Peter Shoots Rebecca, Steef, and Eva Dead in the Cottage

Peter’s shooting of Rebecca, Steef, and Eva in the cottage is the fatal culmination of the armed confrontation: after Rebecca shoots him, he kills all three and describes the violence as both self-defense and a way to keep from being alone. The sequence turns the language of love and protection into an excuse for annihilation, as Peter’s narration moves from panic to a chillingly deliberate final shot.

The Shooting and Its Escalation

Rebecca’s shot hits Peter in the flank. Blood pours from his side, but he remains standing. He interprets movement around him as a threat that the others will finish him off, and shoots Rebecca before she can fire again. The account makes clear that Peter has been wounded; it also confines the justification for his next actions to his own perception of danger, rather than establishing that Rebecca or the others are about to kill him.

Eva runs to Rebecca as she falls and drags her to the couch. Peter, however, experiences the scene as an intolerable blur of screaming, light, and noise. He describes himself as a machine and swings the gun around. When Steef springs up and grabs for his hands, Peter fires again. Steef collapses against the wall, and the movement from shooting Rebecca to shooting Steef is rendered as a rapid escalation: Peter treats the struggle over the weapon as his one chance and says the trigger is easier to pull the second time.

After Eva screams, Peter turns toward her. His account makes the killing intimate in a way the earlier shots are not: he thinks that he loves her, cannot bear either going alone or remaining alone, and decides to take her with him. Both fire. Eva’s bullet strikes the ceiling; Peter’s hits her heart. She drops her weapon and falls slowly over Rebecca’s body. The image joins the two women in the aftermath while Peter reports feeling nothing. He then turns back toward Steef, who is still moving and reaching for the gun near his feet, and prepares to fire again.

Self-Justification and the Final Threat

Peter’s narration recasts the shooting as a collapse of personhood: amid the screaming and noise, he imagines the four of them as no longer human and himself as a pumping, roaring machine. That language conveys the extremity of his perception, but it also obscures his agency. Even as he describes himself as swept into violence, he makes successive choices to fire, and he turns his fear of being alone into a reason to kill Eva. His declaration of love does not restrain the violence; within his account, it becomes part of its justification.

The passage ends not with a confirmed final shot at Steef, but with Peter turning back toward him as Steef reaches for the gun and preparing to fire. Peter describes himself as no longer trembling, as cold as ice and stone, and imagines taking the others with him to hell. The threatened last shot leaves the immediate physical outcome unstated in this excerpt, while making Peter’s intention unmistakable: he has shifted from defending himself against what he perceives as danger to promising further violence as vengeance.

The Gun and the Narrowing of Choice

The scene’s sequence of gestures makes the gun a shifting center of control. Rebecca grips it when she shoots Peter; Peter then fires while interpreting the movement around him as a threat. Steef’s attempt to seize Peter’s hands briefly turns the weapon into the object of a physical struggle, while the later exchange of shots between Peter and Eva ends with her gun falling to the floor. Steef’s reach toward the weapon near his feet leaves that struggle active even after Peter has shot him. The weapon’s changing position links the separate acts of violence into one continuous crisis, without making them morally equivalent: Peter repeatedly decides to fire, while the others’ actions are shown in immediate relation to the threat around them.

Narrative Perspective and Moral Reversal

The episode is confined to Peter’s immediate perception, so the reader encounters the violence through a consciousness that is wounded and disoriented but also making decisions. Rebecca appears to him doubled; the shooting is surrounded by a flash of white light, pain, and sound, and after Eva falls he reports feeling nothing. These distortions register his collapse without turning his account into an objective explanation of what the others intend. His belief that they will finish him is explicitly his interpretation; the narration does not establish that Rebecca or Steef is preparing to kill him.

The scene’s moral direction changes as Peter’s own language changes. He first frames his fire as self-protection, but after killing Rebecca and Steef, his thoughts about Eva combine love with a refusal to be alone, making attachment a rationale for killing her too. By the final turn toward Steef, the language has become openly retaliatory: Peter imagines taking the others with him to hell. The sequence thus exposes the distance between his claims of love and protection and the actions those claims are made to authorize. It ends on his intention to fire again, not on confirmation of what happens next.