Gone Tomorrow

her head. Her nose was broken. Her flawless face was ruined. She charged me. I feinted left and moved right. We danced around Svetlana’s kneeling form. A whole circle. I got back to where I had started and ducked away to the kitchenette. Stepped between the counters. Grabbed one of the hard chairs that Svetlana had piled there. I threw it left-handed at Lila. She ducked away and hunched and it smashed against her back.
    I came out of the kitchen and stepped behind Svetlana and put a hand in her hair and hauled her head back. Leaned around and cut her throat. Ear to ear. Hard work, even with the Benchmade’s great blade. I had to pull and tug and saw. Muscle, fat, hard flesh, ligaments. The steel scraped across bone. Weird tubercular sounds came up at me out of her severed windpipe. Wheezing and gasping. There were fountains of blood as her arteries went. It pulsed and sprayed way out in front of her. It hit the far wall. It soaked my hand and made it slippery. I let go of her hair and she pitched forward. Her face hit the boards with a thump.
    I stepped away, panting.
    Lila faced me, panting.
    The room felt burning hot and it smelled of coppery blood.
    I said, “One down.”
    She said, “One still up.”
    I nodded. “Looks like the pupil was better than the teacher.”
    She said, “Who says I was the pupil?”
    Her thigh was bleeding badly. There was a neat slice in the black nylon of her pants and blood was running down her leg. Her shoe was already soaked. My boxers were soaked. They had turned from white to red. I looked down and saw blood welling out of me. A lot of it. It was bad. But my old scar had saved me. My shrapnel wound, from Beirut, long ago. The ridged white skin from the clumsy MASH stitches was tough and gnarled and it had slowed Lila’s blade and deflected it shallower. Without it the tail of the cut would have been much longer and deeper. For years I had resented the hasty work by the emergency surgeons. Now I was grateful for it.
    Lila’s busted nose started to bleed. The blood ran down to her mouth and she coughed and spat. Looked down at the floor. Saw Svetlana’s knife. It was mired in a spreading pool of blood. The blood was already thickening. It was soaking into the old boards. It was running into the cracks between them. Lila’s left arm moved. Then it stopped. To bend down and pick up Svetlana’s knife would make her vulnerable. Likewise for me. I was five feet from the P220. She was five feet from the magazine.
    The pain started. My head spun and buzzed. My blood pressure was falling.
    Lila said, “If you ask nicely I’ll let you walk away.”
    “I’m not asking.”
    “You can’t win.”
    “Dream on.”
    “I’m prepared to fight to the death.”
    “You don’t have a choice in the matter. That decision has already been made.”
    “You could kill a woman?”
    “I just did.”
    “One like me?”
    “Especially one like you.”
    She spat again and breathed hard through her mouth. She coughed. She looked down at her leg. She nodded and said, “OK.” She looked up at me with her amazing eyes.
    I stood still.
    She said, “If you mean it, this is where you do it.”
    I nodded. I meant it. So I did it. I was weak, but it was easy. Her leg was slowing her down. She was having trouble with her breathing. Her sinuses were smashed. Blood was pooling in the back of her throat. She was dazed and dizzy, from when I had hit her. I took the second chair from the kitchen and charged her with it. Now my reach was unbeatable. I backed her into the corner with it and hit her with it twice until she dropped her knife and fell. I sat down beside her and strangled her. Slowly, because I was fading fast. But I didn’t want to use the blade. I don’t like knives.
    Afterward I crawled back to the kitchen and rinsed the Benchmade under the tap. Then I used its dagger point to cut butterfly shapes out of the black duct tape. I pinched my wound together with my fingers and used the butterflies to hold it together. A dollar and a half. Any hardware store. Essential equipment. I struggled back into my clothes. I reloaded my pockets. I put my shoes back on.
    Then I sat down on the floor. Just for a minute. But it turned out longer. A medical man would say I passed out. I prefer to think I just went to sleep.

Chapter 84
    I woke up in a hospital bed. I was wearing a paper gown. The clock in my head told me it was four in the afternoon. Ten hours. The taste in my mouth told me most of them had