The Darkest Evening of the Year

gallon of gasoline for the third act.
    The second act is just going to be punching Piggy. Except for the burns on the bottoms of her feet, Vanessa never marked the little creep before. You have to be careful: all the meddlesome bastards who see one bruise and they’re on to child welfare. She really wants to hit her. She’s got a lot of years of hitting saved up.
    The first act is some little pretend-drowning in the big bathtub upstairs. Tie her up, do some dunking, see how long she can hold her breath. If it’s good enough to get some answers out of terrorists, it’s good enough for Piggy, who doesn’t even have any answers to give.
    Vanessa has just finished filling the tub with cold water, as cold as she could draw it. She’s selected and set out some scarves she doesn’t want anymore, to tie up the little freak.
    She has wasted ten years with this. Ten years. She has never gotten from it the level of satisfaction she expected.
    It’s very difficult for a pleasure in reality to be equal to what you work up first in your imagination. The world is always failing her. Pleasure is the only thing, everything, and yet it is never what it ought to be.
    Maybe she’ll find something better in the desert. She likes the heat of the desert, the barrenness, the emptiness.
    There’s too much nature here on the coast. She just wants sand and heat and white sky and silence.
    She bought a book, The World Without Us, she wants to read it in the desert, someplace isolated, where there’s just her and Harrow, and then maybe not him.
    Death is the only thing that satisfies. It’s the only thing that is complete, everything you expect it to be. The dead never fail you.
    She is descending the front stairs when, just as she’s about to turn onto the landing, she hears whispering in the vestibule. She stops, puts her back to the wall, and eases to the corner.
    She’s just in time to see Piggy going out the door with a dog. What the hell is that about?
    Amy Redwing looks after the girl for a moment, then closes the door and turns to Brian.
    Vanessa eases back from the corner, for fear they’ll glance up at the stairs. She hears fragments of their quick exchanges: search…kitchen…back stairs.
    She retreats to the second floor and races across it, as light-footed as always. She descends the back stairs.
    They have guns, and she just has the knife she was going to use to mess with Piggy’s mind a little, the old Bear knife. She doesn’t care if it’s a challenge. She doesn’t even care if she dies. But she won’t die, precisely because she doesn’t care. It’s when you care about dying that you hesitate, and when you hesitate, Vanessa cuts you down.
    Redwing and Bry want to live. They’ll hesitate, which makes a knife faster than a bullet every time.
    She is very excited. She has wanted him dead a long time.
    Off the back stairs, across the kitchen, where fog creeps through the open door, toward the pantry, but instead into a narrow broom closet. The closet contains only a mop, no broom, and Vanessa has just enough room to close the door. It’s like standing up in a coffin.
     

     
    Returning from the front of the house, Amy and Brian searched the rooms that they passed by earlier when Nickie led them through the place. As it turned out, the dog’s disinterest in those spaces proved to be wisdom at work, because they were all deserted.
    In the kitchen, the pantry seemed unlikely to yield either one of the charming couple, but Amy yanked open the door while Brian covered it with his pistol.
    The hinges creaked on the pantry door, and behind Amy other hinges creaked almost simultaneously, and she started to turn, but the knife took her in the back and went deep, and the air went out of her, and the strength.
     

     
    Amy made a small bird cry, and Brian turned to see Vanessa behind her, and Amy’s face as white as the whites of her eyes.
    Running horses on stone could have clopped no harder than his heart, and he hesitated to shoot because Amy was blocking Vanessa.
    His hesitation coincided with movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye, and he saw a man, surely Michael, coming through the open kitchen door, a pistol in his fist.
    Brian wasn’t familiar with the gun that he had taken off the shooter earlier, but he didn’t hesitate to fire before being fired upon. The weapon was a machine pistol; a quick squeeze pumped out five, six rounds.
    Michael went down, but maybe not because he was hit, maybe only for