I just hadn’t been ready to hear him.
We shuffled the last few steps toward each other. I rested my forehead against his shoulder and murmured something useless. He made a noise no more articulate.
“What the hell is this?” the Bitch demanded.
“Come on, kids!” Daddy urged. “Mix it up already!”
We were both sorry.
But we both knew this couldn’t end until it ended the only way it was allowed to.
I reared back and slammed my forehead into Ethan’s broken nose, feeling it collapse again under the impact, hearing the crunch of cartilage and the gasp of pain.
“Good one!” Daddy yelled.
Ethan staggered back a step, but recovered quickly, advancing with a speed I could not have expected, to drive his knee into my gut. It hurt even more than most belly-shots because my gag cut off most of my air’s natural escape route, making my cheeks balloon from a mouthful of exhaled breath unable to leave as fast as its force demanded. I doubled over, spun, and fell over on my side, hitting the pool bottom with a thud that rattled my entire spine. My spine exploded again as he spun and slammed his right heel against my lower ribs. I felt something crack, as my eyes tried to well with tears but couldn’t come up with the moisture they needed to cry.
The Bitch yelled, “Finish her!”
Daddy screamed. “Get up, get up, get up!”
I arched my back, whipped my legs up and around, and delivered a pile-driver kick to Ethan’s crotch. I would have recognized the impact as solid even if the pain of impact hadn’t rebounded all the way to my waist. I would have heard it in his liquid gurgle and in the blind thud of his next clumsy steps.
From the way he staggered, those stunted balls of his were just as sensitive to pain as the normal kind. It’d only take him another second or two to shrug it off, and come after me again, but I had no intention of giving him that much time.
I pinwheeled my legs, flipped to my feet, lowered my head, and charged him, striking his midsection with my right shoulder. He was already off balance and struggling to remain upright. The tackle drove him off his feet, his legs flailing against the pool bottom, his arms straining at their canvas binding as his body obeyed the urge to regain balance.
We both screamed through our respective gags: Ethan because he knew what was happening and myself because a tidal wave of white agony had flared down my back at the moment of impact. Daddy and the Bitch were screaming too, but at the moment I no longer gave a shit about them. I no longer gave a shit about anything.
The only thing that mattered, in this last second before the ground gave way, was driving Ethan back, further into the Deep End.
Then his left foot sought solid ground where there was none.
He didn’t fall backward right away, which might have been better for him. He had just enough balance left to compensate as the pool bottom disappeared beneath him. His left leg sank into the drain hole, and his right slipped out from under him.
He took the bulk of the initial impact just under his left knee.
Even as I heard the wet splat of the first blood freed by the break, he was still off-balance, still falling backward.
I spun away and lost track of up and down as my feet pounded concrete trying to use up the momentum that remained. I tipped over and started to fall.
Ethan took the brunt of the impact on his bound arms. Something, maybe an elbow or one of the bones in his hands, made a sound like cracking ice. There was another crack, louder and more final, as his neck whipped back and slammed his head against the concrete.
I slowed and regained control just a hair too slowly to avoid a painful face-first encounter with the wall. I felt the cartilage in my nose release.
Behind me, Ethan wailed through his gag, making sounds that could have been words and could have been inarticulate cries of pain. They sounded the same. When he tried to pull his leg out of the drain, something razored ground against something obstinate, and he wailed again, in a voice suddenly gone as high as a baby’s.
Still dizzied from my collision with the wall, and freshly sickened by the taste of blood, I lurched away, tripped over an invisible Ethan, came far too close to another potentially deadly pratfall, then regained my balance and approached Ethan again, triangulating his position from his moans of pain. When I was sure I knew where his head was, I spun like a top and drove my heel into the side of his face. I felt his jaw leave its track. His cry went wet and bubbling, with a nasty undercurrent of fresh rage, all the shared understanding between us forgotten as I became nothing more than an enemy, beating him to death in the dark.
I couldn’t see his eyes but I knew they had to be reproaching me.
We owed each other more than this. This may have been the only currency we’d been empowered to pay, but it wouldn’t settle any of the debts that really mattered. Those would stay on the books forever.
The Bitch yelled, “Ethan! Oh, please, honey! Get up!”
Another voice, all but drowning her out, swelled with pride: “Show him who’s boss, Jen!”
The blood bubbled in Ethan’s throat. His mouth must have been full of it, but there was no place for it to go but down, filling his windpipe and cutting him off from what he needed to live. He would have been fine without the gag, but with it, he was just a man in a noose, struggling for breath a mere layer of skin from all the air he could ever need or want. He was still strong enough. If I left him alone with his will to live he might even manage to keep snatching breath for hours.
I circled him again, exhausted, unwilling to take the logical next step.
The Bitch cried, “Ethan! Baby!”
Daddy yelled, “Jenny!”
I needed a drink of water so very much.
“Ethan! Get up! Do something!”
“Jenny! Finish him! Now!”
Their voices ran over one another, melding, becoming a single shrill command in a voice that sank knives into the base of my spine.
Had I been able to say anything intelligible, I might have apologized to my brother.
Instead, I prodded him with my toe, determining his position, figuring out the most efficient way of doing what needed to be done. He lay on his back, his spine arched because of the bound arms that prevented him from lying entirely flat. His head hung backward, his spasming throat as exposed to me as that of a defeated dog offering itself to the mercies of its pack leader. When he felt the weight of my knee, resting without any particular pressure on his neck, before I made the commitment to bear down, he whipped his head to the right in a final, instinctive attempt to shake me off. I shushed him with a sound my gag transformed into a reptilian hiss, tried to send him the silent message to the effect that what I did now was being done with all possible respect, and bore down, wishing that the knee was his and the crushed windpipe mine.
The next few days passed in a delirium of shifting light, moist compresses dripping cold water into my eyes, fevers so brutal that I came out of them astonished at being alive, the agony of every glancing touch, and the uncertain comfort of female hands spreading ointment on my face, shoulders, breasts, belly, and legs.
It must have been two or three wakings before I grew used to the realization that I was in a bed with sheets, and maybe another couple after that before I registered that my arms, while restrained, were no longer drawn behind my back and were instead chained by the wrists to the bed frame.
Sometimes I heard canned laughter from a nearby low-volume television, other times I heard whispers saturated in venom. Sometimes I vomited. Sometimes, out of sheer malice, I soiled the bed and exulted in silent triumph when the soft, caring hands had to deal with my filth. Sometimes I dreamed I was still in the Deep End with Ethan. Some of the dreams bordered on the erotic, allowing me to have my way with him in every possible position despite a disapproving inner voice that insisted on reminding me that this would now be necrophilia as well as incest. Sometimes, when I told myself that, the dreams compensated by giving him Daddy’s face instead, but I hated when that happened. I’d been there, and much preferred nonsensical fantasies about Ethan, even when those fantasies faded into detailed replays of the battle’s final moments.