No Exit by Taylor Adams 2

Jay cried, struggling to look away, but Ashley wouldn’t let
her. “See?” he said into her ear. “That’s a red card.”
Across the room Lars watched all of this like a scarecrow,
holding the .45 in one hand and a white jug of bleach in the
other, as Ed’s strangled scream reached a fever pitch in the
confined air.
All of this horror barely registered with Darby.
She wasn’t there. Not really. She was somewhere else, and
this world had gone slippery, tinged with oil. Lights smeared
into shafts. Her body was a cold suit, her heartbeat and breaths
falling into a slow, mechanical rhythm. She imagined a tiny
creature, her truest self perhaps, pulling levers and viewing
camera feeds inside her own skull. She’d seen that in a movie
— Men in Black. She recalled watching the DVD years ago,
with her mother on the basement sofa, sharing a Snoopy
blanket. I like Will Smith, her mother had told her, sipping a
drink that smelled like peaches. He can rescue me anytime
he’d like.
She was gone now, Darby realized.
The body of Maya Thorne would remain in some hospital
in Provo, Utah, but the tiny being that lived inside her head
was lost forever.
Now Ashley squeezed her right hand, interlocking his icy
fingers into hers like teenagers on a date, and he guided her
through the room. Past Ed and Sandi, past the stone counter,
past the coffee machines. She didn’t know where he was
taking her, nor did she care. She numbly noticed her right foot
was leaving red footprints — she’d sleepwalked through Ed’s
pooled blood. Like a nightmare, she just wanted it all to be
over.
For it to please be over.
She twisted her neck, glancing back at the old Garfield
clock on the wall. It read 5:19 a.m. For winter daylight
savings, she subtracted an hour.
That made it 4:19 a.m.