BEHIND YOU.

His attention shifts when he hears a gurgling near his feet. Looking down, he watches a man clutching at his throat and crawl towards them, delirious with blood loss - the dark pool between the couple looks like an unfathomably deep well, a black and empty window gaping wider and wider as his life splutters and drains out of him. In a dying effort to feel something, the man reaches a hand out, his fingers grazing the toe of Dollface’s shoe lacquered with crimson.             It is only now that Michael participates.           Still remaining seated, his foot hovers over towards the victim’s outstretched hand, the sole of his boot pressing down on trembling fingers. Bones snap like brittle twigs, Michael abusing the final threshold of pain, and the man chokes out a voiceless cry before slumping on the ground, lifeless.           Michael turns back to Dollface, as if expecting an appraisal.

Testing his theory, Michael is the first to take a step forward, a boot beating against the tile. Closer towards her in the shoebox room, what little distance there is between them turns from meter to inches. But a plosive ringing stops his measured footfall. His attention flickers from Dolores to the phone fixed on the beige wall, plastic rattling. Reaching his empty hand out to grip the sound, he watches her lips peel back, baring her teeth.             Soon, he would discover that just like any cornered animal’s primal display of defence - it was a warning.             He leaves the handset to hang on the line, forcing the caller yelling their muffled concern to listen. Dolores lunges for his hand. Bone pierces into skin, her teeth drawing blood with the  strength of her tourniquet-tight jaw. His knuckle cracks, the joint of his forefinger dislocating. The sting of her bite engulfs his palm - burning through his wrist. With a sharp gasp, he wrenches his hand out of her maw. Red incisions curve into a crescent line over his flesh.           He looks down at the blood running in rivulets between his fingers, one of them misaligned and bruising. Then he looks up at her, only to see a raw sheen of crimson coating her teeth, and she transforms from something desperate to ravenous, no longer game for the slaughter. 

All he needs is a glimmer, the white sheen of an eye staring back at him.           Unearthing a glint, he reaches out for the locker on his right, yanking the door open with such a strength that the hinges scream out in protest. Barely noting who she was, his knife splinters the red panelling beside her head and his hand closes around the girl’s neck; actions that are less instinctive as they are pre-determined. Until he feels an foreign force puncture his throat.           He freezes. The sensation in skin and sinew more unfamiliar than painful, like a needle piercing into an anaesthetised limb. Looking down, the intrusion feels as if it penetrated between where his collarbones meet, the precise point where both the neckline of his mask and collar of his shirt reveal a strand of bare flesh. Unable to see what punctured the hollow muscle, his plastic skin impeding on his breadth of view, Michael releases the girl who plunged her makeshift ‘blade’ into him and fumbles at his throat. Grasping the weapon, he steps back and yanks a broken bone out of unbleeding flesh, ivory clean of crimson.           Whatever she lacked in subtletly, she made up for in resourcefulness. And, inspecting the remnant of the totem in his grasp, he wonders how long she can rely on that skill before the game’s end.