HM SERIAL ROUND #6: Almost There

Svetlana was leaving, there was little anyone could do to stop her. Too many people were dead, she didn't want to be next. It is odd how violence can focus a person, but once set their position is unshakeable.

She held her revolver at her side, ready to be used if needed. Her hands were already red with blood, she thought, what is one more death? Her heals clicked across the hardwood floors, playing out a wartime beat, stiff, dark, and brooding. The noise echoed off the walls, reveberating through the empty rooms.

The morning sun was rising, washing the foyer in red. It had been a bloody night, this red is fitting, Svetlana mused.

~.~

The killer waited in the shadows, hiding in a room with a couple of tables. The urgent beat of the woman's heels on the floor grew louder and then, after she passed the doorway, softer.

Creeping out from the hiding spot, the villian rounded the corner, deciding to wait no longer.

"Where do you think you are going?" The words held malice that stabbed through her chest like the point of a dagger.

"Why am I being not surprised?" she spat in return.

~.~

The movement was fast, the predator hadn't noticed the gun in the woman's hands, pointing towards the ground. Raising it to take a steady aim, a glint of light caught the killers attention and suddenly it was closing the distance between the two. The killer had just reached her.

*BANG*

The shot rattled the windows and filled the corridors and hallways with the sound of death, unmistakeable and dooming.

~.~

Svetlana thought it was funny, in a dark, eastern european way, that her death had come at the hands of an American. Americans, showy and lacking any moderation at all. It seems, she thought, that nearly every guest that had started the night in the dining room had fit a cliche that the rest of the world imposed on this 'great land' and its people, free and selfish.

She mustered what energy she could, before it leaked through the bullethole in her stomach, and spat in her attacker's face. Her Speak and Spell, destroyed in the brief struggle, regurgitated little more then static and distorted sounds.

"Я надеюсь мое кровяное пятно ваши руки и прежде, чем темнота ночи исчезает, Вы обнаружены для того, каковы Вы действительно."

The woman had trouble getting the last few words out, but she managed, because she had to, for her own peace of mind. And then she eased into the waiting darkness and was no more.

The sun, now cresting the horizon cast an array of light through the front windows. She was almost there, she almost had made it out.

The killer left her, only a few steps from the door, and retreated back into the darkness the rest of the mansion provided.