“All right, you little fucking freaks…” Julia spews as she shoves her way through the partially opened bedroom door and advances into the hallway. “…no more lessons. This is your last day at school.”
The eerie words of our “teacher” notwithstanding, just her tone of voice would’ve been enough to know how truly delirious we’ve made Julia. Grossly maladjusted to being reduced anywhere near to our level, she blinks more rapidly every time her eyes meet a new and far more prodigious sight. Even if we’d succeeded in shrinking her down all the way to an inch, I can’t imagine her ire would be any less intimidating, though the difference now is that twelve inches, she could still quite easily bring about the extinction of her former pets.
And from the look she gave me on our way under the door after Goodwin’s PMRD retooling took its satisfying toll, I know that’s exactly what she plans on enacting.
Following the plan, Brian and I continue sprinting to the closer end of the hallway while Kelly and Goodwin set to work inside the wall. We turn the corner before Julia has a chance to lay eyes on us. After how fast she moved back in the room, I know it won’t take long for her to put herself right on top again.
With only a matter of seconds to spare, Brian and I reach the string we unraveled during the night across the hallway rug. The line runs into a crack in the wall beneath a narrow mahogany table, with its opposite end looped around a pair of nails we managed to pry just loose enough to act as an anchor.
In this angle of the hall, with the nearest window so far down and its curtains billowing above an air vent, the light falls just far enough away that the string is practically invisible unless you happen to be down at our eye level.
“You think you’re so smart? You think you’re better than me? You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?” Julia croaks. I can’t even tell if she’s speaking to me or the entire universe. Probably both. Her voice is getting raspier by the second. She’s obviously not coping well with the degradation of her insane new reality. I hear her stumbling, leaning against the wall for support as she advances. She’s a breath away from turning the corner.
I look to Brian and we share a nod as he slips behind the angular leg of the table, scooping up the end of the cord in his fist.
Julia’s gaze meets mine just as I turn back around, with only a pebble’s throw between us. The deep blue bowls of her eyes are singed on the ends by reddening veins in her scleras as madness crawls over her outer shell. She may be quadruple our size, but she’s already hunching over lower like some haggard gremlin, resting her hands against her wobbling knees for support. Her chest is heaving to work through a completely understandable panic attack, and the rest of her is quivering almost as much: her entire naked body flushed pink with shock. Even as those cutting irises attempt to slice through me with a withering glare, I feel lighter than ever. It’s more like staring at a wild animal now than a murderous teen. She’s shedding humanity even faster than clothes or inches.
“Jack,” she utters, hacking to catch her breath. The word is hardly distinguishable from how thoroughly her throat chars the syllable.
“Julia,” I say back mockingly, placing my hands on my hips and stepping backwards over the concealed string. “Something the matter?”
“I wasn’t going to kill you, you know,” she growls, nearly overcome with rage just from looking at me. Her limbs are shaking hard enough that it’s a wonder she can even remain standing. “Maybe I was going to take some things away, like your little cock, but you’d have seen. I could’ve been reasonable, even when you betrayed everything I ever gave you.”
“I can’t believe I missed out,” I simper at this proposal to have castrated me, continuing to shuffle backwards across the carpeting. “Was that just a one-time offer?”
Julia only shakes her head, incapable of grappling with any of my foolish rebellion when she already has me so clearly in her sights and ripe for the clawing. Her left leg stiffens, and I can see her shifting her weight to avoid tripping over thin air. She’s cracking badly and not even making an effort to hide it now.
“But I won’t keep you anymore, Jack,” she spits. “Not after this. I won’t be this. You… you can’t just fucking-”
“Actually, Julia,” I interrupt cheekily. “We not only can, but we kinda just did. Funny, huh?”
“Do you have any idea what I’m going to do to you, Jack? To all of you?”
“No, but I’m sure I won’t have to wait long to find out, will I?” I’m smiling and crossing my arms like a cheesy stay-in-school poster, but Julia is seething so radically she can’t even see through my paper-thin guise.
“I’ll save you for last. So you can watch it all,” Julia threatens, at last taking a stumbling step forward. “First I’m going to put you in your jar.”
“I don’t even have my own jar,” I snicker.
“And then I’m going to peel them. All of them, down to their bones. Like little guppies. And put them in the jar with you.”
All right, even in my adrenaline-high state of do-or-die confidence, that idea is enough to chill me to the bone, but it doesn’t matter now. What we need is time for Kelly and Goodwin to finish their work. And in about two seconds, if there’s any luck left to be squeezed out of this surreal hellscape of a situation, they’ll have it.
“That’ll be awfully hard to do if I’m running around inside the walls again,” I say with a shrug, scratching the back of my neck. “Kind of pokes a hole in your plan, doesn’t it?”
“You honestly think you can get away from me? You messed up my gun and that still didn’t work for you, and do you know why? Because you weren’t meant to be beat me,” Julia snarls, pious as ever. “I could already have you right now if I wanted.”
“So why don’t you?” I laugh and, God help me, I flip Julia the bird before making a beeline in the opposite direction down the hallway.
I don’t make it more than two miniature strides before I feel the ground quaking with Julia’s pounding footsteps as she sprints in hot pursuit. Daring to look over my shoulder is not something I’m feeling up to at this moment. If my goal was to get her fired up, I guess I’ve succeeded.
But I don’t feel Julia’s hands slamming into my back and pulling me into a pulverizing compaction. Instead I hear the near-silent swish of the string rising up from the carpet as Brian gives the pulley a tug with all his might.
I also hear a shriek of surprise and pain from Julia as she runs directly into the wire, which slices against her stomach, clotheslining her flat onto her back with another hard slam. Gathering the bravery to turn around and peek at the felled beast of a girl as she loudly moans over the stinging wound, I get a glimpse of the cut along the width of her abdomen, plus the look in her eye as she groggily lifts her head just in time to see Brian and I taking off at our pathetic top speed.
The vent, so far down the hallway it might as well be a mirage, grows larger in the swimming rush of my field of vision like it did two days ago on the sprint from Julia’s dollhouse. I hear the slamming of her feet behind us again, closing in faster even as she cries over the probably-bleeding cut, and allow it to spur me forward. For once, it pays off to be the smallest guy in the room as Brian and I swan dive through the air in a desperate panic, slamming through the grating and into metallic sanctity on the other side.
I look to Brian in the pillars of dim light we have to work with, silently asking a question. He shakes his head, confirming we need to drag this out a little further. Part of his job was to keep track of the passing seconds as we diverted Julia long enough to extract Gina and Faith, and it’s one we knew he would take seriously after all the careful timing practice we performed in the walls last night. I nod, helping him to his feet and dusting myself off.
“How much longer?” I utter into Brian’s ear, so quietly I might as well have just been exhaling.
“Two minutes,” he says into mine.
Down to the wire.
Julia lets loose some mangled hybrid of a scream and a screech I couldn’t possibly have identified as human if I wasn’t right here to witness it. Each of us cover our ears, observing the rampaging teen as she rattles the caged wall in her white knuckles. The screws are still loosened after her thorough morning hunt yesterday, which is why we chose this vent for our next move under Plan B’s assumption that Goodwin’s ruse wouldn’t succeed, though at her current height, she’s finding difficulty in prying it open.
“Oh come on. For a goddess, you’re sure having a hard time with a little pair of runts, aren’t you?” Brian taunts with his hands on his hips, and I can tell he’s getting some serious catharsis from directly taunting the murderer of his sister and lover without fear of reprisal. “I’m starting to question your whole title, you know?”
She doesn’t offer a response, but instead kicks uselessly at the grate and repeats the guttural noise, probably giving herself a bruise in the process. Her other hand is busy rubbing gingerly at the definitely-bleeding line of crimson across her stomach. My eyes dart to the blackness behind us, instantly spying a hole that leads into Goodwin’s insulation path, where Julia couldn’t possibly follow us. Easy in, although we were planning on Julia being able to break through the grate by now and give chase, allowing us more space to work with. Ironically, our absolute safety right now thanks to the partial aid of the PMRD is starting to present a risk to the whole riskily cobbled Plan B.
It’ll be all right. We just need to keep her mad so she can’t think for too long. That’s all.
Rolling through my options faster than I can process them, I open my mouth to speak again, but before I can get a word out, Julia slams her fist into the vent hard enough that the clank actually silences me.
“That’s it!” Julia hisses, wheezing for another infuriated gasp as she slides her now-bloodstained palm across her torso to wipe it away, though she only succeeds in spreading it further like war paint. I watch through the grate as a single bead of dark blood trickles its way down her pale flesh and onto her thigh. “I don’t need to do this anymore. You’re just going to come to me.”
I chuckle as condescendingly as I can manage, trying not to let my renewed anxiety show as the sticky bead of blood travels along her calf. I realize her voice is beginning to calm down again into its usual slithering whisper, indicating she’s probably fighting her way back into that maniacal sense of logic that’s allowed her to stay ten steps ahead of everyone she’s ever known. We can’t let that happen.
“Stalling me won’t do much for you when I’m using Baby Julia’s head to pull the screw off to get you,” Julia comments with a quicksilver cool that once again catches me off-guard. Giving the grate one last shove, she turns away, abandoning the attempt to get us, exploiting the weakness in our plan without even knowing it. Brian’s not going to last long under this kind of pressure, especially as Julia begins limping rapidly back toward her bedroom, where Goodwin is probably still in the act of rappelling Gina and Faith down to Kelly from the towering bed so they can make a break for the wall.
“Minute and ten left,” Brian drawls in the same tone I recognize from the previous day.
The words of a man about to take his last stroll.
Instantly I know what he’s thinking, and what’s worse, I know I can’t stop him. Time for an improvised Plan C. I poke my head out the opening of the grate to maximize my volume.
“HEY! Is that all you have, babe? Don’t leave us hanging!” I roar at Julia in a desperate bid to give Brian other options, and as I suspected it would, my cry goes ignored as the wounded creature of a sixteen-year-old maniac stalks further away. She’s already pushed us out of her mind again, and knows precisely where to strike to hurt us now.
“She’s going back in,” Brian says, the determination overcoming the awareness of his fragile mortality. “We need more time.”
I can tell he’s already made up his mind. Julia’s successfully turned the tide on us. The both of us are scrambling back through the vent, into the vulnerable kill box of the ornate upstairs hallway. I know she heard us emerge, but even now she doesn’t turn. If anything, she speeds up. A set-up if I ever saw one.
“No,” Brian grunts, bracing his weary legs against the ground in preparation for this final push. His voice has become airily ethereal, as though he’s begun the process of shifting to a new plane of existence post-thrashing. “She took them all away from me. Not again. Not this time.”
“Please. Don’t. W-We can j-j-” I beg uselessly as he takes off running after Julia.
It’s no use.
She’s already ensnared him.
I witness helplessly as Brian catches up to the foot-tall leviathan, tackling her right leg and wrapping himself like a tumor around her limb. As I’d anticipated, she momentarily stumbles but is still fully prepared for this gesture from the aggrieved new father. She pivots, dropping to a crouch immediately and planting her knee directly against the man’s chest before he can have a prayer of dodging the retaliation.
Glancing back to me with a demonic glint in her stormy eyes, Julia winsomely regards her easily subdued victim as she cracks her powerful fist across Brian’s face.