Jack's coming. And she can see it through glances past Hollins, eye contact with the wide brown eyes of Ardelia as she stands stick stiff. Steady. Ardelia looks like a real officer, Clarice can't help but think, as she grounds herself, expression hardened, jacket pulled back exposing her gun. She's mouthing something, but it's so hard to hear her over Hollins's words.
"Where is he?" Clarice demands for the man who's helped make her life a living nightmare.
"Come with me and we'll walk. If not, I think I know who can reach him first," Hollins replies. He opens his palm, revealing a tiny remote control. "We do a lot of Revolutionary War re-enactments out here. The good doctor's hanging on a noose right now. I can drop the gallows before you can reach your gun."
"Bullshit," Ardelia calls from the kitchen. Both Hollins and she look back toward her. Her gun's out, aimed, but Clarice can't imagine her puling the trigger even if she watched Ardelia practice hundreds of times at Quantico. "Gallows aren't like the movies. Half the time they'd have to break prisoners' necks. You can't guarantee he'd be dead before we shoot you."
The strangest heat flickers inside Clarice as she processes what Ardelia said. There's even a bit of pride knowing where she learned that, all that time Ardelia's mother would complain about the documentaries Ardelia would watch as a kid and teenager instead of going to bed at reasonable hours.
As slowly as Hollins pulled out his remote, Clarice shows her gun. Removes it from her holster and aims it at his heart. "Drop the remote, Hollins. You're under arrest—"
Hollins drops the remote, the piece of plastic clattering to the ground. "Unless I already did kill him? He could just be hanging from the rafters in the barn. Guess neither of you know."
Jack is going to be here soon. When she glances back at Ardelia, she's miming for Clarice to keep her cool. Dr. Lecter isn't dead. This isn't the way Dr. Lecter goes out. But something in Clarice feels so, so wrong. Helpless, angry, drowning in everything from the air surrounding them to the words coming out of Hollins' mouth.
She doesn't think Dr. Lecter is dead, but she has to know. It's that same primal, aching need she had when she realized she was in Jame Gumb's house not knowing if she'd find Catherine's skinned corpse or not.
And if there's one thing she learned from Jame Gumb's basement, it's that these men bleed. That she may be smaller than these men, but she's faster.
Clarice aims the gun lower than Hollins' heart.
Ardelia's eyes widen.
"Clarice, don't!" Ardelia calls out as—
—Clarice pulls the trigger.
Hollins collapses with a scream, clutching his bloody hand. Clarice can hear something splat to the ground, but she doesn't take the seconds to see if it's finger nubs or not. She just runs. Runs so fast, so hard, she doesn't even feel the herself in her skin. What should be the whip of wind, the ache of her legs, the vice grip on her lungs as she tries to breathe is nothing but the singular images in front of her. The rotting brown-red of a barn on Hollins' property. A rickety door that she has to push open, that slams shut behind her. The open darkness of the barn area, barely lit by cracks in the rotting walls.
The darkness.
That hits her like a sledgehammer. All those months seeing the darkness in the safe spaces around her, all that time convincing herself that it could never happen again. That she'd react differently this time. That she'd remember a flashlight this time, that she'd be ready, that she wouldn't just get lucky. It's all gone. Nothing in the room but the darkness and Clarice, feeling tinier and tinier by the second as her heart lodges in her throat.
Bill's in here he's got a gun he's got knives he's going to skin you like all those woman you couldn't save—
Tears spring to Clarice's eyes as she spins in circles, gun at the ready.
And that's where it dawns on her, spiders crawling up her skin.
There isn't anyone in here.
No Hollins, but also no Lecter.
It crashes down on her. No gallows, no Lecter, nothing.
He was baiting her.
For what—?
Then another gun goes off.
The second shot rings off and Clarice's world falls from under her.
"Ardelia!" she cries out, even knowing she can't hear her.
She rushes to the door.
But it opens.
With a blood-soaked Hollins in the doorway, light spilling in on the empty barn.
Clarice's stomach lurches.
Ardelia's blood.
She doesn't know, but she feels herself falling anyway. Falling back to that last memory where she didn't fully take in Ardelia's face before running, where Ardelia hugged her like Clarice was the one whose life was at risk, Ardelia's smile at their graduation, that first night they really talked to each other, talked about their dead fathers and found someone amid the chaos of their lives who got it. Who put the world back in focus.
She ran in here for Hannibal Lecter, someone who consumed her world. But Ardelia made it make sense first.
Clarice raises the gun, arms shaking. The fear is gone, just like that. "Move." The police speech plays in her head, but she can't say it.
Hollins snickers. "You know how I know Lecter killed my sister?"
This man shot—killed (she can't think about it)—Ardelia, and he still wants to go on about Dr. Lecter.
"I don't care," Clarice says through grit teeth, barely holding back the flood of anger as it overtakes her.
"He left a note on her car. Can you believe it? I didn't even know the guy! My uncle used to go to his opera galas, met the guy once when I came to pick up money for a loan for the bar. And he acts like we're old friends."
Clarice thinks two things when she shoots—that she's going to tell Jack that not everyone who kills in the DMV area was Dr. Lecter's patient and that he's done listening to this man talk.
But as the bullet leaves Clarice's gun, white hot pain shoots through her thigh.
She hears banging as her legs fall from under her.
And there's a moment of silence, stillness, numbness as she falls. Where she can't hear screaming, see the darkness, feel the heat or wetness or pain.
Her leg drops into the hay-lined ground. But when that—when that digs into bullet wound on her thigh, she knows it. She gasps a breath as her body thrashes inside and out from the pain. It's unlike anything she's ever experienced, ever could imagine in the recesses of her brain. As her nerves scream, as she fitfully clutches her pant leg as it soaks through with blood, she wishes she were back in Jame Gumb's basement, if only because it wasn't like this.
But she doesn't. Not as she hears her gun clank away from her, as she hears Hollins's knee hit the ground as he moves forward.
She sees him from an angle, her on her back as he crawls to her on his bloody knuckles. She aimed for his hand again, thinking it would be strategic, merciful. Or like she wasn't thinking at all, every curse word that'd make her parents blush drumming through her head.
Hollins can't grab the gun, so what is he hoping to do coming to it? Clarice's head is running fuzzy, barely processing the question, let alone the answer.
Then he's on top of her. Knees launched into her every organ that a Kevlar jacket can't protect. She lurches up as she gasps for breath, the whole hundred seventy-whatever pounds on her. She thrashes, she pleads for air, but without it, she can feel the seconds tick by.
Then his arm, his bulking arm presses on her neck. The world goes fuzzier, fuzzier.
She hears a crunch, but she can't feel it. That terrifies her so, so much more than the pain.
Through it all, one image comes to mind. That nightmare she used to have after her father died, when she shivered in the rancher's spare bedroom in the attic. The one where she tried to imagine what her dad felt when the robbers left him to die, how he felt the whole stretched out hell he stayed alive after. How he must've, for some amount of time, feared that he was going to die alone.
Clarice thought she'd die alone in Jame Gumb's basement, carved apart alongside Catherine Martin to become cold slabs on an autopsy table for Jack Crawford.
She loved her dad, but she wasn't about to repeat him. Her life wasn't one death blow that stretched out six months before finally taking her.
She snaps her arm with all her strength, lifting her body with power she knows should be gone by now.
Clarice knows she isn't physically strong, isn't big, isn't intimidating.
But she's fast.
And she shoots him right in the motherfucking mouth.
The second the gun goes off, Clarice re-enters the world of the living.
Her ear screams in pain, too close, too too close to the blast. Blood blasts from Hollins' face right onto hers—into her eyes, up her nose and mouth. Metallic and thick and revolting in a way that tries to launch her right back to that dinner with Dr. Lecter. Blood pudding, even if he hadn't put blood in hers. She rolls onto her side and gags, the pain from her bullet wound screaming in response to another ride in the hay.
She lurches up into a sitting position, despite the pain and disgust and growing wooziness.
Right to the icy blue eyes of Dr. Lecter.
Dr. Lecter in front of her, holding the mangled but horrifying alive body of Hollins by his greasy hair. Dr. Lecter in a suit like he wore to the dinner they shared, with his fox eyes and the confidence of a man who has nowhere he can't go.
He's here.
Hollins said that he was here, but then he wasn't. But now Dr. Lecter is. She can't be sure much of anything is happening, but this is real. She can even smell the expensive cologne on Dr. Lecter she noticed from dinner.
"You think about Billy, don't you?" Dr. Lecter says, eyes on Hollins. He has a knife in his hand, twirling it like he's giving Clarice a show.
"I do," Clarice says. She isn't sure why. Maybe it's the only thing that feels normal in this twisted world. Maybe because she knows what comes next.
"Don't this time," Dr. Lecter says.
His lips curl into a smile of a predator as he lifts the knife to Hollins' neck. Like he's the rancher killing the spring lambs from her childhood. But Clarice doesn't flinch when Lecter ends Hollins. With a piece of his jaw somewhere in the hay, Clarice knows it was a mercy.
It's only when she hears Hollins's body hit the floor that the pain really, really hits, though. She collapses back into the dirt and hay, clutching her leg as she sweats through shallow breaths. Anything else stabs a pain through her chest so intense she sees stars.
If she isn't going to die from this, she wishes she would.
Then more footsteps sound.
"Hannibal, the cops are—" a voice Clarice doesn't recognize, but knows somehow.
"Good," Dr. Lecter says as he gets to his feet and brushes the dirt off his pants. "Put her here. Let Jack find them."
Through a haze only growing hazier from the pain, Clarice sees Will Graham's face as he gingerly places a pale Ardelia beside her.
She watches Ardelia's chest rise and fall.
She hears the footsteps exiting the barn. Hears the ones heading toward them. She knows, despite all odds, they won't intersect.
All she sees is Ardelia. Ardelia and the red hole in her stomach, soaking through her shirt. Clarice takes a hand off her own wound to staunch Ardelia's wound with her.
Ardelia looks over to her. The tiniest of smiles on her face. "Did you shoot him too?"
"Yeah."
"Same."
They hold each other until Jack arrives seconds later.