Then we’ve reached one of the doors and the man sets me down and my first instinct is to run, but Veronika grabs my arm and yanks me inside, and it looks like the man is going to follow when a bullet tears into the back of his head.
Veronika tries to drag me down the corridor.
I resist, kicking at her, which unsurprisingly isn’t something she enjoys.
She punches me, then presses the barrel of the gun against my head.
“Do you want me to kill you?”
I’m guessing the question is rhetorical so I don’t bother answering.
“Move,” she says, pushing me forward.
I move. “Where are we going?”
“Move,” she repeats.
I walk ten paces before I stop.
The barrel of the gun pokes me in the back of the head.
I don’t move. I close my eyes. Hope that at any second my father or one of those men from the helicopters will bust through the door and kill Veronika. Because they’re here now—they’re so close—and the only thing I have to do is wait.
“I will not tell you again,” Veronika says.
I open my eyes. Slowly turn around.
She’s aiming the gun at my face. The barrel is this tiny hole less than a foot from my nose. With a slight squeeze of the trigger, a bullet in the gun will exit that hole and kill me. At least, that’s the way I understand the mechanics of guns. I’ve never actually fired one before. Have never even touched one. All I know of guns is what I’ve seen in movies and on TV.
Past Veronika, down the corridor, is the door we’ve just entered. Nobody opens it to save me.
I turn around again, my back now to Veronika and that closed door, and start to walk.
Behind me, Veronika takes a step forward.
That’s when I spin back around and throw my body into hers. We hit the wall with a heavy thud. The impact is enough to cause her to drop the gun. It clatters to the floor. I bend to reach for it. Veronika kicks me in the stomach. I fall to my knees, reaching for the gun, but Veronika steps over me. She bends, reaching for the gun herself. I grab her ankle, yank back as hard as I can. She loses her balance, falls on her face. I crawl over her, digging my knee into her back, into her kidneys. Both of us are reaching for the gun that’s only inches away. I’m on top of Veronika, so I have a slight advantage, but not much. Because I don’t have the training that Veronika has. Because the world Veronika lives in is not the world I live in. I’m just seventeen years old. I attend high school. I like going to the mall with my friends and being sarcastic with boys. So I take a moment to think about what any seventeen-year-old girl would do in this situation, and like that, the answer becomes obvious.
I grab Veronika’s hair, yank her head back, and smash her already messed up face into the floor.
It doesn’t stop her, but it gives me the extra couple of seconds to scramble forward and grab the gun.
It feels heavier than I thought it would, but I grip the handle tightly as I turn and stand up, pointing the gun at Veronika.
She looks up at me, her nose now dripping with blood. Her ground hamburger face cracks into a smile.
“Are you going to shoot me, Holly? Are you going to kill me?”
I don’t answer. I keep the gun aimed at her face.
Veronika grins, her mouth full of blood. “You are not going to shoot me. You are not the type.”
I look past her up the corridor at the closed door.
Come on, I think. Come on, come on, come on.
Even though I don’t know it at that moment, there are twenty seconds to go.
“I will make it easy for you,” Veronika says. She sits up, slowly, and leans back against the wall. “If you do not kill me in the next five seconds, I will kill you.”
Ten seconds.
I say, “Oh yeah? And how do you plan on doing that? I’m the one holding the gun, if you haven’t noticed.”
Five seconds.
Veronika grins again. She says, “There are others ways to kill than with just a gun,” and reaches for her pocket.
I squeeze the trigger.
Twenty
The gun kicks in my hand. I almost drop it but manage to hold on tight. The report was louder than I expected. My ears ring. So at first I don’t hear Veronika crying out. She’s not screaming so much as crying out in pain. I watch her writhing on the floor, reaching for her foot. Or what’s left of her foot. The bullet took out several of her toes.
The door at the end of the corridor opens.
I jerk the gun in that direction.
A man stands in the doorway, his rifle aimed at me.
A tense couple of seconds pass before I realize the man is my father. At that same moment, my father seems to understand that the girl holding the gun is his daughter. He lowers the rifle a bit and sprints forward.
I aim the gun back at Veronika.
As he nears, my father quickly assesses the situation. He gives me an awestruck look.
“Holly?”
He says it like he doesn’t believe it’s really me. I want to say his name in the same tone because I don’t believe it’s really him at first. Despite what Veronika has said about my father, part of me refused to believe it. My father has always been in the military, yes, but he’s never actually looked like a badass soldier to me. Now he’s wearing tactical gear, carrying a rifle, and has a hardened look in his eyes that
