I’m rooted powerlessly to the ground as Julia’s fist lands a blow on Brian’s head that rattles my own bones from ten feet away.  It takes just one strike for him to flop like a ragdoll, blood spurting from his shattered nose.  Unable to pull my gaze away, I feel like retching as I watch my friend pay out the grisly wages of his choice to ensure his daughter will live another day.  I know even now he doesn’t regret it.  Only just clinging to consciousness, he makes no protest as Julia stands and slings him like a sack of potatoes over her shoulder to continue back to the bedroom, barely delayed at all.

                But maybe, just maybe, delayed enough.

                “Come on, baby,” Julia says, addressing me with a beckoning wave of her free hand, still stippled with drying blood.  She’s already adapting to the madness like the animal she is.  “Let’s go play with the rest of my toys.  You don’t want to miss it, do you?”

                Dumbfounded, I crawl back into the vent as Julia saunters in the other direction, with Brian’s face leaking crimson down her back on every alternate step.  He lifts an arm as if to reach for me but doesn’t have the strength or clear vision necessary to locate me in the haze.

                I’m running in the pitch again and I’ve hardly noticed it, my feet pounding against the cold metal and my lungs pumping with more air than I should rightfully have left.  Knowing following Julia down the hallway would just earn me the same fate as Brian, I bank around the curve of the dark inner wall, bounding over a bundle of low-hanging wires and traverse a cross-section that will lead me back to her bedroom.

                Through the wall I can already hear a shriek of contempt from Julia rather than victorious jubilation, and at this I can take some shred of comfort.  Kelly and Goodwin must’ve gotten Gina and Faith out in time.  The outburst is quickly followed by more screams of rage, the pounding of feet, and then a stomach-churning slam as Brian is thrown back to the ground.

                “WHERE?” booms Julia to her victim with a volume that permeates the walls and the house itself, the word hardly distinguishable from a wail of agonized horror.  I hear another crushing strike that surely snaps another couple of Brian’s bones.  I can’t imagine he’s managed to stay awake this time.  “Where are they GOING?”

                I turn a final corner and can already see the familiar glow from the hole in Julia’s wall.  Though they’re hard to make out, two dark and slender shapes slink out of the light, kicking up the dust and only halting when the opening is too far away for vengeful hands to find them.  One of them is clutching a quietly whimpering form to her chest.

                They made it.  The extra seconds Brian bought at so high a cost were just enough.

                Scared as I am for our friend out there, elation overtakes me as I clear the final hurdle of pipes.  Locating Gina in the dark, then, I’m barely conscious of the fractional moment between recognizing each other by touch and throwing our limbs around one another.  God, she’s warm.  Embracing her feels more like heading home than any of the empty days I spent in prior years walking up the cobblestone stoop to my foster house.  It’s hard to imagine a time where we couldn’t be held like this.  We squeeze so tightly I think we might cut each other’s circulation off.

                “Are you okay?” I gasp into her ear, my chest heaving but my heart at last released of its painful strain.

                “Me?” she utters.  Her voice cracks.  “I thought y-you were going to… to… s-she had you under…”

                “I know.”

                “I can’t believe… w-what… what happ-”

                “It’s a long story,” I sigh wearily, bowing my head to her shoulder and letting her hair brush against my face to help convince me she’s here and not some cruel hallucination.  Her lips are on my cheek, planting quick delicate kisses like little raindrops from a surprise early spring shower.

                As much as I want to just melt into this moment of bittersweet serenity, though, I can’t.  Not just yet.

                “Where’s Goodwin?” I whisper to Kelly, still wrapped around Gina in a protective hold that I fully recognize as equally necessary for me.  My own eyes are involuntarily blurring with tears.

                “Still on the bed,” Kelly mutters as she cradles a quietly babbling Faith in her arms.  “H-He… he was g-going to-”

                Somehow managing to peel myself away from Gina’s arms, I scramble back to the hole in the wall, flinching at the sight of a blood-spattered Brian sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room with Julia hunched over him like a rabid grizzly bear.  Drops of red are tattooed over her cheeks, and I realize they must’ve splashed up from the sheer force of her punch.  Her fist hovers over the beaten form of Brian’s head, preparing to rain down again as punishment for his failure to answer her while unconscious.

                One more of those hits and Brian won’t be getting up ever again, but a sharp whistle breaks the silence and stops Julia’s descending hand in midair.

                “Hiya, Jules, you adorable little cunt!” a gruff voice sings from atop the bed.  “MISS me?”

                Too startled to avoid falling over onto her side, Julia gazes up to discover the haggard remains of her very first capture peering down at her from the sheets.  Flinching with the shock of someone who had witnessed a bona fide apparition, she pushes herself to her feet, staggering back several steps away from Brian to devote complete attention to the foul-mouthed revelation of Goodwin, who she more than likely had written off as eaten by cockroaches.

                “Y-You?” she coughs, too stunned to summon her normal propensity for barbaric witticism.  The return of the presumed dead, it seems, is a little much even for our psychotic schemer of a ward to handle well.  Nudging Brian aside with her foot, Julia marches back toward the bed with the resolve of a circling vulture, leaving him alone at last.

                And there’s my window, courtesy of that mad bastard of a tech wizard.

                Taking a deep breath, I know instinctively what I have to do, because it’s the same thing Brian or Kelly or Gina or Anna would do if I happened to be lying in a puddle of my own blood awaiting to be permanently put to sleep by Julia’s hand.  We’ve come too far in this silly little quest for species solidarity to leave someone behind in the final moment of truth.

                And I’ll be damned if Julia is going to be proven right about us being anything less than human.

                Bursting out into the light of the bedroom again, I bolt towards Brian.  Stomach fluttering, I propel my aching legs forward with more gusto than they’ve got left.  Suddenly from behind me I can hear the quiet gasps of panicked breaths accompanying.  It’s Gina, running alongside, her tangled hair whipping against her back.  Her hand grasps my shoulder and the pair of us pick up the pace together.  I know Kelly must be fighting back a scream at our suicidal gesture from inside the wall, but as she’s still holding Faith, she can’t stop us now.

                It’s hard to make out, but I can see Brian’s chest miraculously still managing to rise and fall, fighting to make it to the end and not leave his child an orphan after all she’s been through.  As I plant one foot in front of the other in petrified strides, I’m vaguely aware of Julia off in the distance giving up on climbing the bed and instead wrestling with the sheets hanging over the side, tugging at them until they pass to the floor in a soft avalanche of color and fluff.

                “I’m going to kill you, you know,” she drones pallidly up to him, miraculously calm in her certainty.  “I’m going to kill you, Arthur.”

                We reach Brian, my heart skipping several beats to realize what a mess Julia’s made of him.  Blackening bruises and swollen flesh dot his bloodied body.  This is probably something like Charlie looked beneath Julia’s crushing derriere moments before he took his last pungent breath of her thrusting sphincter.  Gina and I loop our arms under Brian’s elbows, cradling his head as we hobble him up to his feet.

                “THAT’S RIGHT, BITCH!” Goodwin cackles at the top of his lungs, waving his arms wildly above his head to keep Julia’s focus exclusively on him.  “COME GET ME.”

                Winding the blankets around her shoulders and arms, Julia fights to reach her most despised and probably most resilient pet, tugging hand-over-hand to pull him down from the mattress.  Encouraged by his taunting, she rapidly regresses back into the mindless murder machine of a few minutes before.  Probably not for long, but it may just be enough to let us sprint out of this bloody debacle.

                Goodwin, fully committed to this terminal gift and act of apology to us all, keeps his feet planted defiantly in the blankets as though making a final salute to his fellow POWs.  Everything tumbles down in a billowing mass of plush cotton to the floor, including the damaged PMRD with a hard clatter just behind where he lands on his back.

                Gina and I refuse to surrender the chance yet, hoisting Brian against our shoulders, but quickly realize dragging him along as we dart for safety will only finish the grim job Julia started.  As with my last race toward the paradoxical freedom of life in the absence of light, my drumming heartbeats feel like they’ve slowed to just a couple per minute.  How can we possibly move Brian without snuffing out what remains of him?

                Then we hear it.  A squelch, splattering brain and bone in a single stomp.  Another.  Another.  And another.

                I chance a glimpse over my shoulder and witness Julia’s foot rising from a mess of pulpy carnage where Goodwin’s head used to be intact.  He probably didn’t even have a chance to stand up again before she’d pounced, leaving nothing recognizable after repeated plunges of her heel into his feeble skull.  A fresh streak of blood is painted up the length of Julia’s calf from Goodwin’s neck, and in a flash she’s already moving for the PMRD with that ravenous gloss in her deadened eyes.  Julia’s not only caught up with us, but she’s determined to retake her first-place position in the game.

                And then I realize.  Even if we sprinted with Brian at a pace that could very well kill him anyway, there’s no way we’d make it back to the hole before Julia can regrow and cross the distance, enclosing us into her hands and the last sight we’ll ever experience on this earth.

                The device’s narrow barrel, coincidentally aimed for the three of us now after the violent topple from the bed, stares at me with myopic judgment.  I feel as though that heap of surreal clinking metal is putting me on trial for all my foolish dreams of grandeur.  I so wrongly assumed we could all get out of here together, ride away into the sunset, and live happily ever after, like some kind of idiotic band of cowboys.  There’s no one here to defend me for my costly decision, nor should they even if they were.  Gina, Brian, and I are marooned on a golden platter for our self-imposed goddess as she ascends back to her cloud to order in the fire and brimstone.

                With three aggressive punches into the touch screen, Julia crouches by the broken handle of the device whose faithful mechanical magic finally betrayed her, having grasped the reversal to her advantage now.  I watch helplessly as she squeezes the trigger, blasting a sputtering ray of emerald light to regrow its target to a height more befitting a human being.

                Gina’s hand finds mine and squeezes as Julia melds her body into the rattling remains of the PMRD, its clunky innards chugging out its heinous function.

                I’m expecting her to soar skyward, growing not just to her own height but beyond the reaches of this mansion, the neighborhood, and the county, until at last she can touch all she wants to own and reduce cities to rubble with a single brush of her pinky.

                I’m expecting to meet nothingness more all-encompassing than any sensory horror Julia forced me through in this hellish excuse for a life.

                I’m expecting the world to end.

                But none of that happens.  The universe remains remarkably in one piece, even as light pours from that fabled little size-changing weapon.  Julia remains just as low as she’s ever been in her life.

                That’s when I realize.

                Goodwin.  That son of a bitch did it again.

                He swapped the refraction panels in the PMRD back to the barrel which, by the grace of serendipity just good enough to make a person reconsider divine existence, happens to be pointed not at Julia, but at us.

                The blaring green beam cuts across the room, imbuing the entire space with an almost holy glow.  Air lodges in my chest as I stagger back, out of range for the ray by just a few hairs, and look into the epicenter of the emerald glare’s recipient.

                It’s Gina.  Bathed in the light, she stands with her arms extended and mouth agape, receiving the bloom.  If I blinked, I might mistake her for a rising celestial, because as the growth effect intended for Julia takes its toll instead on Gina, I watch her begin to ascend.  In a matter of fleeting seconds, as her body swells out and she returns to her full height for the first time in two years, I’m no longer staring at her face, but at the smooth instep of her bare foot, the size of a school bus to me.

                Our real-life guardian angel.

                I doubt Julia has the gumption to even make a sound as she, in a stupefied frenzy, scrambles to reset the trigger of the PMRD atop the hill of blankets and make up for her costly mistake.  But it’s too little and far, far too late.

                In a sweep of gale-force wind that nearly bowls me over, Gina is away like a shot.  She bounds across the floor, rattling books and pictures on the shelves high above with concussive impact.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the entire house quakes with her fury, imparted back to the ground each time her feet slam down with a humbling vengeance.   Julia doesn’t even get the chance to double-take before she’s enveloped in the shadow and scooped up by her neck, rising into the air well out of range of her favorite toy.

                Gina’s fist, whitening along her knuckles with what I can only describe as godlike might, compresses around the delicate cranium of the sixteen-year-old demon.                For a moment the pair just trade gazes, and I swear I can actually see the light draining from Julia’s eyes as she looks into the much-larger face of a girl she’s spent the last two years dangling into her literal worst nightmare.  The exchange loses its civility awfully quick as Gina spits a wad of phlegm into Julia’s eyes and brings her other hand up to her entrapped prey.  Squirming does nothing to protect Julia from Gina’s middle finger, braced against the pad of her thumb and flicked into the tinier teen’s quivering jaw with more than enough strength to bruise everything below Julia’s chin.  The potency of the blow swallows up whatever scream Julia might’ve conjured and forces it back down her throat like a cyanide pill.

                Flailing uselessly in the superhuman grasp of her former prisoner, her tiny hands pawing pathetically at the iron forearm, Julia sputters meekly for air as she’s slammed into the wall with enough strength that the bedroom door rattles on its hinges.  Gina rears back, breathing heavily as infinite hours of torment and torture mutate into unquenchable rage, and railroads Julia into the wall again.

                Over, and over, and over.  I hear a snap and a squeal of pain as Julia’s arm becomes a casualty to the brutal comeuppance, hanging like wet paper from her shoulder, at least snapped out of its socket if not cracked entirely through the marrow.  A few crimson beads trickle from her lips, though I can’t say if it’s because she’s spitting up blood or just chomped through her tongue.

                Our titanic savior, noting the impassioned chorus of Julia’s whimpers, shifts her grip.  Her palm slides along the foot-tall heathen’s bloodied frame, pinning her against the wall again, and fastens around the broken arm.  Renewing the assault, then, Gina slams Julia down to a bookshelf by her limb and drags her along the crowded path, sending plastic trophies and velvet jewelry cases crashing to the floor far below and, luckily, well out of range for us mere three-inch humans below.

                The demented little teen howls with fresh agony each time her body bursts through a new obstacle, the impact obviously putting new strain on her shattered arm, and once Gina pauses for a moment at the end of the shelf, shoving Julia’s cheek down against the edge, I can see the tears flowing and raining down from the shelf above.

                Behind me I hear Faith gurgling, thankfully innocent of all the grisly havoc where Kelly laid her on the carpet.  The former nursing student had sprinted out to come to Brian’s aid once the coast was clear, but I don’t tear my gaze away from Julia.  I can’t.

                Guttural growls escape Gina’s lips.  She’s held all this inside for so long, she likely can’t summon coherent words.  I find myself empathizing deeply, and I don’t even possess the cathartic scale of sovereignty she now holds over our captor.

                But it’s over now.  We made it.  A weight I’ve had lashed to my shoulders for years at last crumbles into the earth, allowing me to walk freely of Julia’s influence for the first time in what feels like a span longer than known creation rather than the two and a half years it’s actually been.  It takes a moment just to remember how to stand up straight with the knowledge that the girl can no longer lay claim to our fates, but as I watch Julia’s shrieking form discarded from the shelf with a final sweep of Gina’s hand, her limbs thrashing as she’s sacrificed to gravity, I more or less locate the correct musculature again.  Splayed out like an ashen cadaver, her eyelids sealed shut and her chocolate locks streaked with blood, Julia lies motionless on the floor.

                “Gina,” I whisper, realizing as soon as the word’s left my mouth that it probably wasn’t loud enough to register.  However, I’m proven wrong as this giantess I happen to love with all my heart swivels around, replanting her foot on the ground softly enough that I can hardly feel a tremor through the floor.  Looking down upon me with benevolent serenity in her eyes and lowering into a crouch, I now know for certain things can be all right again.

                Before I can get another sound out, the hazy imperiousness of Gina’s violent dance wears off and we’re both back by Kelly’s side, hoping for something we can do to help revive Brian.  His chest is heaving harder now as he fights his way back from the brink, and I realize our nurse-in-training placed Faith nearer to her father, allowing the infant’s fragile fist to be cradled in Brian’s palm.

                There’s no way he’ll give up now on her.

                A bracing crack to the back of my skull scatters my senses into oblivion.  My face smacks into the floor, squeezing the wind from my lungs before I even have a chance to process the fact that I’m being dragged roughly back across the floor.  A severe carpet burn sheared over my skin, I blearily gasp back to awareness to find Julia’s arm wrapped around my chest and her clawed digits pressed into my neck, fully prepared to cleave inside and pluck out my windpipe with just a few ounces of pressure.  Her warm body is clasped to mine in an embrace more intimate than we’ve ever experienced together, her heart railing so fast it just might collapse inward on itself.

                “Jack!” Gina cries, spinning back around, palms open to snatch me away from our staggering foe, but Julia quickly tucks me into her side, dodging the theft.  She’s limping backward like an injured crab on an ankle that has to be severely twisted if not powdered entirely.

                “Back… the fuck… off,” Julia snarls, and given the way her palm is fondling my neck, Gina doesn’t need to hear the threat more than once.  Squeezed against my ex-girlfriend’s breasts and smeared through her blood, I can feel the irregular pulsing of her lungs as she hacks for breath, chewing through what I can only imagine to be excruciating pain after the beat-down Gina delivered.  It’s a marvel she’s even able to stand right now.

                “It’s OVER, Julia!” Kelly croaks, rising to her feet and swiftly taking a stance between the injured father and child on the ground, clearly ready to withstand any retaliation to keep them together.  “Put him down.  Now.  You’re done.”

                “Nothing is DONE.  Not until I say it is,” Julia seethes, hobbling steadily back toward the bedroom door and wincing with every step from the pressure on her abused joints.  Gingerly she passes over the threshold of the carpet into the hallway, and already I can tell her strides are weakening.  She probably doesn’t even have the energy to reach the stairs.  Gina takes a few tentative paces closer, keeping her deadly fists lowered to the ground to avoid spooking the fractured fiend, but it clearly still sets off an alarm.

                “I said BACK OFF!” Julia yelps hoarsely, giving my neck a cloying squeeze beneath her weighty fingertips.  I cough, on the verge of choking, and watch Gina instantly retreat from her towering advance, too terrified for my safety to risk a quick draw.

                “There’s no way to get out of here, Julia,” Gina says coolly, trembling but somehow managing to keep it together for all of our sakes.  She lowers herself closer to the ground, probably hoping to reduce her visage as much as possible.  “You know that.”

                “All I know is that you can… take almost everything away from me.  And you have.  But you will never, ever take this from me,” Julia spits, hugging me closer into her bosom.  Her voice cracks, not from the pain of internal bleeding but genuine, crushing gloom.  It’s almost enough to catch me off-guard, though having her hand coiled around my throat is still earning most of my attention.

                It couldn’t be.  Could… could she actually…

                Could she actually still feel something for me?

                “No.  You’re not going to take him,” Gina informs Julia, softly, but with enough confidence to let her know it’s not merely a theory but stone-cold fact.  “I won’t let you take him away again.”

                Julia’s heart manages to pound even faster, practically punching through her chest and splattering against my back.  I’d be surprised if she’s not on the verge of cardiac arrest, but still her remaining good arm clutches me with all her leftover strength into her blood-splattered body, painted away in watery ribbons by her rapidly cascading tears.

                “What can you do, Gina?” Julia challenges wrathfully as she begins backing her way down the hall, with Gina and Kelly pursuing at a respectful pace.  Her fingernails scrape against my skin, on the verge of breaking the skin just above my Adam’s apple.  “I’ll kill him if you try to take him from me.  You know I will.  I’ll pull his little fucking neck off.”

                Her tone is exactly the same as it was in the moments before she pulverized Goodwin into a fine paste.  We all know she means it.  My eyes meet Gina’s, more scared than I’ve ever seen them.  Even with all her bravado and newfound size, even understanding that Julia will finally be brought to justice one way or another, she knows my corpse might still be a part of the equation.

                Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen very soon, probably in just a few more seconds.  I know already that someone isn’t going home from this.  And if Julia’s fingers can close any tighter around my jugular, it’ll be pretty easy to guess who.

                Wheezing for air, my vision drowning into blackness, the only way forward presents itself to me with uncommon clarity.  Delicately I let my hand pass beneath the folds of my cloth toga, ragged with panicked sweat and Julia’s leaking blood, and close my fingers around the comfortingly cold metal of the shiv Goodwin armed me with last night right before our final siege on the mad sixteen-year-old goddess.

                “You could never feel what we felt for each other,” Julia scowls to her romantic rival, bottled-up jealous rage at our tryst allowed to be chemically released all in one agonized string of syllables.  “You… you could never know him like I do…”

                “You’re right, Julia,” I whisper lovingly, instantly centering the focus of her insane universe back to my insignificant voice.  “Nobody could ever know you like I do.”

                Though her body is ravaged and on the verge of shutdown, Julia’s muscles soften around me.  She’s melted merely by the hallowed revere in my voice.  And that’s all I need.  It’s funny, but amidst the burning hatred that clings to every fiber of my being, I actually feel the smallest iota of pity for this broken teenage deity who learned to love me as more than just a toy.  In the next heartbeat I draw the shiv from beneath my rags and plunge it through Julia’s forearm, splitting her wide open.

                With a spurt of blood and ear-shredding howls, Julia’s fingers release their death clamp on my neck.  I flop out of the vice of her elbow down to her feet, knowing there’s little I can do to avoid her retribution with so little to lose now.  Sure enough, as I roll onto my side, too weak even to raise an arm in defense, a bare sole still soaked through every wrinkle with the gummy remainder of Goodwin’s brain hovers above, poised to tromp directly through my face and into the floor with a single step.

                Before I can experience the passage into nonexistence courtesy of Julia’s heel, though, I watch in a helpless daze as Gina’s far-larger foot launches through the air above my head, produced perhaps from the great beyond, and collides into Julia with such pulverizing force for a moment it seems conceivable the girl will be liquefied on the spot.

                The punt sends my ex-girlfriend soaring through the air, her ribcage almost certainly crushed in far enough to pierce a majority of her vital organs.  For a few precious seconds, it seems she might continue on her flight path and wing into the clouds, but the moment is squelched just as suddenly as the sensation of being jolted awake from some overlong nightmare back into reality.  Crashing into the wall above the winding grand stairwell, her neck is snapped like the stem of a flower, sending the bloodied pile of twisted limbs once known as Julia Mack tumbling down the stairs and to the tile below, where she lands in heap more silent than even the most reserved grave.

                Too shocked to move or even begin trying to comprehend the way the world has just opened itself up again to us all, I remain on the ground, hardly aware of my body until I feel Gina’s soft fingers scooping gently around my sides, collecting me into her warm, cupped hands and raising me into the light.