Lexi was running away from Gray, and she couldn't stop laughing.  She'd dumped a pot of boiling water over the killer's head, and now she was fleeing through the house, half a step ahead of annihilation.  And she couldn't stop laughing.  She made it to the basement while Gray was still in the hall of mirrors, and ran to the doorway of the darkened storage room.  She stopped there, silhouetted in the door, and in her best LL Cool J voice, taunted, "C'mon, man!"  It was sure to further enrage Gray…who didn't know that Lexi had her hand on the light switch, just inside the storage room.

Thing was, in spite of it all, she was scared to death.  If she didn't laugh she was going to tumble to the floor with her hands over her ears and her eyes shut tight and just cry, cry for her daddy, cry for someone to make all the bad things go away.  Which Gray would happily do for her, of course, but not in a pleasing way.  And there were so many things Lexi needed to live for at the moment; finishing Ren's car, for instance.  So she ran, and did whatever came next, and hopefully Eddie and Nikki had some wonderful trick to bring the whole thing to an end, because she had no idea where this would end, only a vague notion that the chase couldn't last forever.

Or could it?

She turned the lights off when Gray was seven feet from her, and stepped aside.  There wasn't time for Gray to stop, and she barrelled into the empty Crane-Packard crate that was standing on end just inside the doorway.  When she hit--wham!--it fell flat with a crash that left Lexi's ears ringing.  "Don't call it a comeback!" she shouted, "I've been here for years!"  She flipped the lights back on and threw a toolbox into the crate.  The metallic, almost musical crashing made it impossible for her to tell if she'd hit Gray or missed her.  Lexi stepped back out of the storage room, closed the door (on some level aware that she was still shouting LL Cool J lyrics--"listen to the bass go BOOM!  Explosions!   Overpowering!  Over the competition, I'm towering!"--but at the same time not really listening to herself) and went back to the steps.  She heard Gray struggling out of the crate (tools clanging to the floor).  That was okay.  While Gray couldn't see her, Lexi slid the three stairsteps whose nails she'd removed into positions that looked nice and supportive, but weren't.

She took a bite of the second apple, then waited suicidally at the bottom of the steps until Gray got the storage room's door open.  When she did, Lexi threw the apple.  Gray swatted it out of the air, and Lexi was already on her way up the steps, avoiding the broken ones.  Gray did no such thing; she stepped on the first one, which was halfway up the staircase, and fell forward onto the second two.  There were two secure steps in between, but the sixty-year-old wood wasn't strong enough to hold her weight falling forward onto them.  Gray broke through both of them and fell back into the basement.

Gray found herself on her back in a shattered litterbox, and nowhere near hurt enough to stop herself from getting up.  Kerry's dalliances were nothing.  Even the ghost that masqueraded as her only fear was a mere irritation compared to what she felt now.  Gray was enraged.  It was difficult to keep the scarlet anger from overwhelming her completely, making her even more careless than she had already been.

Lexi was at the top of the steps, just inside the entrance to the hall of mirrors, taunting her with inane boasts--"Don't you dare stare!  You better move!  Don't ever compare!  Me to the rest that'll all get sliced and diced!  Competition's paying the price!"  Gray stood, heedless of the cat litter streaming out of every fold in her clothes, the blisters forming on her face from the boiling water Lexi had thrown on her, or the nasty sprain in her ankle, and jumped straight up.  She got her hands on the top stair and pulled herself up out of the wreckage of the basement steps.

Lexi was already fleeing again.  ("Mama said knock you out!" she yelled)  There were two cats running with her as she sprinted through the dark turret room and down the back hallway.  Lexi didn't know why Teague and Amy-Ann were running--probably because she was--but the cats thankfully didn't trip her.  The kitchen was bright, almost blinding after the darkness of the hallway.  She'd gained a few steps on Gray, was just far enough ahead to reach the stove, where she'd left a second pot boiling after taking the big pot of water away.  This one held a gallon of random oils, though--canola, olive, peanut, pretty much whatever was in the house--and it was boiling nicely.

Lexi was still singing, and Gray heard herself scream at her to shut up.  Embarrassing.  Lexi didn't stop, just turned with the pot, slinging a wave of hot oil toward the doorway as Gray came through. The oil soaked Gray from hairline to sternum.  She made a noise of acute pain, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, as the oil seared her skin.  Gray tried to charge through the attack, but Lexi jumped to the side and she ran blindly into the stove instead.  At least one burner hissed to life as Gray's belly hit the knobs, and the one that was already on set her oil-soaked her left arm on fire.  She pulled her arm back, and the motion ignited the unlit gas, causing the whole top of the stove to explode in a hot, brief fireball.  Gray was thrown backward, covering her face with her good arm as she fell.  She expected to be enveloped in flames, but the violence of the blast blew out the flames on the stove and her arm.

Gray sprang to her feet and opened her eyes, feeling the skin of her face going taut and swelling.  Blisters were forming on top of blisters, and breaking wetly even before Lexi hit her between the eyes with a coffee mug.  It was only the beginning of a barrage of crockery; even with her eyes seared she dodged or batted aside the missiles easily.  The instant Lexi ran out, Gray took four quick steps forward, all that was needed to close the distance between them.

Lexi was moving forward as well, toward the refrigerator, reaching eagerly for a bucket on top of it.  She got it before Gray ran into her.  The bucket held approximately twenty pounds of flour.  Lexi fell flat on her back at Gray's feet, and both women were enveloped in a choking cloud of white.  The flour stuck to the oil (and to the second-degree burns on her face and hands), and Gray was powdered white from head to foot.

"A little bit of nutmeg and you're ready to sauté, my pretty!" Lexi yelled, cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West.  She slammed the empty bucket down on Gray's head before the killer could clear her eyes of the clumping flour and oil.  It was enough of a distraction to allow her to squeeze past, and from there Lexi charged up the secret staircase to her room.

The evil chiclet was right behind her, but that was okay.  Lexi had left a big pickle jar full of marbles at the top of the steps, and booting it into the staircase was easy and convenient.  The jar exploded against the wall; a watery splash of freed marbles followed, and a series of heavy, violent thuds as Gray stepped in them and went right back down the steps.  She had about ten seconds before Gray got back up, she guessed, and used the time to run to the closet, open the door to the attic, and start up the ladder.

Gray was aware that chasing Lexi blindly through her own, clearly entrapped territory was stupid, but she couldn't stop.  The pursuit had taken on an instinct-driven life of its own.  Lexi ran; Gray chased, knowing she was giving advantage to Lexi by not stopping to think, yet convinced that in the end, it would make no difference.

The fall down the stairs was less painful than it could have been; Gray felt a moment of shame and increased anger at having been thwarted by child's toys.  The marbles didn't unsteady her footing on her second ascent.  She could hear Lexi scuttling in the closet.  Yes.  The stairway to the attic.  Gray kicked a toppled chair aside and went for the closet.

Unpleasant and unexpected was the cat that launched itself into her face when she yanked the door open.  Malice had been crouched amid Lexi's clothes on the upper shelf, and when Gray appeared she attacked, hissing and spitting, clawing valiantly for Gray's eyes and succeeding in scratching one of them.  With a roar that was more anger than pain, Gray flung the cat across the room.  Malice tumbled through the air and bounced across the dresser, scattering knickknacks.

Gray tracked Lexi's progress across the attic as she climbed the ladder.  There would no doubt be some trap at the top.  Her eyes were tearing violently from the burn, the scratching, and the flour in them, but she didn't stop to wipe them.  Nothing mattered except for killing Lexi, right now.

The trap door at the top of the ladder didn't fall in on her.  Gray's eyes found Lexi as she cleared the opening and rolled to the side.

Lexi had her bow and arrow again.  She had stopped shouting, and was aiming over Gray's head.  She looked up; the ceiling directly above her was covered with a bright yellow tarpaulin.  As Gray looked up, Lexi loosed the arrow, which cut neatly through whatever held the sheet up.  It dropped like a net, weighted corners pulling it down quickly.  Gray sighed and let it fall.

When the tarp covered Gray, Lexi dropped the bow, and rushed her.  She knew she wouldn't be able to get close while the woman could see her...especially not with the shovel she had picked up.  She swung it like a baseball bat, and the rusty head connected with the lump in the tarp that was Gray's head--or maybe it was a shoulder, she couldn't really tell--with a sickening, satisfying thwack.  If life was like a decent explosion-filled movie, Gray would have been knocked out and that would have been it for the chase.  But of course, life wasn't like that, and the concussion only made Gray angrier, as well as telling her where Lexi was.  The assassin's arm snaked out from under the tarp and she snatched the shovel from Lexi's hands before she bothered to free herself.

By the time she pushed the canvas away from her face Lexi had fled to another trap door.  She paused for half a second--yes, Gray was coming again, with the shovel.

Maybe that hadn't been such a good idea.

The staircase to the upstairs hallway was below her; Lexi kicked the latch free and the folding steps lowered themselves with a clatter and a creaking.  She grabbed Ren's titanium crowbar on the way down, ducking and holding it over her head as she went down the steps.  Halfway down she felt it catch on a strap of duct tape she'd put along the ceiling, and Gray, a step behind her, ran directly into the glass table top which swung free when the tape broke.

The thick glass broke Gray's nose (she left a white and red smear shaped vaguely like her face on it).  The impact made her stagger on the creaky stairway, and when the table top completed its swing the tape at the other end came loose and it fell on her.  Gray fell in a shower of shattered glass, tumbling down her third set of stairs in as many minutes.

It still didn't slow her down.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  The fall was taking her toward Lexi, so she rolled with it, keeping her grip on the shovel and popping to her feet within swinging distance.  Lexi parried the shovel with her crowbar, a completely unintentional maneuver that probably saved her from losing her right arm from the forearm down.  The hit numbed her fingers; she dropped the crowbar and ran again.  When she reached the stairs ("Mama said knock you OWWWWWT!" she yelled) she jumped, clearing all seven steps and dropping to the landing.  She kept going, right back up the other side of the staircase toward her room. There was a loud CHUNK at her heels; Gray had thrown the shovel like a javelin and it had stuck in the top stair.  Lexi tried not to think about how close she might have come to being decapitated by it.

Back in her room, she paused for only a moment to be sure Gray was still after her--which she was, just like a dog after a cat.  Malice meowed from under the dresser.  "Stay there, sweetch," Lexi told the cat.  The secret staircase had a latch on the room-side; it was covered with duct tape to keep it from locking when the door at the top of the steps closed.  Lexi pulled the tape off, kicked the doorstop loose, and grabbed the saucer-sled she'd stood up by the door.

Gray charged into the room at that same moment, and Lexi threw herself down the steps.  Literally; the fastest way down was the sled, especially considering the six hundred and forty-seven (or so) marbles and glass splinters that littered the steps.  There was no way to control the slide; she held on for dear life and put her feet out in front of her, hoping she wouldn't break her legs when she hit the door at the bottom.  Her legs didn't break on impact, but the sled did.  Lexi shot into the kitchen holding the separated halves of the sled as Gray reached the top and started down.  The door closed behind her; Lexi heard it latch. 

Lexi threw the broken sled into the general mess and looked for something to block the door with.  Something big.  Something convenient.  The refrigerator was right next to the door.  Perfect.  Lexi climbed onto the counter on the other side of the fridge, threw her weight into it as high up as she could, and turned it over on its side.  The noises of destruction from within and without were wonderful; she wished she could have recorded them.  The impact made the clock over the kitchen window fall into the sink, where it broke.

The next thud was Gray trying to open the kitchen door, which was blocked securely shut by the fridge.  Lexi sat on top of the refrigerator.  Eddie helped Nikki through the kitchen doorway as Gray began attacking the door in earnest, kicking fiercely at the knob.

"What the fuck?" Eddie said, seeing the mess.  Not only was the fridge on its side, but flour, oil, and broken dishes were scattered everywhere.  Nikki limped to the kitchen table and leaned heavily on it.

"Freak-a-me, freak-a-you," Lexi said, and sighed.  "Turn off the stove, please," she added, hearing the burners still hissing.  She was exhausted.