Flo was already dead.

  She'd had the awful man pinned, had Qiang stuck beneath her pillar of force, the flesh sloughing off of his grinning face as fast as it could regenerate itself. She'd hiked up her battery pack, readied another attack, and then disappeared from the air.

  It had taken Madison a moment to realize what had happened, had taken her eyes a full second to locate Qiang and Flo, where they stood now. Qiang had, with a spasm of both of his arms, shattered the ground beneath him, freeing him, and then bolted over to the girl, snatched her from the air in one instant and pinning her to the shattered earth in the next.

  Madison barely had time to gather the air for a gasp before Qiang had driven his hand directly through Flo's torso. He frowned down at his arm, where it stuck elbow-deep through her heaving chest cavity. Even as the flesh bubbled and dripped from his head, he looked mildly disappointed.

  "Oh. With all that talk about me being a dead man, I expected you to be scarier."

  Flo shuddered and gasped, her body already in its final throes. A shimmering orb of light began to buoy up into the air, emerging from the wound in her torso like a wayward balloon. Qiang eyed it with mild disinterest.

  "Barely anything here. Not even a-" he paused to physically shove his jaw back into place, to keep it from melting off. He held it in place for a moment while new tendons re-attached themselves around his jaw. "Not even a snack. It's not gonna shock me like the old man's did, is it?"

  The corpse he knelt over decline to answer. As he reached for the orb, a bolt of lightning caromed out from behind a ruined section of seating and ricocheted harmlessly off his aura.

  "GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF MY SISTER, YOU F- YOU FREAK!"

  Dylan was standing, one hand smoking, pointed directly at Qiang. His face was bright red, streaked with tears. His voice cracked as he yelled, making him sound painfully immature.

  "I'm almost done," Qiang said, as if lodging a reasonable complaint. "I don't really care about your sister, I just want her-"

  Dylan launched another bolt of electricity, leaping forward into the field as he did. Hazel emerged from behind a pillar at this, arms outstretched.

  "Dylan! Dylan, no!"

  Qiang screwed up his eyebrows at the boy's approach, bewildered. He shrugged off three more blows from Dylan, who sprang through the air and screamed as he let each bolt fly. Then, casually, Qiang grabbed a fist-sized chunk of rubble from the ground and whipped it at the boy.

  The projectile hit Dylan so hard that the boy essentially exploded on impact. His pack shattered into thousands of scraps of sparking metal, his clothes fell to the ground in ribbons amidst a sooty red mist.

  Hazel cried out from the stands, a wounded, animal noise, and Madison felt her stomach lurch with sickening horror as Qiang's head lolled over to look at her.

  "This is annoying," Qiang complained, grabbing the glittering remains of Flo's essence and standing, moving to go collect Dylan's, which was already emerging into the space where he'd been vaporized. "Scraps, scraps, scraps. I came here for a good meal and I'm getting little pissy bits, little kids interrupting every step I take. What about you, you got anything? Anything to offer? Should I crack you open and check?"

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Hazel was shuddering, face buried in her hands, too lost in the throes of shock and grief to answer. Qiang diverted course, stepping away a step to face Hazel.

  "Hey!"

  Qiang turned around, melting face somehow projecting lazy confidence.

  Madison froze, her yell just barely having escaped her lips, her arms frozen upward, mid-flail.

  She'd moved without thinking. She'd seen the man take a step toward Hazel and had suddenly decided that she'd rather die here than watch the last member of the only real family she'd known get turned into paste by this shambling monster.

  "I'm over here!"

  Qiang cocked his head. "Right, I saw. Who are you?"

  "Your worst-" Madison's voice caught as she realized what she was doing. That, while she was more afraid to see Hazel killed than she was to die, she was still plenty afraid to die. She caught a glimpse of Hazel's face as she pulled it from her hands, of the shellshocked look of uncomprehension on the girl's face. "Your worst, uh, nightmare!"

  Qiang smiled. "What is this?"

  "A- A challenge!" Madison was crying freely now. How had everything gone so wrong? "Don't go fight her. She's- She's harmless. She's a good person, who's talented, and smart, and was nice to me when she- when she didn't have to be."

  Qiang looked puzzled. "I don't-"

  "Fight me! Kill me! I'm-" Madison's chest spasmed in a sob. "I'm nobody! No one will care if I die! My whole life I was kept in- in a basement, and nobody even looked for me! If you kill me, it's like you're not even doing a bad thing!"

  "This is sad," Qiang said, pursed lip churning like a tar pit as it decayed and re-grew. "I don't want to fight you."

  Qiang turned away, back toward Hazel, and fear made Madison lurch forward in the sky and blurt: "What? Why?"

  "That whole thing about how you're okay dying, I don't trust that. Plus it's depressing. Plus plus, I can see from here that you're basically a nobody. Nothing to eat at all. " He jabbed a finger over his shoulder, toward Hazel. "I'm just gonna get her quick and-"

  "I see!" Madison found herself laughing, now, maniacally. Oh God, she was going to die. "You're afraid!"

  Qiang froze. He levelled his gaze up at her.

  "Maddy, no," Hazel moaned, just audible in the distance. She met Madison's eyes.

  "You see me flying, up here, and you can tell I'm special, and- and- and that scares you! That's the only reason you wouldn't want to fight-"

  Qiang shifted almost imperceptibly, and then Madison felt a warm, overwhelming pressure on her face, and her vision was blotted out, and her hearing replaced with a high whine, and then she was on her back, cool astroturf digging into the skin under her shirt.

  A small pinprick of vision returned to her. She was lying, now, in the crater with Victor's remains, his shimmering essence bobbing just off to her side. Her chest was caved in, one of her arms gone. She felt the prickly beginnings of pain in her ribs, her stomach, her jaw. She reached up with her free hand and recoiled when she felt nothing below her nose but wet, yielding gore.

  Qiang paced over to her, a blurry stick figure approaching through the smoke. He said something, gestured with a rotting arm, but Madison heard none of it.

  Madison expected her life to flash before her eyes. It had been a trope she'd seen on the TV, a few times, back when Gramma had allowed her the luxury of the occasional show or movie.

  Nothing came. Just a single vision, technicolor and vivid: her room in the basement, at night. The sounds wafting in from the other side of the wall: crickets, sparse traffic, the occasional bark of a dog. Someone neighbor's TV on, barely perceptible. A crow calling. Reminders that outside of her room, her cell, there was a wide world full of millions of things that, unlike her, were allowed to be free.

  Most nights that thought had angered her, had welled her up with self-pity. Now, it comforted her. The crickets and dogs and crows and TV shows would go on without her, like they always had.

  She'd seen some of the world now anyway. Had experienced some of the freedom. Had soared, unaided, through the sky under her own power.

  Still, she thought, as her vision began to fade again, as Victor's essence bobbed its way over to her and began to sink into her chest. It would've been nice to see some lions. She'd always wanted to see lions.

  Then, with a shudder and a sigh, Madison died.