Ben clutched his pasty knuckles against his vibrating chest, for a moment considering the possibility that his heart had actually stopped until realizing it was just beating so fast he was having difficulty picking out individual pulses. A cold drop of sweat traveled down his forehead and descended the bridge of his nose as he gazed into the fuzzy bloom of the light provided by Gail’s survival lantern left near the front of the stage.

            The glow was cast across Alma, crouched to the ground with her elbow fastened around Taylor’s neck, the latter of whom appeared to be grappling with the option of passing out. Her face had gone even paler than her concealed Beta accomplice’s hands, her eyes glazed over even from this distance, her dislocated arm dangling off her shoulder like a disembodied salami. Mona looked especially sickly herself too, especially after being dealt a blow that was rapidly causing her jaw to swell like a purple storm cloud.

            Of course, even more troubling was Halle Paradise, sprawled on the carpet a few paces away from her mutinied engineer with her sister’s knife wedged between her ribs and dark blood spurting like a broken fountain out of the wound. Her heart rate monitor was still blaring its warning call, threatening to set off the gaseous mechanisms inside the metal graveyard that would send one hundred thousand innocent souls to Kingdom Come if the woman’s heart ceased to pump. Her march toward the reaper, and with her so many others, was apparently so inevitable that Gail felt comfortable leaving the pair unattended by anyone other than the now-ravenous Alma.

            Ben’s vision was swimming faster into a whirlpool by the minute, and it wasn’t just the difficulty of seeing anything in the near-pitch black of the auditorium after he and Taylor had blown out the lights with Sonja’s portable EMP. He knew his options were trickling away just as quickly as the seconds, and standing here allowing his kneecaps to fully turn to gelatin wasn’t going to help anyone: not himself, not the Alpha he’d grown to trust against all odds, and certainly not the masses like him quietly awaiting their fates.

            Somehow or other the boy got his feet in motion again, sprinting even, pounding like fluttering petals against the floor and becoming lost in the expansive hall. Estimating where he’d found it before, Ben crashed headlong into the duffel bag and immediately began pulling himself up and over the edge. Some brief fumbling allowed the Beta to reacquaint himself with the military junk, barely remembered from earlier, but enough familiar shapes that he soon found a thimble-width cylinder with a glass lens at its tip. Snapping the flashlight on, his eyes flared with blurry ovals and green dots before readjusting and scanning rapidly through the blackened jungle of weaponry, eventually settling on something that made the exhausted young man crack a near-impossible smile.

            “There’s nothing you can do now, you know,” Alma snarled quietly, breathing down the back of Taylor’s neck as her sinewy limb crushed harder against the girl’s windpipe, keeping her docile. “You’ve seen how it works. Once Halle bleeds out, the failsafe lock goes off, and there’s no bringing her back. Or any of the rest of them.” The warm words like drops of acid dipped into the young Alpha’s ears and made her squirm in spite of the paralyzing pain emanating out from her shoulder and the drunken chill settling across her skin.

            “D-Didn’t have to… b-be like this…” Taylor sputtered, having difficulty focusing enough to twist her lips into the right shapes.

            “It didn’t, huh? What could it have been like, then?”

            “You c-could’ve just… held them to… r-ransom…” the Alpha continued, her words growing meeker as she felt Alma’s arm squeezing in closer. “M-Made them do whatever you… want. N-No one else had to… t-to die.”

            Alma opened her mouth to let out a raspy cackle before the decibels halted in her mouth, her ears perking up like a wolf’s at a metallic tinkling sound, so soft it probably would’ve been missed by anyone else present. It repeated, over and over, insistent in its cold whisper from somewhere in the back of the hall.

            “Girl,” Alma barked, earning Mona’s attention after a sharp whistle. “Check it out. Slowly.”

            Nodding, the innocent Alpha arose shakily to her feet and padded softly out of the lantern’s dim glow and into the blackness. The futility of resistance had apparently been already accepted without a verbal reminder.

            “Make loud enough steps so that I can hear you,” Alma added. The young Alpha obeyed, slamming her small feet down as she disappeared into the theatre’s shrouded walkways.

            “A-Afraid someone e-else will leave you?” Taylor whispered to her captor, suddenly formulating a potentially dangerously optimistic explanation for the sound, and deciding to take a chance.

            “I don’t need to be afraid of anything, not now and not ever again,” Alma retorted more curtly than normal, her words growing edgy as she nudged Taylor in the gut. “But I don’t need the added headache of babysitting you two separately. Soon Gail will be back, and we can watch the real show happen onstage.”

            “Y-You… gotta b-be afraid of s-something…” Taylor grumbled, conjuring up a soft belly laugh that startled her handler. “I know y-you have some… trouble keeping… keeping people in y-your life.”

            “I think that’s enough talking from you,” Alma growled, focusing her dark eyes in narrowed splinters onto the girl.

            “It’s n-not something to b-be ashamed of, Alma… everybody’s f-family is a… l-little dys… dysfunctional.”

            “Are you going to shut up, or am I going to have to choke you out before Gail comes back to decompress?” She gave Taylor’s neck a hard pull in the crook of her elbow.

            “I j-just want to h-have a little conversation now that you’ve d-decided to… go kamikaze on t-this whole thing… before the Omegas c-come in and t-turn you into j-jelly…”

            “You can only think in the small picture, can’t you? You and all your friends,” Alma scowled, seemingly forgetting her previous threats for just an instant in the face of such blasphemously narrow-minded ideology. “We don’t matter. None of us matters, individually. Gail understands that. I understand that. And soon, after everyone else sees what we’ve done here today, they’ll understand it too. It’s all about the change we have the chance to make.”

            Taylor had no spoken response this time. Instead, after another moment of pause, her breathing became heavier, heaving even, as her chest huffed out what eventually were revealed as dry sobs. The sounds throbbed in their bid to escape from her neck, still contorted by a veiny forearm.

            “Of course. This is the natural response. Just cry it out, kid. You won’t have much longer to do it, anyway.”

            Sure enough, tears began pouring down Taylor’s cheeks and dripping into the crevice between her tender throat and Alma’s skin. Like clockwork, her muscles loosened, allowing her to slip in her captor’s grasp as though her entire body had ejected the rest of her bones from their sockets as well. She slumped back against Alma’s abdomen, limp, but was quickly thrown to the ground, flat on her face like an unwanted ragdoll.

            “Pathetic. Hey, girl. What’d you find?” the poisonous Alpha spat into the darkness, only just now remembering Mona’s existence. The thumping footsteps had ceased long before. “Come back this way now.”

            “Okay…” the girl peeped, shuffling back into view, her quivering hands clasped together in a bundle of her over-long sleeves.  She remained near the edge of the lantern’s meager rays, her back to the shadows.

            “What are you doing?” Alma hissed, beckoning with a trembling finger. “Come here. Now.”

            “Y-Yes…” The girl’s feet shuffled along the aisle and closer to Alma, her fingers still interlocked and concealed inside her sweater.

            “What are you holding?”

            “Nothing.”

            “Tell me now.”

            “Nothing!” Mona squealed, quaking at the increased volume.

            “You… you found one of them, didn’t you? One who got away…” Alma accused, her hazy irises broadening in paranoia. Her fingers rent into talons as her teeth dragged bicuspid-to-molar, shredding the words. “Bring it here. To me. Now.”

            “P-P-Plea-”

            “NOW. Or so help me you will watch me peel its fucking skin off one strip at a time.”

            Now weeping just as heavily as the prone and questionably conscious Taylor, Mona took the final fateful steps toward her kneeling captor, alert and just a twitch away from a manic episode. Her fingertips eased out of the woolly sleeves one stitch at a time.

            “Open your goddamned hands.”

            Nodding, Mona unfurled her palms, turning her fingers just enough that Alma’s practiced iron-sight gaze could detect that there was not, in fact, a Beta in her hands, but a tazer, the crackling tongs of which were already whizzing through the shadow and embedding themselves into Alma’s forehead before she could get out much more than a muted squawk. The victimized Alpha’s eyes crossed into one another, adopting an eerily milky hue for a split second before her lids clenched shut and she collapsed in a heap, most likely shattering her nose as her face smashed against the ground.

            Alma was barely incapacitated before Taylor was stumbling back to her feet, wiping away the theatrical tears, and wrapping an arm around a clearly shaken Mona, who dropped the incapacitating tool out of her hands as though it had become white-hot just as soon as she’d finished firing. Ben, swelling with relief that his longshot of a backup plan had worked once he’d managed to lug the proper equipment out of Sonja’s bag, ducked back into the light at last. He hopped into Taylor’s waiting hand without hesitation after she stooped down to collect him. The Beta noted her icier touch and pearly tone of her skin, but still felt safer than he had in hours as he gave her thumb a warming pat and found the gesture returned with a sporting nuzzle against his shoulder blades.

            “You okay? Holy shit, that was… um…” Taylor breathed, every gulp of air still labored, but her spirits were noticeably lifted to see things weren’t quite so history yet.  Her thumb ran down his spine as soothingly as she was capable of.

            “Yeah, I know…” he shrugged. The past several minutes he’d spent too high on adrenaline to capably judge whether it was going to work, and now all he could really muster was wrapping his trembling palms over Taylor’s broad fingernail. “Wait… w-what about…” 

            Any and all comfort gleaned from the minor victory over Alma was instantly squelched as Halle harshly sucked in what sounded distinctly like her ultimate cloying gasp, a larger gush of blood seeping from her wound as her chest inflated fully in a desperate failed attempt to continue gathering oxygen, and then sunk down. Her hand flopped to her side and splashed into the sticky pool of crimson that had puddled around her hip. An instant later the monitor’s beeped alarm settled into a continuous, apocalyptic tone. The gears shifting inside Alma’s mechanical masterpiece further signaled that all this deceptive chaos was too little too late.

            “Fuck.” The word was almost musical in its utter despondency as it escaped Taylor’s lips. Her wrists shook, rattling Ben momentarily above her palm before she curled her fingers in closer around him, clasping him to her clammy skin. His temperature had dropped in the previous seconds to match her own.

            “What do we do?” Mona cried, shuddering down to her haunches and bracing herself against the ground as her tears plopped into the carpet. “What do we do?”

            “I… I d-d…” Taylor croaked.

            “How long do they all have? Before it… it-”

            “Two minutes. Maybe less.”

            “What about the box?” the frantic Alpha continued, grabbing for any possibility as she gazed pleadingly in the direction of Alma’s scrap-metal control hub in front of the stage. “Isn’t there a way to-”

            “Won’t work. It’s already closed off.” Eyes agape, the very veins clawing closer to her pupil as if to choke the remaining life from it, Taylor’s chapped lips closed again. A near-fatal hush settled.

            “The bag,” Ben droned out in the hollowing pause.

            “What?”

            “The bag,” he repeated more insistently, louder now so Mona even managed to drag her line of sight back up from the floor and presumably the hell to which she assumed she’d damned herself through her failures.

            “What about it?”

            “F-First aid. Or… or something. S-She must have… have a-”

            The final words were choked out of Ben’s cheeks as Taylor’s fist fully enclosed him for his own safety as she took off at a stumbling sprint into the darkness. She rooted through the contents of the duffel with her free hand while Ben scanned the semi-familiar items from chest level until they spotted it at the same time in the low spray of the flashlight.

            “What is it?” Mona howled as Taylor came tearing back with an AED dangled from her fingertip in the same hand as Ben. The younger Alpha had risen to her feet but couldn’t summon the strength to flounder much past Halle’s blood-moistened corpse before her knees gave out again. “Please…”

            “Undo the straps. Get her armor off,” Taylor ordered imperiously, dumping the device at Halle’s feet and picking its latches open with her remaining good hand. Just as terrified but yet entranced by her elder’s apparent lack of hopelessness, Mona obeyed, fumbling over the lightweight defensive attire before locating the fasteners and tearing them away with strength that could’ve only been imbued with the fear of losing a family member in the very immediate future. By the time Taylor had awkwardly pieced together the wires and patches inside the defibrillator according to the instructions emblazoned on the case’s inner panel, Halle’s body was exposed.

            “Now what?” Mona demanded.

            “Get her top up. Then move away.”

            Sweat dribbled into the corner of her eye as Taylor clung to a piece of cloth in her teeth, putting the final touches on their plastic-molded last hope. She inched forward on her knees and attached the defibrillator’s pads to the corresponding locations on the tanned, sweat-drenched skin of her former boss as Mona finished rolling the fabric as high as she could get it and wriggled away. Ben, with little else to do, clambered inside the AED’s open case and peered intently at the directions.

            “S-She won’t… w-won’t be here for l-long even if this w-works…” Mona pointed out, her words ebbing into a tragic slur. “She’s l-lost too m-much blood.”

            “We don’t need her for long. Just long enough to get that failsafe in the box open again.”

            “Watch the light,” Ben peeped to Taylor once the ends were attached to Halle’s unmoving chest. “It’ll go on when it’s ready to-”

            As if on cue, the circular display near the top of the panel glowed with a supernal red that flashed an unsettling gloss over the pooled blood. It had hardly been on for half a heartbeat before Taylor’s fist was hammering into the button marked with a lightning bolt.

            The pulse seemed almost to lift Halle’s lifeless body, teasing an exorcism, before the terrorist’s remains flopped back into the blood. A few drops splashed onto Mona’s and Taylor’s knees were the only response. It felt an awful lot like being mocked.

            “C’mon. C’mon. Again,” Taylor growled. Her thumb jammed so hard back at the button it seemed it might chip clean off the device.

            “W-Wait for the light,” Ben noted, pointing again at the darkened semi-automatic indicator.

            “C’mon, bitch,” Taylor scowled under her breath as she leaned in lower over Halle’s defiantly still form. The blue steel in her eyes flashed brighter than the defibrillator’s reader. “Get. The fuck. Back. Up.”

            “It’s almost charged again.”

            “Did you hear me, Halle? You’re not fucking dying yet. Not until you’ve done the first and only good thing in your goddamned life,” Taylor commanded so coldly Ben wondered how even someone beyond the grave could be compelled to ignore the strained syllables. The rose light filled the bulb again and in the same stroke the Alpha’s thumb squeezed the AED’s trigger, willing life and another electrified jolt into Halle’s chest. There was a start, a pulse of the Alpha’s breasts via invisible puppet strings, and a blood-choked scream from the dead-woman-lying’s lips as she was resurrected purely to save the thing she hated most in the world.

            The most beautiful sound Ben had perhaps ever heard in his life flooded his ears as Halle’s heartrate monitor returned to its emergent series of pulsing bleeps, and with it, the whirring of the execution device’s gear-operated brain.

            “Open it up. Now,” Taylor commanded as her palm lowered to scoop Ben back up. The two Alphas made the short limping dash toward Alma’s murderous technology, guided by the lantern’s previously haunting light.

            “Stop!” Halle yelped, having regained a state of mind just clear enough to interpret what was happening around her. Her hands flailed, smearing the blood further out over the carpet, and her cry rapidly devolved into coughing as more fluid spilled into her lungs, signaling how little time there was.

            Mona heaved the maintenance panel off the device as Taylor set Ben back on the ground by her feet, allowing her to fish into the mess of copper wire and clacking cogwheels with her quavering fingers for anything of use. She allowed her eyes to flutter shut, acting purely on bleary memory of her earlier work under Alma’s begrudging tutelage, flattening her palm against each rotating surface inside the bulky broadside of the controls.

            A bar. The cold clasp of a handle in her fist. Something that shut it off, however briefly. It had to be there.

            “Please do something,” Mona begged, crowding closer to Taylor over the opening but clearly afraid to set a hand on her and upset the uncertain work of defusing the device. Instead she reached down, allowing Ben to scramble into her soft palm and be lifted up into view of the action above. “Please!”

            “I’m trying.”

            “Maybe we can smash it! Is there a-” the younger girl gaped.

            “No!” Taylor retorted. “They talked us through this. Right now it’s just keeping the gas from dispersing. We destroy it now, the timer goes down to zero.”

            “What are you looking for? Let us help,” Ben offered.

            “Bar. Long. Probably below somewhere. Behind the wires. It’s… hard to see all the way in because of the-”

            “There it is,” the Beta gasped pointedly, crawling forward in Mona’s hand so far he nearly toppled off the cusp of her fingers.

            “Where? Talk me to it.”

            “You almost had it. Put your middle finger further out. Two more inches. One to the right.”

            “Got it,” Taylor grunted triumphantly, latching her fingers with a resolve thicker than any length of cobbled metal inside the horrendous belly of Alma’s pièce de résistance.

            “STOP!” Halle wailed from the distance with her final bubble of air before her gullet became too thick with blood to speak. This pitiful plea was immediately followed by the returned single-note of her monitor, and with it, the telltale whiz of the machine again setting into its preliminary gassing phase.

            “Fuck,” Taylor murmured again, eyes darting over the opening for an alternative that didn’t exist as she felt the handle beginning to sink back down through the gears toward a pair of swiveling panels, waiting like brass jaws to clamp down and swallow up the last prayer for any of the thousands of Betas inside the boxes just ahead. Pieces of what she’d learned from watching Alma were coming back now. Hanging on was the only way to keep everything still while she was working. Letting go now was a death sentence; she might as well have thrown the switch herself.

            “What’s happening?” Mona said, the words nearly as dead inside as she.

            “The failsafe is trying to close off.” Taylor ground her teeth together as the handle continued inching toward the interlocking barrier, forcing her to lean in closer until her arm was almost entirely inside the mechanism. She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth, acutely aware of the wet sensation trickling away across her skin in all directions like ice cracking across a frozen lake, as if savoring the final moments of subtlety in her body before all feeling explosively stopped.

            “W-What happens when you-” Ben started.

            “It’s not going to feel good,” she laughed dryly.

            “Wait… how do you even know it will… p-please, you’ll-”

            “If I let go, they’re all going to die,” Taylor said, clearly trying to brace herself just as much as the other two as the handle and her hand passed between the panels, at last forcing her to insert her limb up to the hilt of her shoulder. “I…”

            “Taylor, look at me,” Ben pleaded, causing his newfound and unlikely friend to snap her attention to him. “Take a deep breath. Just look this way. Focus on my face. Don’t look at anything else.”

            “Okay,” the girl swallowed, nodding her head as fresh anticipatory moisture welled in her eyes, crystallizing the once-metallic blue.

            “T-Taylor…”

            “Hey,” she said, reading his mind and stopping him before he could get another word in. She even managed a shrug with her opposite arm. “If you had a couple more inches on ya, it’s what you would’ve done. And you know it.”

            Alpha and Beta locked eyes, refusing to blink, even as the device closed on Taylor and shredded instantly through the meat of her forearm, extracting a sentience-halting shriek from her throat that rebounded from the dustiest corners of the auditorium to every box of the execution chambers, which remained miraculously devoid of death thanks to Taylor’s fingers coiled unrelentingly around the bar.