“Surprised?” a voice behind him asked.
Cliff turned around. Whitney stood behind him on the beach about fifteen feet away. She held a large shotgun in her hands that was almost as big as she was.
“Sort of,” he said.
She smiled at him. It was the biggest smile she’d cracked since they’d arrived on the island. It didn’t fit her face and almost gave her a cartoonish look. Cliff didn’t laugh.
It wasn’t funny.
“Well, congratulations, you’ve won the game!” she said.
“Doesn’t that mean I get to live?” he asked, eyeing the shotgun warily.
“Of course!” she said. “You get to live about an hour longer than everyone else! Well done.”
“But the rules, the winner gets to live!” he pleaded.
“Yeah, and you do get to live a little longer, like I said. Look, at no time did the rules say how long the winner gets to live,” she said.
“Where are Giles and the other staff? Did you kill them, too?” Cliff asked.
“No, I sent them all home. They were more than happy to abandon all of you in order to save their own lives. Nice, huh?” she said.
Cliff shook his head slowly and grabbed at the sand. There wasn’t much he could do now; his death was apparently imminent. Even after all of this, after he’d solved so many riddles and won the last challenge.
“Why? Why did you do all of this? Can you at least tell me that before you kill me?” he said.
“I’m not one to question God’s will,” she said calmly, with no trace of irony. “He commanded your deaths. And I obeyed. You must ask Him when you stand before Him for your eternal judgment.”
Great, she was crazy. That meant he had no chance of reasoning with her. Basically, he was doomed. He lowered his head and looked down at the white sand. He felt the fine grains in his palms. At least he would die somewhere beautiful.
At least there was that.
He heard Whitney let out a little groan, and he looked up expecting to see her raising the heavy shotgun. But instead her eyes bulged in their sockets. Her forehead bubbled out like chewing gum. She made one short gurgling noise briefly and then her head was suddenly gone. Well, not gone, gone, exactly, but more so flying through the air in about a thousand chunks of whites and reds and grays.
One of Whitney’s bright blue eyeballs landed near his knee. He flicked it away with a quick swipe of his gardening spade.
Her headless body crumpled to the ground, blood pouring from her roughly severed neck stump, soaking into the white sand. And that’s when Cliff finally saw the figure behind her, holding out the compressed air rod he’d jabbed into the back of her skull.
“Giles!” Cliff shouted. “I thought you were gone!”
“I could not leave this place in the state it was in, sir,” Giles said.
Cliff wasn’t sure if the kooky old bastard was joking or not, but he laughed anyway. He didn’t think he’d ever laughed so hard in his life, nor would he likely ever do so again.
And after a few minutes, Giles even joined him. But the butler’s laugh was different. It was almost bittersweet in a way, as if it wasn’t actually over for the Englishman just yet. Cliff wasn’t sure how that was possible, but when he looked into Giles’s tired eyes, he somehow knew it was the truth.