While he hadn’t expected the balcony to give way, Ty was glad it did. He wanted it to be quick. He wanted it to be over.
There were any number of ways he could’ve made it worse for him. Juvenile fantasies of exacting the worst possible kind of revenge on Lorenzo had certainly crossed his mind. Torture, mostly. Treating him as an effigy for every abuser, every evil person for whom Ty had harbored fantasies of retaliation.
Ty wasn't so sure he enjoyed it anymore, fighting back.
Surviving as he’d put it, even before all of this. Getting into scraps with people who he thought needed to be taken down a peg. Hurting his father, tormenting an invalid who should’ve just been left alone to die. Finding any way to make himself seem superior. It was easy to mistake the rush he felt in those times, and the numbness that followed, for catharsis or satisfaction. To keep thinking it would act as a balm on his own pain. Nothing like that could ever be a substitute for what had been taken from him.
Watching his world fall apart made him see things differently. Pulled him away from the prospect of ever getting better, of someday quelling the fucked up instincts he had; the way he treated sadism, as if it was some kind of a nervous tic.
The thing of it was, to enjoy the suffering of someone like Lorenzo still meant enjoying someone else’s suffering. A bad person who had been broken down to a sniveling, crying mess was still a person. They didn’t sound any different. They certainly didn’t bleed any differently. Screams weren’t a sweeter sound just because they came from someone who deserved it.
And he did deserve it, absolutely. For all the rest of them had done, Lorenzo was one of the only ones who did horrible shit well before the excuse of
kill or be killed.
Ty stared down at the body from the balcony, cradling the cut across his chest. Lorenzo was dead now, but that wasn’t as hard to adjust to as he imagined. The person he fought, the friend he shared despair and a cigarette with - it was just a ghost. Something that didn’t belong here anymore. An idea of a person that was starting to fade away.
All that was left were wounds and memories, and how difficult it felt to distinguish between the two. Stumbling back inside, he noticed how incredibly quiet it seemed in the manor house now. His whole body ached, the feeling of pins and needles seemingly never-ending. No single cut or scrape was bleeding horribly, but altogether he was more than a bit of a mess.
He slumped down onto the chaise-lounge, once again clasping a pillow close to his chest. Exhaustion nearly overwhelmed him, and he could barely keep his eyes open. After a few minutes, he stopped bothering to try.
No more Andy, Lorenzo, maybe Axel too. Katie was dead. Erika wasn’t herself anymore. In spite of everything she’d done, he almost wanted to find her. Like she was still somehow able to make sense of everything, that there was some comfortable explanation for abandoning him, setting him up, and killing nine people.
No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t want her any more than he really wanted to share a smoke with Lorenzo.
The time was what he missed. High school, a contrived little world where everything seemed so incredibly absurd and arbitrary - but at least it made sense. It wasn’t so fucked up and unforgiving. Life was simple in so many great and awful ways back then.
It wasn’t so lonely.
“I wish we could’ve just been stupid teenagers together.” Ty repeated her words, muttering them to no one and to everyone.
His eyes shot open. Ty’s body demanded it, but he didn’t want rest. He wanted something chaotic, something dynamic. Where it wasn’t so hard to justify his existence, where he didn’t feel like he had to. A game that wasn’t zero-sum. A place where the endgame wasn’t
the end.
It didn’t feel right to just fade away.
Something different, sure. As long as it isn’t nothing at all.
If only. Somewhere in his mind he almost figured he could earn it, if he just did everything right. Like he’d close his eyes for the last time, and open them somewhere else. Somewhere new. Maybe he didn’t even have to take all of these memories with him, at least the bad ones. Maybe he could be somebody else. It seemed just appealing enough to seem real.
Ty stood up from the chaise-lounge, pillows under his arms as he limped down the hallway of the manor’s upper floor. On the way out of the drawing room, he grabbed the maul. Walking back through the building, he was kind of impressed at the carnage that they’d caused.
The door to the drawing room was broken off its hinges. Blood trailed up the stairs and across the banister. They shattered the front window, the glass curio, and the glass coffee table; the dining room floor was pretty much an even layer of broken glass. The wooden dining table was lying flat on the ground, its legs split out in all directions. Every drawer in the kitchen had been torn out with their contents spilled across the floor. Only now did he notice the strange presence of old blood stains and toy cars in the main foyer.
The front door was slightly ajar, and Ty stepped outside to see Lorenzo’s bags lying where they’d fallen. The Uzi was right next to it, still with the empty magazine slotted in. Looking inside Lorenzo’s bag, he found a decent amount of ammunition and supplies. The folding shovel was more of a cherry on top than anything else.
Something else caught Ty’s attention in the bag. A small, gray device. The layout on the small screen reminded him of the motion tracker from
Aliens. Flicking it on, Ty saw the display read out one dot at “0.” Another one was nearby, around the edge of the house. Where he knew Lorenzo was lying dead.
“Well fuck me, that’s nifty.”
It tracked collars. That was worth more than any weapon he could’ve found. It was exactly what Lucas, Princess and Katie needed; some way to pre-empt an attack by Erika or anyone else. An edge over all the seasoned murderers. It was a chance, more than they’d had before.
Maybe there was somewhere else he belonged, somewhere he’d end up when he was done here. However, he wasn’t done here. As alone as he felt, he knew he couldn’t forget about them. The people that had given him a chance, that he’d abandoned to come here and finish this. If they were all he had left, they deserved all he could give.
The struggle to stand back up felt all the more frustrating knowing what he now had in his possession. The walk back to the Temple wasn’t easy to begin with, and it was made all the worse for what he’d gone through. In spite of the sunburn on his arms, Ty couldn’t help but notice just how pale his skin looked. Everything here was trying to wear him down and tear him apart, and it was working.
If this was all he could do before it was over, so be it.
Tyrell loaded a fresh magazine into the Uzi, and cocked back the action. Fading away like a candle at the end of a wick, it didn’t really appeal to him. He supposed there were more than enough ways to die like that out here, blood loss and infection chief among them.
That was no way to go, not for him. He’d go screaming into the void, a bolide cutting a fiery streak across the sky before shattering into dust. For himself, for the others, and everything that used to be.
It’d be nice if that earned him something else after all of this. Ty supposed it didn't really matter either way, if he chose to believe it.