at her mother, to put her once and for all in her grave.

Meredyth dodged, stepping aside, and Lauralie's tripping over the pitchfork combining with her momentum sent her careening out the window and onto the shed below, a howling banshee scream rising back up to Meredyth, echoing off the house and into the heavens.

Meredyth looked down once again at the shed. Lauralie- still alive, her legs, arms, and extremities twitching- looked like a beetle stabbed through with a needle. She lay faceup; the wrought-iron greyhound windmill had caught her weight and had spiked her through the back. She lifted a defiant fist to Meredyth and muttered, "See…in Hell… mow-ther…"

"I'll make that call now, bitch!" Meredyth swore, and rushed for the phones lying on the bed, finding hers and dialing 911. "I have an emergency…need help immediately at-"

"What is the nature of your emergency?"

"Christ…ahhh, ahhh…. Six, no, seven dead, an eighth dying-in desperate need of paramedics immediately."

"Gun wound, head trauma?"

"Officer down! Gunshot to…to the body, I believe."

"Is the shooter still a threat, ma'am? Are you in any immediate danger?"