T10: Peppa

'Clear the upper level', Alba had said. Easier said than done, thought Peppa, as she inched her way out onto the gallery walk-way. She could hear the sounds of the ongoing gunfight taking else-where in the facility, and the wet, muffled choking sounds coming from down the stair-well, where Talisha was dying down there alone. She'd been a stuck-up, snooty bitch, but no-one deserved to go out like that, thought Peppa.

She certainly didn't want to go out like that.

Not for the first time, Peppa found herself regretting the life choices that had brought her here. It had all seemed too good to be true; a shadowy secret agency wanting to hire a council-estate girl like her; offering her a fat pay-check to dress in expensive clothes and learn to handle a gun. She hadn't bothered to read past the first few paragraphs of all the forms they'd asked her to sign- hadn't really looked past the first payment in her bank account, and the designer platforms she'd seen online, with an Italian name and a three-digit price tag which she could suddenly afford.

Looking at the sprawled bodies on the concrete flags, she realised with a sick feeling that she'd have been better off staying behind the bar, and occasionally on the stage, of the lap-dancing dive she'd not told her parents about.

She advanced, her gun held low and ready, the way she'd seen in the movies. Was this the way they'd trained her? She couldn't remember- her heart was pounding that hard and her mouth was so dry, it was hard to think. She couldn't take her eyes off the dead girls lying on the ground ahead of her.

That was why she didn't see the shooter in the doorway until after the sound of the shot- after the feeling of being punched in the belly. She tottered, bent at the waist, grabbing reflexively at her gut, gasping in shock. There was only one gunshot, but one was enough.

With a cry of pain and despair, Peppa fell back onto her arse, saw her feet in their four-hundred-pound Italian sandals kicking up and out with futile, desperate energy. The bullet buried in her belly burned like fire, like she should have been able to see smoke, not blood, leaking out of the swollen puncture-hole in the narrow window of bare skin between her skirt and her half-buttoned blouse.

At least now, she and that bitch Talisha had something in common.