Better off Dead A Lucy Hart, Deathdealer - By Eva Sloan Page 0,9

and wet down the lobe of her right ear.

“Shit Lucy!” Greg stood over her, eyes wide and his hands on his hips. He looked pissed. “Look at the mess you made.”

The pain in her head turned to a hot annoyance as she looked up slowly into Greg’s eyes. “Mess I made?” Her voice was low and strangely even sounding. “You sent me after too many things at once—”

“You should’ve made two—”

“I got stuck in there because you never had the latch on the door fixed, and I slipped because there was—” She looked over to the floor in front of the walk-in cooler. There were even some pickle slices shining green against the sandstone red tile. “Pickle juice on the floor!”

When she looked back up at Greg she saw him gulp.

She was about to point her finger at him and tell him her father’s lawyers were going to sue the shit out of him, and McDonalds, and the company that designed such a faulty latch, when the pain in her arm suddenly sparked to life again and raged like a bonfire. It sapped her words out of her head and replaced them with raw pain.

There was a long, cold silence, and then Greg said, “We’ll call an ambulance to take you to County.” His voice was thin and very polite.

A hospital! And doctors and tests and needles and...

“I’m fine!” she snapped, and Greg’s head jerked back at the force of her words. Seeing the sudden effect of her voice, she forced a fake smile on her face and pulled herself—though cringing at the nagging pain—up off the tile floor.

“I’m fine,” she said again, this time with smooth sweetness. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there, and go home. Her birthday had already been heinous enough; she’d rather not tempt fate anymore. And she wasn’t about to spend the night in the emergency room.

“I don’t know.” Greg was returning to form. And once Greg got it into his head about something, he always forced the issue. His beady eyes squinted down at her. “I think you should go to the hospital and get checked out.”

“I...am...fine!” That annoyed heat was back in her voice as she rounded on Greg, and practically spit each word at him. “I didn’t black out,”—which was a lie—“so I don’t need to go to a hospital!”

Her voice ricocheted off the walls like a shotgun blast. Greg’s eyes bugged out and then he cleared his throat. “You’ll have to sign a waiver,” he croaked.

“Fine...whatever.” She shifted her weight and almost fell back into the wall. She was dizzy, yet still on her feet...with the help of her hand gripping the wall. “Can you call my Gram to come drive me home?”

No way was she making it to the bus stop, not to mention all the way home, like this.

~*~

People whirled by in blurred colors and shapes as Lucy sat alone in the booth closest the side entrance. That’s where Gram would pick her up. It wasn’t the main entrance to McDonalds, so it was where the least amount of people could see her.

The globs of special sauce on her chin and ear were easy enough to remove. She’d tried unsuccessfully to clean the special sauce from her shirt; the goop had soaked into the fabric. She could have asked if someone had a shirt they could loan her, but she was so tired, and her arm was throbbing incessantly. She sat in the booth and shivered as the air conditioning made the special sauce cold on her chest.

She was glad though. Glad that at least that that had been the worst of it. Her birthday had delivered pain and degradation in spades. Now all there was to do was go home and take a long hot shower, and then crawl into bed.

One of the blurs of movement stopped right in front of her, and she looked up to see a beautiful couple in a lover’s embrace, kissing like it was the end of a big budget romantic comedy.

She closed her eyes. At least someone’s getting it right. But when she opened her eyes again they stared down at her with mirrored expressions of revulsion on their faces.

Their faces...so familiar...oh crap!

Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, Jeff Haas, and her ex-best friend, Tara Minger, stood clutching each other, the looks of shock and horror clear and nightmarish on their faces. But Tara didn’t remain shocked for long. And with a practiced and horribly malicious smile, she held her perfectly