- STEVEN -

"You know, I gotta admit: I never was really any good at anatomy." Lane wore a mischievous smile as she spoke. "But I guess it's never too late to start studying." She pressed down lightly with the hacksaw she held, penetrating into my father's back with the frontmost two teeth.

Dad groaned weakly, a trickle of blood running down his side.

"Lane," I could hear the tears in my own voice. "Lane, please."

"But, Steven?" Her words were full of acrimony as she drew back the blade. "We've only scratched the surface!" She sliced the saw down again, this time harder, stabbing a full gash just below Dad's clavicle. Blood spurted upward, scattering to stain the saw in dots as my father howled in agony.

I felt throbbing, aching behind my eyes, thick in my skull. "I...he was wrong," my confession came out more like begging, shivering a final plea into the unforgiving air.

Lane left one hand perched on the hacksaw's handle, blood seeping from my dad's back onto the carpet all the while; with a cock of her neck, she turned to me.

"Lane, they were all wrong. Everything my dad did to you...everything that happened with Glenn...and Marissa...it was dead wrong." Tears were streaming down my face now. "But...you don't have to do this."

Lane shook her head. "You know, you really are just like him." She tightened her grip on the hacksaw blade. "I'd say I feel bad for you, but...well, that's the thing. You don't deserve my sympathy. And neither does anyone in this town."

I felt my teeth chattering together as Lane stared at me with those bright blue eyes as cold and unforgiving as a winter's night. How could such a flawless figure so nearly porcelain in its beauty house such a relentlessly brutal heart?

As Lane Alexandria Martin stood before me, it was almost as though I could feel the heat of her hatred, the blaze of her outrage, exploding forth in a maelstrom of pure execration.

I closed my eyes against the blaring bitterness of it all, just as the spray of pale light fell against my face.

I peeked one eye open, glancing first at Lane and then to the window, the source of the mysterious brightness—

A car?

"HELP!" I was screaming before I'd scarcely had the chance to process what I was seeing. "HELP! HELP! PLEASE HELP!"

Lane left the hacksaw lodged in my dad's back, then turned to the stage and grabbed her pink comb.

"HELP!" I screamed again. "PLEASE! PLEASE HELP M—mmm!"

Lane covered my mouth with one hand, then shoved her comb's pointed teeth into the middle of my throat. Each tip was like the sting of a scorpion, the penetration of coarse metal rods through skin that felt already to be wildly blistering. Liquid strips of blood poured from my neck to my chest, soaking into my shirt as the rawed nerves in my windpipe were forced into spasm.

Just beyond the pain, I heard footsteps, hard-bottom shoes.

Sam? Ahmed?

My throat screamed, and my eyes fell groggy, just as Lane withdrew her hand from the comb stabbed in my neck and resumed her full height before walking back to finish with my father.

"S-S-Salrrr..." I tried to call out to Sam, to whoever was roaming through the church—were they looking for me?—but my words escaped as gargled slurs while blood squirted intermittently, streaking down my body and all along Lane's girlish pink comb.

Gripping the hacksaw once more, Lane wrenched the blade caudally in a single motion, stopping just above Dad's hip, then withdrew her weapon and let flow the sanguinary discharge of his excoriated flesh.

With a single foot, she nudged my father's legs wide open, then swung her blade like an axe into the middle of his crotch. Crimson spewed as if fleeing a fire hose, as though set aspark by the surge of a live wire. Splotches of dark, cherry-colored fluid spattered and clung to the carpet like blood in the snow.

STOP IT! I was screaming in my mind. STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!

Lane raised her blade once again, her grip firm and strong around the saw's handle as her stone-cold eyes narrowed at my father's writhing body, his abraded and nightmarish hollering.

"Lane, stop!"

My eyes grew wide.

For it was not my voice, silenced and bloody, that broke through the ferocity of this most horrifying moment. It was the words of another, the command of a ruggedly tired yet unwavering soul standing in the doorway to the chapel that gave pause to both me and Lane, leaving us to stop and stare.

"S-Sam?" Lane exhaled a soft, bewildered breath.

- AHMED -

I rushed into the room after Sam, Irina sprinting behind.

The screen projecting above the stage flaunted the vitiated corpse of Glenn Clather, the bloody carvings on his back mid-ooze, his cranium split in half to reveal its darkly gory entrails.

In front of the stage, Steven sat bound to the pew; to his right, Marcus Hall's body was splayed wide, drenched already in red and pouring ever more from between his legs.

"He's gonna die," I whispered. "Guys, we've gotta get him to a doctor, or—"

"DON'T!" Lane screamed, waving a saw-toothed blade in the air. "Don't even think about it."

"Lane, listen to me," Sam tried. "You're better than this...you're not just some killer..."

Lane laughed. "Of course I am." She glanced down briefly at Steven's dad. "And so is he."

"Lane, you can't be serious," I tried. "I know Pastor Hall's done a lot, but—"

"YOU KNOW NOTHING!" She waved the blade again, shook her head. "So ugly," she whispered at first. "HE MADE ME FEEL SO UGLY!"

I winced, took a step back.

"Of all people, Ahmed, I'd have thought you would understand."

I shivered. "What's that supposed to mean!?"

"It means," Lane trilled, "that I saw what Steven wrote on your locker that night."

"Y-you were there?" I breathed.

Lane placed one hand on her hip. "Who do you think wiped it clean after the four of you were gone? Did you really think I was going to let Steven off that easy?" she scoffed. "When I sent that footage to Detective Stapleman, he thought he'd hit a gold mine—and with no evidence that he was just there pulling a prank, I knew Steven would be forced to run and hide...just like I was forced to run and hide."

"And what about the rest of us!?" I countered. "How could y—"

"You and Irina were never going to jail, and neither was Grace. Not after my file started surfacing around town. And in his mad dash to cover up the truth, dear old daddy Marcus left himself wide open."

Sam shook his head. "Lane, I'm begging you." He sighed. "You can't do this."

Lane's eyes narrowed. "It's already done." She turned to EdgeWay's dying leader and lifted her hacksaw into the air, preparing to smash it sideways across his waist when, suddenly, the whir of cop sirens ripped through the air.

Lane growled in rage, her head twisting back and her eyes thinning at the three of us who stood in the sanctuary doorway. "You really think, really, that the police can stop me?"

"Not in the slightest."

Sam, Irina, and I whirled around, turning at once to the voice emanating from behind us.

"But I'm hoping that for once," the voice continued, "the love of God will be enough to save you from yourself."

"Ms. Charity?" I breathed.

She stepped forward, walking between me and Irina, then continued up the aisle toward where Lane stood, blood-drenched hacksaw in hand.

"Stay back!" Lane ordered, pointing the saw's front end toward Ms. Charity as she steadily approached. "Charity, I swear, I will rip you to a million freaking pieces—!"

"And then what, Lane? Dig up another little girl's grave? Bury me for getting in the way?"

"STOP IT!" Lane screeched. "STOP IT RIGHT NOW!"

"Stop what, my love?" Ms. Charity breathed.

"...T-trying to get...close to me..." A single tear fell from Lane's eye, dripped from her cheek.

"You don't have to be afraid," Ms. Charity whispered. "He loves you—Jesus loves you so much."

"Don't you dare!" Lane commanded, her voice regaining its edge. "Don't you dare try to bring religion into this!"

"It's not about religion," Ms. Charity countered. "It's about love...it's about you." She took another few steps forward. "And you, Lane—you are so deeply loved. But you've let monsters define you, ruin you, until you've become no better than they are."

"Don't come any closer!" Lane waved her blade again, more tears escaping her eyes as she spoke, as Ms. Charity held her smooth and gentle stride.

"Lane, you've used your lack of faith the same way Marcus used this town's religiosity, to justify wrongdoing and satiate every devilish desire—to eschew purity and sidestep self-control." Ms. Charity finally stopped walking once she stood mere inches from Lane. "Jesus is the Answer, Lane," she breathed. "It's just that none of the people around you ever really found him. Not Marcus, not Marissa, not Landon, not Caroline, and not you."

Lane shuddered at Ms. Charity's words, her body quavering as more tears began to stream from her cheeks.

Ms. Charity reached forward to touch Lane's hand still gripping the saw. "Put it down, my love," Charity said in a low voice. "Put down the blade, Lane."

Lane sniffled, her head shaking slowly as she shut her eyes to it all.

"You heard her," came another voice from the distance.

I turned to see Prudence Darrow and two officers walking in a side door to the left of where Sam, Irina, and I stood.

"Drop the weapon. Put your hands on your head, and—"

POW!

Prudence and the officers ducked just as a bullet ripped through the leftmost sanctuary window, propelling shards of glass through slits in the blinds.

Sam and Irina ran for cover behind the sanctuary entrance doors, and I instinctively jumped to the floor to shield myself behind the row of pews in front of me.

More shots rang out, and I heard Prudence yell into a walkie-talkie, "It's Alice! Alice Martin is armed and positioned against the building's left flank!"

Two more officers darted inside, just as another gunshot tore through the air.

I bolted for a more protected vantage, hiding myself behind more and more rows of chairs as I moved forward and away from the sanctuary's back leftmost corner.

One of the officers ran toward the stage for Lane as Prudence fired her weapon again, and I heard Alice scream in pain.

Lane gasped at the cry of her sister, then hurled her saw blade at the officer sprinting toward her with his weapon drawn. He fired his gun, just as the hacksaw's handle struck him in the face and he lost his balance, toppling to the pews as blood poured from his nostrils.

Lane bounded from the room through the exit at the side of the stage, leaving Ms. Charity to stand with her arms extended and a look of wistfulness painted on her face.

Without thinking, without hardly even sensing what I was doing, I ran from the room after Lane.

The church beyond the sanctuary was dark; but I could still hear the rapid, frantic patter of footsteps as Lane fled down the hallway in murky darkness.

I bolted through the shadows, ambling ahead with only inklings of light as my guide before stumbling to reach a slightly ajar door that stood near the end of the long hallway—behind the door, a creaking flight of stairs.

The squeak of hard wood shrieked out above me.

I darted up the steps, the penetrating light of the moon outside growing brighter and brighter until I reached EdgeWay's second floor.

Where am I? My eyes swept left to right as I moved warily away from the stairs.

Much of the surrounding area was bathed in blackness. It looked to be a storage space of some sort, with dusty old furniture littering what small places I could see. Rays of moonlight filtered in from a sidelined window covered by downturned basswood blinds, illuminating a couch topped with ruffled blankets, a set of haphazardly stacked cardboard boxes, and the base of a giant lamp that stood just a few feet from me.

I was about to take a tentative step forward when the click of a pistol sounded in the bleak depth of the moon-streaked shadows.

I gulped hard, froze in place, glanced to my right where I could vaguely discern the penumbra of a wooden drawer plucked open, a tiny box of ammunition resting on its side.

"Go back downstairs," whispered Lane's voice at my hesitation. "Just tell them I got away, that you couldn't find me." She paused, stepped finally into the fingers of moonlight. "Tell Irina that you tried...and tell her that you really care about her."

I balled my fists beside my body, felt every inch of me trembling, staring into Lane's icy blue eyes.

I blinked back at her. "Shoot me."

"...What?"

"I'm done running away," I spoke up. "And I'm not letting you go."

I could barely hear anything around me for the ringing in my ears. I'm done running away, I thought again to myself.

POW!

I covered my ears and fell to the floor, knocking over the lamp standing to my left as my knees slammed into the hardwood beneath me. The lamp's shade crashed inches from my body, and I flinched at the sound of it.

I did my best to protect my head with my arms, shielding my eyes from—

"Ahmed! Ahmed, get outta here!"

What?

I looked up and to my right and spotted a man holding a gun with a smoking barrel, standing where I'd been only seconds before. Adhered to his chest, his nameplate shone from white rays of light—STAPLEMAN, it read.

"Ahmed, go!" he screamed down at me again.

I flicked my eyes toward the back of the room, where a single bullet had blown a hole through a window obscured more completely by the blinds that covered it.

"Huh?" I felt like I was seeing stars. "Detective Stapleman, where'd she g—LOOK OUT!"

The second I spoke, Lane sprang from behind the cardboard boxes covered by darkness and raised her pistol to fire at the detective. Her first bullet tore past his head as I again spotted the fallen lamp shade.

I gripped the shade's apex and hurled it forward as Lane fired another shot. The lampshade beamed Lane in the forehead, and she stumbled backward, toward the splintered window veiled in darkness.

Crashing against it, she fell through the glass in a wave of moonlight, a terrified scream escaping her lips as the shards gave way to the weight of her slimmed figure. In seconds, I heard a sharp thud against bare grass, followed by another scream.

I was crouched on the floor, hunched forward in pure shock; I could barely move, my breath falling in spasmodic waves. My eyes sailed to the right of the room, where Detective Stapleman stood to his feet. I thought instantly that I must've looked pathetic to him—a shivering, scared little kid huddled in a shadowed room.

But above the ringing in my ears, the pounding of my head, the humming swirl of the dusty black air all around me, I somehow still registered the beating of my own heart—a beating that, for the first time in a long while, felt like it was finally settling to a calm and steady rhythm.