Apocalypse Queen: My Space, My Rules Chapter 200: Bloody Day

Only Roxanna remained, still wedged under the bed.

Chandler crouched low and lined up his shot, but Roxanna crawled out on her own before he could fire.

"Don't shoot! I'm not wearing anything." She pushed herself upright and put herself on full display for Chandler.

Chandler found the whole thing deeply uncomfortable and looked away immediately.

Mariella surged forward, and then the room's door burst open behind her, followed by a rapid cascade of shocked outcries.

The raiders who'd answered the alarm had already found the blood and the bodies blanketing the exterior.

To avoid a head-on firefight with the incoming wave, Mariella seized both Roxanna and Chandler at once and pulled them all into the space with her.

The raiders flooded into the room in nearly the same instant.

All they found were bodies heaped at every angle, and not one person among them was still breathing.

Even Black Bear's skull had been cleaved straight down the middle.

"It's split with a blade!" One raider's voice tore through the silence, raw with horror.

"What kind of monster strength do they have to split a skull open like that?!" came another staggered cry.

"Black Bear's gone!"

Goldilocks shoved through the crowd and stepped inside. The moment he laid eyes on Black Bear's body, he threw himself over the corpse and let out a wretched, heaving wail.

"Who did this to you?! I'll make them pay!!" he sobbed.

After a long moment of grief, something sharp surfaced in his eyes. "Whoever did this is still in the building. They couldn't have gotten far! Turn every room inside out until you find them!"

...

Mariella had pulled Roxanna into the space out of sheer desperation, with no better option at hand.

Roxanna stood frozen, struck speechless by what surrounded her. Mountains of supplies stretched in every direction, yachts, helicopters, heavy trucks, passenger vehicles, and every kind of watercraft imaginable, all of it staggering in its sheer abundance.

It was a vault beyond anything she'd ever heard described.

"You... you actually have a storage space ability!" The note Harvey had written suddenly made complete and terrible sense to her.

Mariella tore Harvey's note into small pieces with slow, deliberate care, and smiled wide enough to show every tooth. "Jealous?"

Roxanna stepped back, and understanding crashed over her. "You're going to kill me too, aren't you? To keep me quiet!"

"I didn't spare Kingston. What makes you think you rank higher with me than he did?" Mariella answered without hesitation.

Roxanna nearly hit the floor. Her voice cracked open. "So you killed Kingston! You vicious woman, you wiped out our entire family!"

"You're the one who killed Connor. I won't be taking credit for that one," Mariella said, unhurried and precise.

Roxanna stumbled again, her lips moving faintly. "It wasn't me... I-I didn't want to... I had no choice..."

Chandler had run completely out of patience. He cut across both of them and looked at Mariella. "How much longer are you planning to keep this going?"

Roxanna had nothing on, and the sight was genuinely grating. He just wanted it finished.

Before Mariella could answer, Roxanna grabbed for the only lifeline she could see. She fixed her wide, glistening eyes on Chandler.

"Hey, handsome. I'm Mariella's sister, Roxanna. I've been in poor health my whole life, and I've never killed anyone. I'm not like her. My hands are clean, my father's death had nothing to do with me. I'm completely innocent!"

Mariella laughed before she could stop herself. "Harvey had a weakness for frail girls, but you don't actually think every man alive is into that, do you? You're not nearly as irresistible as you think!"

Roxanna shot her a venomous look, then turned back to Chandler with something calculated sliding into her voice. "Kill her for me, and everything in this space is yours. I'll serve you however you want, and you can have all of me whenever you want..."

A single shot split the air, sharp and absolute. Chandler had reached his limit and put a bullet straight between her eyes.

Blood welled up through the wound and spilled over. Roxanna went limp and folded to the ground, her eyes still wide open and fixed on nothing.

Mariella clicked her tongue and let the amusement show. "I expected you to at least think it over. She hadn't even finished her pitch."

Chandler looked at her, cold and flat, and she had the good sense to let it drop.

"Honestly," he muttered, irritation threading into his voice, "if we'd dealt with all of them properly back at No. 8, none of this would've ever happened."

Mariella didn't rise to it. She let out a soft, easy laugh. "If we had finished them off then, what would tonight have been?"

She thought about Harvey, a man so consumed by his own self-importance, spending the last two days as Black Bear's kept man. The humiliation alone must've been unbearable.

And then there was Roxanna, sharing that same degrading arrangement with him and apparently competing for the top spot.

The idea of that tableau alone nearly made Mariella sick.

If Harvey had recovered every memory from their past life, it would've only made every moment of that suffering worse.

Breaking someone's spirit before ending their life was the cruelest way to do it, and Harvey had died already shattered on the inside.

Mariella found that deeply satisfying.

Watching her smile like that, Chandler felt his irritation quietly bleed away. "You're wicked," he said.

...

Goldilocks led several hundred raiders through every inch of No. 101 and came up completely empty.