I don't know how long I was out. No more than a few seconds, probably. A minute. But time has a way of stretching in a tragedy, and this day had lasted a lifetime, each painful second of it rolling forward into the next like an endless wave of misery.

I felt lightheaded, nauseous. Hungry, incongruously and irreverently. The pain in my arm, sharp and fierce, had become an all-encompassing burning so overwhelming it came out on the other side, like a numbness. My body, too exhausted to deal with the pain, had simply written my wounded flesh off as something no longer worth noticing, like something that didn't really belong to my body at all.

I had a lot of practice with feeling like my body was not a part of me, but this was something different.

Something smelled like gasoline.

I searched for the source, finding a canister -- meant to fuel the power generator at the main office -- tipped over on its side, seeping its noxious liquid out onto the floor. It soaked into the edges of blankets and clothes of the bodies Liza and Richard had dragged inside. I must have knocked it over when the chair fell, I thought.

That was probably why they'd gone through the trouble of bringing all the bodies here: When it was all over, when Liza was through with me, and with Dawn, she'd planned to burn up all of the evidence.

Scatter my ashes to the wind.

I scraped myself off the floor, laboriously making it onto my knees, my arms trembling with the effort of lifting me. Liza lay sprawled nearby, a bloody gaping hole where the back of her head should be, bits of gore matted into her carefully braided dark hair.

"It just went off," Richard said, his voice low, mumbling. His skin, normally a deep tan, was ashy and bloodless. "I didn't...she had it in her hand and I grabbed for it and it just went off."

The gun sat abandoned on the floor between the body and Richard, huddled as he was against the fireplace and its low-burning embers. His clothes were dark, soaked through with blood.

I regarded him warily, glancing down at Liza, uncertain whether to trust this, whether this could somehow be some other kind of trick. Shakily, I got to my feet and went to where Dawn was tied up, tried with clumsy numb fingers to help undo the knots and the gag. Tears were streaming down her face, her shoulders shaking.

"I...Jesus Christ," Richard moaned, as if with dawning realization. "They're dead. All of them are actually dead."

I don't know what expression I made when I turned to look at him, but it felt like weary exasperation.

He wasn't looking at me. "I didn't want this," he said, staring down at his hands. I could see his fingertips trembling. "It's...it's not like on TV. Revenge. Justice. It sounds so good, so right, and then you realize that people...if you kill them, they're actually fucking dead."

It sounded so stupid, so obvious, but I knew exactly what he meant.

"I was so angry when Laurel died. I was pissed at her, for being dead, and I was pissed at myself, for not being better to her, and I was pissed at everybody else for the same thing, and Liza had this whole thing planned and god help me it felt good. It felt good to think about it and it felt good to say it and then we were in it so deep that..." he coughed, then, for a long time, unable to say much of anything as he spluttered fat gobs of blood up onto the floor.

Dawn sniffed beside me, wiping her face. "I don't understand any of this," she admitted. She was woozy, still under the effects of the drugs. She swayed on her feet and reached for me, steadied against my shoulder.

"I don't think any of us do," I said, finally, making my mouth move to form the words, although it took great effort. "Even if we were all a part of it."

I looked at Richard, wondering if he had it in him to explain any further, but he looked pretty far gone. His eyelids were drooping, the corners of his mouth gone slack. He worried something over in his hand, spinning it slowly between his fingers. It glinted silver in the dim light.

I realized, too late, what he was doing, and just as I was going to make a lunge for him, Dawn caught my wrist, gave a squeeze that sent a tremor of pain shooting through my wounded arm.

With the last of his strength, Richard flicked the Zippo lighter, dropping it down into the evaporating puddle of gasoline. The flames caught, spreading in a fine, flickering line across the splatter-marks on the floor, nibbling at the edges of bodies in the cabin.

"Have to finish it," Richard muttered, and shivered, drawing his knees up to his chest and huddling into them like a scared little boy. His head drooped, his hands going slack as he started to slide sideways, his blood mingling with the gas on the floor.

I strained against Dawn's grasp, despite the pain, but she pulled me back, hard, yanking me with all her strength toward the door. "Enough," she said, in a voice that was raw, flayed open. "Enough. We can't help him. We have to go."

I staggered backwards and we made it together, stumbling for the doorway, her shoving, me collapsing out onto the porch, dragging myself back up from my knees. My blood seeped out into the dirty snow.

The sky had gone gray, darkness hinting behind the layers of clouds.

One full day of hell, and it was enough for a lifetime.

The fire spread through the cabin, licking over blankets and bodies, finding the dried-out wood stacked by the fireplace, the bed clothes, the furniture. Dawn and I stumbled away, slipping in the snow. Somehow she got a sweater wrapped around my bleeding arm, soaking up the most of it. I wasn't paying much attention. I was listening for Richard's screams.

They didn't come, and that, finally, was my permission to go. I turned away from the cabin, the smoke billowing up from it, suctioned through the chimney and wicked out through the open door. Dawn and I didn't speak at first, just walked, all of our energy focused on the singular task of moving forward, but somehow we both knew where we were going.

Parker's car was right where we'd found it. Parker, thankfully, was not. The blood-brown streak of packed snow trailing away from the door was testament enough to that. Liza, tying up her loose ends. Liza, who would go through so much effort to lay traps, who sacrificed sense at the altar of drama. The actress, up to the end.

Dawn crouched a the nose of the car, reached under for the hidden magnetic box, the place to store spare keys. "Parker got it for me. Because I was always locking mine in the car," she said, breaking the silence, and then she wept again, and I collapsed against the side of the car and wept with her because there was nothing left to do.

She reached for my hand, when we'd emptied ourselves of our grief.

"Did you mean what you said? About Laurel wanting to die?"

I nodded, not planning on telling the story, but then it was tumbling out of me anyway, a purge, a confession that needed to be made even if it was too late. I gave her the short version, but all the parts were there: the cancer, the threats to follow through no matter what I did, how I tried to take it all back at the last minute.

When it was done, I sagged against the car door, feeling weak and defeated.

Dawn was silent through it all, but she didn't let go of my hand. The snow was falling more steadily now, and a hush fell over the campground. We were too far to hear the crackling of the fire, but I could smell the smoke, woody and rich and stomach-turning.

"You know how they have all these thought experiments?" Dawn said, finally. "Like, oh, there's this runaway train, you can save everybody on board but only if you sacrifice some other guy on the tracks. And there's, like, no good answer."

I glanced at her sidelong, not following. Maybe she'd lost her mind. There had been enough today that I couldn't blame her if she had.

"Or like, when they do executions with a firing squad, everybody shoots so you don't know who had the lethal bullet, right?"

"I guess?"

"My point is, maybe people...maybe individuals aren't supposed to carry that kind of weight. Maybe no one person is meant to have power over life and death. Maybe it just eats you up."

I don't know what to say to that, so I stay silent. I wonder if anyone has seen the smoke yet, if it's visible yet from town. If the fire will spread, engulfing the campground, the forest. If all the world will burn down to ash before this is finally, finally done.

"I don't know," Dawn said, finally, heaving herself to her feet. She stared at the driver side door of the SUV as if bracing herself. "Maybe I'm in shock or something. I don't know how to feel. My husband is dead. Our friends are dead. Somebody tried to kill me. And I should be angry but all I feel is sick and sad and terrified. I don't understand how people trying to do the right thing can do something so awful instead. I just know...we can't do this by ourselves. We shouldn't."

She extended a hand to help me to my feet, and I took it, shaky, wincing.

"We have to go to the police," I said, circling around to the passenger side. There was no way to avoid Parker's blood inside the car, but we climbed in all the same. I thought Dawn would be sick, but she gritted her teeth, stronger than I ever would have imagined she could be. "We go and we tell them everything. Everything."

"Then at least it's out of our hands," she agreed, starting up the engine. She pulled out, navigating the slippery dirt path, and I caught s glimpse of orange glow through the trees. Ash drifted on the wind, mingling with the snow.

It wasn't perfect. It wasn't right. It wouldn't undo everything that had happened. Nothing could. But Dawn was right. Some things are too big to carry alone. We are, none of us, avenging angels.

Everybody loved Laurel Williams.

And in the end, that destroyed us all.