She rolls Wade off her, and gets wearily to her feet. She watches his body until it quits twitching. When it does, Alana drops his heart in the mud and grinds it under her heel, like a smoker crushing a cigarette.

She takes a deep breath and looks up at the sky, letting the rain clean the blood and muck off her body. She would like nothing more than to lie down, right here on the grass, and sleep for a week. But she can’t. She’s got one more thing to do tonight.

Alana goes off, down the hill, looking for her daughter.

She needs her damn sword back.

35

The End of the World over There

Carrie half-falls, half-slides down the back side of the slope of Snake Hill, her leg screaming at her with every jolt. She remembers an instructor at Quantico telling her that’s a good sign for a GSW. It’s when it stops hurting that you’re in trouble.

Danny really should be the one doing this, she thinks. Then she decides, no, he shouldn’t. Danny would let him get away with it.

She catches up with Buzz at the tree line, before the woods. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. He looks right and left, as if he can’t remember where he’s parked. His suit is soiled and wrinkled, and there are grass stains on his shirt. But his tie is still tied with a neat Windsor, and he still has his gun in his hand.

Carrie takes a three-point stance and raises the pistol, wobbling a little on the bad leg. “Buzz,” she says, “drop the gun.”

That wakes him up. His eyes focus again, and he turns around, slowly. He gives her an aw-shucks grin. “Oh no. You caught me.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Buzz. It’s over.”

“I keep telling you, it’s ROBERT,” Buzz screams. “MY NAME IS ROBERT NOW.”

Carrie is not in the mood for a tantrum. She cocks the hammer back on her pistol, which has the delightful effect of bringing most speeches to an abrupt halt. She sights down the barrel at Buzz’s face.

“Buzz,” she says evenly, “you raise your hand or your voice again, and I will shoot you.”

Buzz looks stunned for a moment, then shrugs and laughs. The boy she knew in high school comes back into his eyes.

“Okay. Fair enough. You know this wasn’t my idea, right?”

“Oh, give me a break. You were going to sacrifice all of us. And you shot me, you asshole.”

“That wasn’t me,” Buzz says.

He sees the look on Carrie’s face.

“The shooting, okay, that was me. But the rest of it…I was only doing what they told me to do. Carl forced me into this. When you think about it, I’m really a victim here, too.”