Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

[MurderWeasel]

((Kimberly Nguyen continued from A White and Soundless Place))

Kimberly's mood was pretty fucking foul as she stormed into the town center. Will, Steven, and Liz had all gone and gotten themselves killed, and Kimberly was pretty damn bitter about that. She hadn't bothered adding their killers to her list, though. As it was, she already might have picked up too many people to pay visits. It wouldn't do to overextend herself. If, by some miracle, she finished her business with Sarah, Bridget, Roland, and—of course—Kris, and if she lived to tell about it, well, then she'd round up any sorry survivors who had slighted her in the past and give them a good lashing or some shit like that. That was probably thinking too far ahead. In all likelihood, she'd be rotting away long before that became an issue.

After all, surviving her revenge was very much a secondary consideration. She just had to be positive she gave way worse than she got.

Her trip into town wasn't really yielding the results she'd been hoping for. No sign of any of her targets. She'd found the house they'd all been in. She'd kicked the door in, just for a nice dramatic entrance, and had found it fucking deserted. That wasn't so bad—she'd almost fallen on her face after the kicking, which turned out to be a bit more more complicated than it looked in movies—but she was still pissed that they hadn't even left some sort of sign as to where they'd gone. There was a cracked mirror in the bathroom, and some blood, but nothing else.

Whatever. She'd find them. Their class was being whittled down. As long as the people she was looking for didn't die, the odds that she'd run into them again steadily increased.

After that, she'd gone right to the heart of things, hoping maybe they were there, for some reason.

No one was in the town center. There was nothing all that interesting. A couple of bodies. Maybe that would have been a bit upsetting before Daisuke, before Brook's creation. Now she only paused for a moment to make sure that they weren't faking and lying in ambush.

That done, she climbed up into one of the flowerbeds surrounding the fountain. She paced around, making no effort to avoid trampling the flowers. It didn't matter. Besides, someone else seemed to have dug a grave or some shit.

It was a bit strange to be walking over someone's corpse. Yeah, she'd done it before, back in normal life. She'd fucked around in graveyards a bit. Great places to go smoke. That was different, though. People in graveyards were dead people, but they didn't register as having once been alive people. It's not like she'd known them. Whoever was buried here, on the other hand, might have been in her math class.

She was suddenly incredibly curious, but she didn't bother looking too hard for a marking. If she indulged this little whim, and it couldn't solve the mystery, she'd probably get tempted to do something stupid like dig the poor fucker up, and that was the last thing either of them needed.

Maybe that wouldn't have stopped her two days ago. Maybe she'd have desecrated anything for kicks. She couldn't help thinking about Dutchy, though. She had never expected to deal with death like that. Aisyln had been bad enough, but at least she'd been explainable. That had been a direct consequence of Kimberly's fuck up. Dutchy just didn't make sense. His death had no meaning. That wouldn't change, even when she punished the guilty parties.

So Kimberly didn't try to figure out who was in the grave.

Instead, she went to the fountain and sat down on the rim. She was sitting directly in front of the statue, which a quick glance revealed to be a somewhat tasteless nude. Around and in front of her lay the flowerbeds, partially trampled, partially dug up.

Kimberly smiled, and she waited. She could take a little breather. Couldn't hurt.

Besides, you never knew who might show up.

[MurderWeasel]

Kimberly sat and she waited, and very little happened except that the fucking announcements came on, signaling another day and another batch of classmates gone. Apparently, they were now in the final hundred. Kimberly briefly considered setting some other little goal for herself, maybe the final seventy-five, but discarded the idea. That was the sort of thinking that led to trying to be the last one standing, and that was an untenable goal. It was a distraction from what actually mattered. It would fuck up her revenge.

Of course, the announcement was only one of the things weighing on Kimberly's mind. She was pretty sure she'd heard some gunshots from somewhere in town shortly before Danya started talking, and was trying to listen for more over his voice. No luck. She had her knife in hand, held loosely against her leg. Hopefully it wouldn't be obvious at a casual glance.

She considered getting up, moving somewhere more covered, but in the end couldn't be bothered. If someone came to cause trouble, better to control the situation on a mental level. Better to be relaxed, to have drama on her side. Better to be nonchalant. Nothing rattled people more.

So Kimberly closed her eyes, affected an air of indifference, and continued to sit, shifting only briefly when her legs threatened to get stiff.

[MurderWeasel]

Somewhere else in the town, there was screaming and shit going on, all sorts of horrible nonsense Kimberly didn't really give a fuck about at the moment. No one came into the town center, though. She was starting to wonder just who was causing all that racket.

Of course, in the end, she didn't actually give a fuck. It was clearly not Kris. Kris' MO didn't involve messing around with torture. She was quick and efficient. It wasn't Brooks. He'd built his little murder nest, and nothing had occurred that would reasonably flush him from it. That meant someone else, some Maxwell or Nick Reid, was getting off on cutting someone's eyes out or some stupid shit like that. Kimberly didn't really see any reason to go investigate. All she was missing was the opportunity to watch someone else bleed out, to maybe fuck up some killer's fun. She could do it, she was sure, currently-crippled or not. Didn't matter. It would be a waste of time and energy. She was going to go accomplish her mission. She was going to find Bridget and Sarah and Roland and Kris, and she was going to find out exactly what she owed each of them and see them repaid in full.

She jerked back to her feet, wobbling a little. She'd been sitting too long. She reviewed the area once more, looking for anything she was missing. Nobody in sight. The screams had tapered off. Nothing left to do here.

The grave piqued her interest again. She still left it alone. She did bend to examine the flowers, though. They were still alive, not even wilted despite the lack of rain. In all likelihood, they drew water from the same source as the fountain. Kimberly considered the flowers that had not been trampled. She'd never really liked flowers all that much. They were too lively, too happy.

But today, maybe she'd make an exception. She was feeling a little whimsical. She plucked three of them, red and white and purple, twisted their stems together, broke them off a couple inches below the heads, and tucked them between the arm of her glasses and her head, behind her ear. She examined her reflection, straightening the accessory, ignoring how terrible she looked otherwise, ignoring how stupid her bare and bandaged left arm looked compared to the rest of her body, still concealed beneath her sweater. Whatever. Good enough.

Nothing more to do here. Any of her targets would surely have departed, given that noise. She'd just have to search them out elsewhere. Maybe the mountains, maybe the church, maybe the lighthouse, maybe the beach. Somewhere besides here. She'd figure it out as she went.

So off she went, back into the wilderness.

((Kimberly Nguyen continued in Dead Girls))