Sue stopped.
Given her eagerness to go up and investigate the upstairs, it seemed unlikely for her to stop. Even her earlier concern about letting the rest of the party go first had been forgotten in her curiosity, and she hadn’t checked to see if Eve had taken her offer to go ahead – maybe when other girl ran past, Eve assumed that her bizarre proffer of “ladies first” had been satisfied.
Either way, Sue found herself behind other girl, who was moving swiftly up the steps…
The girl stopped. There was enough room for Sue to slip past, and she almost did, before realizing that pushing past a panicked party member with a pistol was probably perilous.
right, the kid! shoot, he was bleeding? She turned to look… and stopped halfway.
Sue suddenly found herself frozen in place. She’d never seen blood before – mainly because she hadn’t seen before, if her fragments of memory were to be believed – but she knew some people were disturbed at the sight of it, some even fainted. Should she turn to look at a potentially grotesque sight she’d never seen before?
Yes. She’d gone to all this trouble – at least, she assumed she had – because she wanted to see, and being able to see meant seeing the beauty as well as the ugly. Not that there was much beauty around here, except for maybe the people. Were any of them “attractive”? She realized she had no way to know.
Irrelevant, and a distraction. She forced a blink, then turned to look…
she was so going to regret looking, wasn’t she?