The Ongoing Adventures of Stupendous Girl!

Götterdämmerung (Part 6 of 7) – Page 2 26 Jun 2010

There was so much Irene didn’t understand about what she was seeing. Funny enough, the idea of someone trying to kill her was old hat, so she’d gotten over that hurdle fast enough, but who was this man who looked so much like Lewis? Could it indeed be her fiancé? Why would someone pretend to be him otherwise? What advantage was there in impersonating a dead man? And if it was Lewis, how the heck was he still alive, and why was he so angry at her? All of these questions swirled around her brain and combined with the terrifying fear of death, nullifying each other as possibilities for being asked as she simply thought too much too fast to ask any one thing in particular.

“I… I don’t understand.”

The balance of emotion on Lewis’ face turned significantly from joy to anger, with Irene able to read that the anger specifically came from a sense of perceived betrayal.

“Don’t play dumb with me. You thought I was out of the picture, just like you and John planned… well, it looks like I ruined your happy ending. I just wanted you to know what was happening before I gave you what you deserved.”

From the look of resolution he now held, from the way his hands stopped their nervous twitching and his finger hovered right by the trigger, Lewis had a particularly destructive idea as to what she deserved. Without even thinking about it, Irene quickly went into a survival mode she knew well from years of battling great evils. Without her superpowers, though, her only chance would be to quickly and correctly guess what was going on, then use that knowledge to talk Lewis out of what he was planning.

In a second, which she thought might be all she had, she ran through the possibilities. This did seem to her to be the real Lewis, but she’d thought he was dead. Clearly the car accident he’d been in had left him out of touch – brain damaged, perhaps? that would explain his change in behaviour and why he didn’t straighten out his apparent demise – and now, having finally returned and seen his finacée with John, he’d drawn a deranged conclusion that they had plotted together to get rid of him? It didn’t explain why he’d brought the rifle with him in the first place, but it made enough sense to work with.

“Lewis, honey… I didn’t know. John just told me you were dead and… I didn’t know what to think.”

That was true enough, and if he wanted to take another meaning from it, get confused, and keep her alive a bit longer, that was all to the good.

What was even better was that it worked. Lewis showed just a bit of hesitation, willingness, even desire to believe that she couldn’t be a part of it. Irene was never much of a liar, but since she really hadn’t been a part of whatever crazy scheme Lewis thought was going on, it was easy to keep him going as she effectively begged for her life and played for time to think.

And so on it went, she saying whatever she thought he’d want to hear, until she stopped agog in mid-sentence, watching for the second time that night as a man she’d loved was shot from a distance, gaping as a chunk at the back of Lewis’ head suddenly exploded into a pulpy red ruin.

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