She stood up and moved toward them, keeping the pulse emitter aimed squarely at Enola with her other arm crushed against her chest. She practically made a running start at Enola and kicked him to get him off Ampersand, but he hardly budged. He probably had at least a hundred pounds on Ampersand, putting his bulk somewhere in the five-hundred-pound range. At just shy of four hundred pounds, Ampersand might have been easier to move if his bulk were more concentrated like a human’s, but his limbs were so long, his head so big, and most of his weight was in his torso, so even moving that meant that the rest of him dragged along like so many balls and chains.

She got them a couple of feet apart before she decided, Fuck it. She turned the flashlight off to prevent it from shorting again, and shot Enola point-blank in the back with the pulse emitter. And then again. She kept shooting him until the pulse emitter had no energy left to shoot. Then she kept firing.

After a number of impotent clicks, she turned the flashlight back on and began looking around for a weapon. Any weapon. A shovel, perhaps. She wondered if a sharp stick would do. She wanted to kill it. She wanted it dead. If she couldn’t kill Obelus, at least she could kill this one.

Now crashing from her high of terror, she was starting to feel nauseous, the thrumming of blood through her skull turning into a headache. What a barbaric thing to think. Her memory drifted back to a moment she had last year with Ampersand, one in which he had expressed confusion over why she hadn’t killed him the first time an opportunity had presented itself. He was an alien, was he not? An unknown thing, a terror, a threat. And she had told him, I wouldn’t attack you when you’re helpless. Even if I had known exactly how to kill you, I wouldn’t have done it. Why would she not extend the same grace to Enola?

The only help she could be at the moment was to make her way back through the woods to the cave, retrieve the pill bug, bring it back, and hope she was able to revive Ampersand before Enola came to. It had taken at least an hour to get all the way down here, but then she didn’t have the benefit of a dead man’s SUV to steal. Assuming he was dead—he’d looked dead when his face fell to the ground, eyes open and mouth slack, but she hadn’t checked.