Biphobia

Christi grabbed the keys from his small gloved hands and pushed through the door, her fingers shaking. Bubblehead might not be dead; he might get up at any moment. She had to act fast. The door swung inwards, opening to the wide hall with the large swimming pool set in its floor. It was mostly empty, but a few feet of water remained in its base, full of black leaves and mould and dirt, and in the middle, something floating.

Red hair shone on the surface, and around it, the filthy water seemed darker than elsewhere. Christi stepped slowly closer, stopped and stepped back when she saw blood at her feet. The body floating face-down in the water could have been anyone's, but Christi would have recognised that vivid hair anywhere. Poor Rene.

She closed her eyes, breathed for a few seconds, opened them again, glared coldly at the floating body. Where was Sherie? She had to know whether Sherie was alive or dead.

She turned, saw the room that she had been set free from. There were several other set of doors against the wall; one was locked with a sturdy padlocked chain around its handles. It took a moment to find the right key before the lock came open and the chain fell away, clattering loudly to the tiled floor and echoing around the hall. The door swung open to her touch. Light spilled slowly over the dirty floor as if reluctant to reveal whatever horrors might be waiting inside. Finally a pair of slender legs was exposed, then a pair of buttocks, and a mass of curly blonde hair atop a body that lay face-down in the grime.

Christi stepped into the room, carefully pulled back Sherie's hair to reveal her face. She blinked, each spasm of her eyelids sending shocks into Christi's chest. Her eyes opened.

"Sherie!" Christi whispered. "You're alive!"

Sherie mumbled something faintly, but Christi couldn't decipher it. She put a hand under Sherie's chest, lifted her bodily from the ground and slung her over her shoulder. "Close your eyes, Sherie." She said, as she carried her out of the cell and into the pool hall. "Close your eyes, there's things you don't want to see."

She stepped over Bubblehead's deflated body and into the corridor. Where to take Sherie? She fumbled with the keys in her hand; yes, there was a car key. Bubblehead must have transport, but the parking lot at the front of the building was empty, apart from Rene's burning sedan, now under a cloud of black smoke that rose up into the rain clouds to be swept briskly away by the cold breeze.

Christi turned back into the building and headed for the opposite end of the corridor, where light shone through another set of grubby windows on the rear exit. She moved slowly under Sherie's weight, and it seemed to take a lifetime to reach the door, but beyond the grubby windows was the other small parking lot, home to piles of dead leaves and bits of timber and, in the far corner, the old SUV.

"I'm going to put you down." Christi whispered as she lowered Sherie onto her feet. "You can stand, can't you? Lean against the wall while I find the key."

It took another minute to find the key to the fire exit and finally set foot into the parking lot. A diesel generator throbbed somewhere nearby. Sherie wobbled on her feet and Christi had to support her as they walked painfully across the tarmac to the SUV. Dead leaves helped to soften the sharp tarmac stone, but concealed bits of gravel or old nutshells or other hard and painful objects that dug into Christi's feet with every other step.

Christi popped open the passenger door of the SUV, which was unlocked, and helped Sherie to climb aboard. She looked almost dead, and Christi wondered for a moment if she'd survive the journey to the nearest hospital. But of course she would. She hadn't come through all this to die on the way to safety, had she?

When Sherie was safely strapped in she opened the tailgate and found two black holdalls. One was full of clothes -- the clothes they had been wearing on their last night in the motel bar, the last thing Christi could remember before waking up in the grimy changing room. The other contained snack foods and bottled water. She checked the bottle tops and labels in the failing light from the overcast sky, and decided they were safe. Bubblehead wouldn't poison his own food supply, would he?

"Sherie, I've got water!" She said, unscrewing a top and placing the bottle in Sherie's limp hands. She opened another and took a long pull from it as she watched Sherie shakily put the bottle to her lips and spill most of its contents down her bare chest. "Here, let me help you." She whispered, guiding Sherie's hands to her lips, holding the bottle so that water flowed slowly into her mouth.

Sherie began to swallow hungrily, letting out frantic breaths between gulps.

"Enough? You'll feel better soon. I've got clothes."

Sherie sighed deeply. "Thanks." She mumbled.

"Here." Christi dug into the holdall and withdrew Sherie's clothes, handed them to her. "Put these on when you feel strong enough. I'm going back inside."

"Inside?" Sherie said, her voice suddenly gaining in strength. She sat upright in the seat. "Why?"

Christi struggled with her tight-fitting jeans. Her underwear was nowhere to be found, and her jeans were cold and damp after being kept in the old car; they stuck to her grimy legs and scratched at her chilly skin. "There's something I have to know." She said.

"No, please, let's just go. Let's just get out of here." Sherie sighed.

"No. You stay here. I have to know."

* * *

Bubblehead wasn't where Christi had left him. His rubber helmet had been torn free and discarded, and lay in the doorway next to his blood-stained fire-axe and a pair of glassless spectacles with bright torches moulded either side of the lenses, shining brightly at an otherwise ordinary piece of skirting board. The crowbar was gone.

Christi picked up the axe and retraced her steps, following a wide trail in the slime, such as might have been made by an injured man in a deflated rubber suit dragging himself along the floor. The trail led to the staircase, where rubbery handprints on the skirting indicated someone trying desperately to claw their way up the stairs.

A shuffling sound came from a bend in the stairway. Christi edged up slowly, her trainers squeaking on the wet steps. Laboured breath echoed down the stairs, subtly amplified and electronically augmented.

"Get away from me!" Said Bubblehead's deep voice, although it sounded breathless, and the higher, tighter, more human voice was more obvious.

Christi rounded the bend, saw the deflated suit draped over a slender figure almost motionless on the stairs, saw long jet black hair matted thickly with blood over a sinuous neck. She reached out with her foot, lifted Bubblehead under his armpit and flipped him over. He weighed almost nothing.

Her gaze met with big, dark eyes staring back at her. She saw a pale face framed by jet black hair. Her heart stopped. She dropped the axe, barely noticed as it clattered to the tiles and bounced loudly down the stairs, finally sliding to a halt in the corridor below.

"Dani…" She said, her voice barely louder than a breath.

"Christi." Danika replied, her big dark eyes glazed and unfocussed. A deep voice echoed under her own intonation, and she reached up with a black-gloved hand, grabbed a small microphone in the collar of her suit and yanked it free, snapping wires, threw it to the floor.

Christi sank to her knees, put a hand either side of Danika's face, caressed her. She tried to feel something. She wanted to feel something. One of her best friends was dead, another was outside in the cold, perhaps traumatised for life, and another was dying in her arms, the very cause of all the grief and pain. She wanted to hate her, enough to crush her skull between her hands, but she didn't. She couldn't, and she couldn't explain why. "Dani, why?"

Danika coughed, her eyes squinting as she grimaced. Perhaps the step underneath was pressing against the broken base of her skull where the crowbar claws had hit. "You'd never understand." She croaked.

"Try me."

Danika tried to shrug, succeeded only in drawing a pained groan from her dark lips. "It started years ago." She said, finding some strength to project her voice a little clearer. "I'd always known I was different. I never fitted in. My first girlfriend was at highschool. I told her I loved her, although she didn't believe me. We tried to keep it a secret, but somebody saw us in the park, and it got around school. We'd never done anything serious, only kissing, but nobody at school believed us. Her parents found out. Her father moved her away. I never saw her again."

Christi stared blankly into her eyes, willing her to go on. That was sad, but it was no reason for all this pain and brutal death. Everybody lost a childhood sweetheart sooner or later.

"My next girlfriend was at college. She was open about it, but I wasn't. I was afraid of what happened before. We were out one night at a gay club, and the local rednecks were hanging out a few blocks away, heckling the gay boys as they walked past. I said leave it, but Karin got involved. There was a fight. It got really nasty. She was into the butch scene, used to wear man's clothes. The next night she went back to the same club; she asked me to come, but I was too scared to go back there, and stayed home. She stayed all night, was on her way back to me when they attacked. They recognised her from the night before, apparently they thought she was a guy. She was beaten really bad, spent time in hospital. I don't think she ever really recovered. She didn't want to see me after that, and I always wondered if it was because I wasn't there to help her. It wasn't easy for gay people where I grew up, and that's why I moved away."

Danika paused for a while. Christi held her stare. "Go on." She said.

"That's when I met you guys. You took me out to regular clubs and showed me a good time, but you never knew I was gay."

"I knew. You told me."

"That was later. In those first days you didn't know. And I saw girls kissing each other. Not because they were gay, but because they wanted to attract guys. Because they thought it was cool. How is it cool to be gay? That's like saying it's cool to be black or it's cool to be tall. You can't just say you want to be gay because it's cool!" Dani said, her voice gaining in power. "You can't just decide to be gay for ten minutes, until all the guys start looking! Now it seems like every girl in the world wants to be gay for ten minutes, or a night, just to see what it's like. That's not being gay! Homosexuality isn't a lifestyle that you can choose to put on and take off, like makeup or clothes, it's something that sits inside you. Yes, I hated all those girls who kissed each other on the dancefloor then went off with different guys. They call themselves bisexual, I call them sluts."

"Dani, you're not making any sense…" Christi hissed, and wondered immediately why a killer would care about making sense.

"You wouldn't understand! You never got separated from the people you love because of what you are! You never saw your lover get beaten up because she was different!"

"What about this place?" Christi said flatly.

"I came past this place a long time ago. I don't know why, but I wanted to stop here. It was ruined and abandoned and empty, like me. I fell in love with it. There was nobody around, so I broke in. It became my escape. It's where I came to get away. I'd bring girls here sometimes, to play games. That's why I got the suit, and the ropes, the orgasm machine, and the other stuff. Our games got more brutal. For others it was a game, but I always wanted more. It wasn't a game for me. I couldn't help myself one time, about a year ago, when I had a girl tied up in the changing room. She used the safeword over and over, but I wouldn't let her go. I couldn't stop until she was dead. I buried her out back, and nobody ever found out. I swore I'd never come back here again, until I found out about you and Sherie."

"Me and Sherie? What's that got to do with anything?"

"Don't you get it?" Dani shouted. "Haven't you understood a word I've said? You're straight. You're both straight. You both talk about guys all the time. And yet it only took a bit of alcohol and you fucked each other, with Rene asleep in the same room! You're exactly what I've been talking about! You know she woke up half-way through, and had to sit in silence until you'd finished? She told me the next day, in the police station, after I'd been attacked. She thought I'd find it funny, thought it'd cheer me up. She didn't know I was gay, she didn't know I'd be offended. That's when I decided I had to bring you all here to teach you a lesson."

"Teach us a lesson? Dani, you killed Rene!"

"So? She cut me the deepest! A couple of years ago, when she kissed you in that club? I never knew about that until Monday night. A couple of years ago, that would have been about the time I realised I was in love with you!"

Christi blinked, for the first time since Danika had started talking. As she cleared her eyes she realised that Danika was crying. "You were in love with me?"

Dani tried to nod, clenched shut her eyes in agony as her shattered skull moved against the step below it. "Yes. I never told you. That's the golden rule: you never tell a straight person if you love them. They'll get offended, and never speak to you again. I couldn't help myself; that's why I told you I was gay, with the faintest glimmerings of hope that maybe you'd work it out, and open up to me. I couldn't bear to be up-front with you, in case you never spoke to me again. All this time, all I had to do was get you drunk…"

"Dani…" Christi whispered. "I'm not straight."

Danika became silent, stared emptily into Christi's eyes.

"I'm not straight. I don't know what I am, I never realised until Sherie showed me, but… I don't know, if you'd have told me two years ago, maybe… I don't know, maybe I'd have been shocked, or confused, but I wouldn't have been offended. Maybe I'd have gone out with you. Maybe… Oh, I don't know, but you didn't have to kill anyone! We all loved you, as a friend! We didn't know you were capable of this."

"I know." Dani whimpered, closing her eyes against a flood of tears. "I was just so jealous, for a year or more I'd gone to bed lonely knowing that I'd never get to kiss your lips, then finding out that at the same time Rene got to kiss them for some cheap thrill… I couldn't stop myself."

"You were going to kill Sherie too?"

Danika nodded slowly, eyes clamped shut against the pain.

Christi let go of Danika's head, slowly stood up. Her fingertips were stained red with blood.

"What are you going to do?" Danika asked as Christi wiped her fingers on her jeans.

"I'm going to fetch the police." She replied coldly. "I'm going to leave you here. If you die, then it's no more than you deserve. If you live, then you'll go to prison for what you did. I'll tell the police everything you told me. You almost took everything from me."

Danika nodded again. "I know."

Christi wondered if she should say something else. Would 'goodbye' suffice? Would that be enough to end almost three years of friendship? She might never see Dani again, at least not alive. In fact, she hoped she wouldn't. To know that she lived on in prison would be too much; the juxtaposition between the sweet, reclusive gay girl she'd befriended and the sadistic killer who had tortured and murdered her friends was simply too great to reconcile.

Better that her existence end now, Christi thought, but she wasn't going to hasten it. There had been enough violence. Her blow with the crowbar might be enough to kill Danika, but that had been dealt in order to save Sherie's life. The axe lay at the bottom of the stairs, and there it would remain; there would be no more killing. She stepped down the stairs, walked slowly towards the rear exit and the waiting SUV.

The air outside was cold and still. Rain fell slowly, pattering onto the dead leaves and old asphalt. The diesel generator, behind an open guard against the peeling walls of the old building, sputtered and coughed, and finally died. Beside it lay a jerry can that had blown over in some earlier gust of wind and spilt its flammable contents in a pool around it.

Sherie was shivering in the passenger seat when Christi climbed aboard, pushed the key into the ignition and started the engine.

"Who was he?" Sherie asked, as Christi pulled out onto the lane that led to the highway.

Christi shrugged. "Just some old guy." She said.

* * *

She told the police everything. Well, almost everything. OK, she admitted to herself later, she omitted lots of details -- like the exact details of some of the challenges, and her new relationship with Sherie that had inadvertently turned Danika to murder. She had a good meal, and a good sleep, and then her insides came back to life, and she bled. She didn't tell the nurse about that. She didn't need to know. It would clear up on its own.

They tried to do something about the alkali burn on her belly, although she was told she'd always have a scar. She would always be number two, and Sherie would always be number one. It had mostly stopped hurting anyway, it just itched and cracked when she moved.

Inspector Moss led the investigation. He listened intently to all that Christi said, and he nodded and seemed to understand when Christi asked that Sherie not be told of Bubblehead's true identity.

He reported back to her after he'd been to investigate the abandoned sports centre. Danika was dead when he'd arrived. Hearing the news had thrown a switch that, for the first time since she'd been set free, seemed to turn Christi's emotions back on.

She managed a brief nod, emptily answered Moss's questions, before he left, and finally she could open the floodgates and let pour the tears that she had been holding back.

* * *

It was a day later when a police cruiser took them home. There would be all sorts to face when the clouds cleared -- Rene's parents, who would have been told by the police, and her other friends, who would want to know why Rene and Danika weren't around anymore, and would soon be looking at Christi in a different light once the rumour mill got working, asking questions, or more likely staying away in fear of saying the wrong thing -- but first there was a life to reorganise.

"I can stay with you, if you like." Christi said to Sherie, as the cruiser stopped outside her flat.

"Um…" Sherie replied. "No, that's OK. I think I want to be alone."

Christi nodded.

"I mean, unless you want to?" Sherie continued. "You'll be alright alone?"

Christi nodded again. She turned away, opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement. Sherie stepped out behind her, stopped beside the cruiser. Christi popped the trunk, hefted Sherie's bag and handed it to her.

"You're alright, aren't you?" Sherie said.

"Yeah." Christi replied.

Sherie smiled, put the bag down on the pavement and took hold of Christi's hands. "You were my rock. My strength. You came back for me."

"You sure you don't want me to stay?" Christi said, changing the subject before it had a chance to turn to what had happened. "You'll be all alone."

"Oh… Well, no, I want to be alone."

"OK, I understand." Christi said, subconsciously lifting her heel from the asphalt and tapping her toe on the ground while she stared past Sherie at nothing in particular on the opposite side of the street. "Only… I know a lot's happened, but I'd like to see you again soon. Y'know, after Monday, I'm like… Well, I want to see you again."