Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance

by Michael Paul Gonzalez

  I try to turn the gun on myself, but men are pouring out of the ambulance, piling on top of me.

  This is the bitch he’s been looking for, they say.

  We’ve got to get her back to the Doctor.

  Time to say sorry, bitch.

  Lightning breaks the sky, and my heart stops.

  * * *

  Lightning hits my body, and my heart has started again. The drug is working, for how long, I don’t know.

  The hallway is still empty. This is near the top floor of the building. I remember because they brought me here before. This was where the Doctor began the process of my apology, taking my legs.

  And now I want to finish it for him. Ten shots. All I need is one.

  I deserve the bullet more than he does.

  I don’t regret what I did.

  It’s better to be hurt by someone you know.

  I’m moving for the door, why? I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going, and it’s not worth it, wherever it is.

  I pull on the handle once, rock back, and roll through the opening. There’s the nurse just inside the door, kneeling over the bloodstain in the doorway.

  My nurse with her cold, sweet smile. Her gouged forearms. Her scars will be the last remembrance of the night I clung to life. I hear footsteps pounding up the hall, and I know that the Doctor will be coming. This would be too exciting for him to miss. My heart is still misfiring. I’m out of needles, out of ideas. I just need to see his face. Just need to breathe long enough for one exhale, one squeeze.

  Thunder builds in the hallway, a stampede. Noise everywhere, shaking the walls, vibrating the floor. The Doctor has brought some friends. He’s still dressed all in white, white hair perfectly combed. His two eyes register my singular good one. Inside, I think he’s smiling.

  “My God, you did it…you really did it. Just like the last time. You’re the greatest product test I’ve ever had. I should thank you. Your heart is so strong…I should have known it wouldn’t break. What is it inside of you?” If his mouth is moving, I can’t tell.

  The two men rush up behind him, security guards, and they’re ready for battle, guns drawn. The room folds in on itself, my vision stretches and snaps back to normal.

  “What the hell happened here?” the Doctor asks, and he truly doesn’t seem to know.

  The nurse says something to Doctor Robert in reply, but it sounds like one low bass rumble to me. My only thought is to shoot them all. I have enough ammunition to take care of the whole mess. I slump back against the wall.

  “How did she get out?” the Doctor fusses. “What happened here? Mrs. Madden? Mrs. Madden, are you all right? Can you hear me?”

  I get it. He’s acting. This is the part of the movie where the bad guy tries to play innocent. I want a happy ending. I want my actions to mean something. The guards seem hesitant to approach me.

  “The blood…the blood, I saw it and I called…I don’t know how she got out…” Now the nurse’s speech hits me, delayed and late, a Doppler ripple tearing through her gravelly sound.

  “Look what he did to me,” I say. And of course they don’t understand. They don’t register. “Look what I’ve become.”

  I lift my right arm, feel the blood sluicing through my veins so loose and free, nothing driving it, nothing sustaining my motion. Hope is all I have now. The Clearwater isn’t working, neither is my heart. But my right arm moves. Raises. Holds up the gun, matte grey and deadly, and I see it, feel it, know it’s real. Know that I’m not the crazy one. That my quest is finally at an end.

  “Help me now…”

  The security guards advance on me, two stepping, shouting for me to lower the gun. The nurse curls into a little fetal ball, her butt straining out the fabric of her pants, the bright white such an easy target. Bright white like the Doctor.

  An easier target.

  The guards are on either side of him, ready to fire, and he’s slack. His arms at his sides. I pray for telepathy, bellow my thoughts to the security guards. Have some decency! Read my face! Leave and tell the outside world what’s happening here. Media reports, news stories, something, just five minutes…the Terror at the Trauma Center. Hell’s Hospital. Carnage in the Care Unit. Someone just has to say something. Make someone care. Put it on paper. Make it organized, make it stick. Build a list. Order, order. They are statues, great iron things ready to kill me.

  As my brain scrambles to eat up the last of the good oxygen pooling there, the world becomes sharper. I see reflections of myself in Doctor Robert’s eyes. In his left, I’m whole and angelic, sickly green, cowering in the corner with a knife made out of a shard of mirror.

  Who I was.

  In his right eye, I’m legless, destroyed, bandaged and bloody, gripping a 9mm handgun.

  Who I am.

  The bloodstain on the carpet takes me to the truth. I killed my daughter. I started this whole thing because I wouldn’t give her up. Because I loved her then and still do now, mistakes and all.

  It’s all I have, so I have to run with it.

  The sky has finally cleared, and for a crazy lady with a pistol, it has made my life’s work a mess. Now my list reads:

  10. Vasili – turned his back on Hooded Jack

  9. Susan Schrader – divorce attorney

  8. Grace Brooks – should have been my role model

  7. Shakes – lured my daughter

  6. Caligula – set me up

  5. Delia Sugar – ruined my daughter

  4. Hooded Jack – lied to me

  3. Dr. Robert Fortescu – I quit

  2. Veronica Madden – look in the mirror

  1. Mrs. Robinson – all my fault

  The guards have their guns leveled on me. And I can’t tell if they’re orderlies, or feds, or cops, or my inner demons. I’m not seeing in color anymore. One of them barks for me to drop it, but I can’t. Because this has to end. Even if it’s just in my mind, even if none of this ever happened, he stole my daughter’s heart, and I can’t let it slide.

  So I bring the gun up, and everyone makes a move on me.

  They tell me if I don’t drop it now, I’m dead. They tell me it doesn’t have to end this way.

  What the hell.

  This isn’t the kind of thing you live to tell about anyway.

  So I exhale.

  And squeeze.

  “There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say,” Cyril Connolly wrote, and we believe he was right.

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