A quick lesson children. Hitting like a girl doesn't mean the person can't hit. It means they're going to hit you where it matters.

You learn pretty fast, if girls actually fight? They're not the fairest people in the world. And if you've still got some sort of deluded sense of honour about not hitting the "fairer sex", how the everloving fuck aren't you dead already?

Case in point. I'm currently nursing a black eye, among other bruises, scrapes and a rather unpleasant cut across the ribs.

But she's dead, so it's not like I'll be indulging the habit.

I didn't think it would be this easy.

It occurs to me that I've been deliberately vague about where I am and where I'm going.

I'm not a long-term plan sort of guy. Never have been, consequences be damned.
You see, the more you think about something I figure, the more you're going to worry about what happens afterwards. Especially if it goes wrong.

No one will ever let you forget those fuck ups. No one. So you live with them. Wear them like armour.

So what have I been doing? I don't stop driving. Not for more than a few hours at a stretch. I've got a map in case I get lost. I've got the internet. But I wake up and I drive. Not much in the way of a course. Maybe wake up with a direction in mind. "Going east today" maybe. And from there, just roll with it.

Plans go wrong. It's like something made to live in a vacuum, or under extreme pressure. Do you know what happens to things that live under those conditions when they're exposed to the real world? Boom. Messy.

Get to the point.

Right. So, imagine my surprise. I stop for gas somewhere yesterday, and the missing posters... dear god the missing posters.

Seven children, in the past... four months I seem to remember. Bang. Gone, right out of their houses.
Sounds like anyone we know?

My interest was... piqued, for lack of a better word, so I stuck around.

And I found something. What, you might ask? We're talking about Them. It's little busy hands and feet.
Just one, not that you'd expect more. Small town. Statistics... It's touch was everywhere. You could see it... feel it. In that sort of ghost town way. This place is not for the living.
I drove by one of the local schools? Bloody thing drawn in chalk. Operator symbols. Fucking everywhere. Like they were mushrooms, and it had just rained.

Not important.

In any case, I found the bastards. It didn't take too much digging. Imagine their surprise. I'm probably a crappy shot, but a gun is a gun, and pointing one at someone, especially if you've just burst in the door and caught them with their metaphorical pants down, does a lot to put a little menace into what you're about to say.

I found them. Two of them, small building on the outside of town.

The funny thing is, you're also a lot less menacing if you're in the middle of making waffles.


One of them starts to get up, looks like he's scared. About to do something stupid. The other is busy holding a bloody waffle iron. I had to stop myself from laughing a little.
"Sit down."
He doesn't argue.
"You're the brains?"
Waffles nods. "Yeah."

Not much brains in either of them, to be perfectly honest.

"There any more of you?"
Waffles manages to stutter out a: "N-n-no"
Point the gun at him a little more emphatically.
"I don't remember asking you a damn thing."
Scared guy shakes his head.
Now, at this point, Waffles thinks he can talk his way out of it, like it was some kind of misunderstanding.
So I point the gun at him.

Not so much point as slam it into the back of his head.

That shuts him up.
"Did I break your concentration? "No? Guess you were finished then. Let me offer you a reply."

Bang. Waffles is down.
Bang. Scared guy takes one in the gut.

Roll credits, get the hell out of there.

Mr. Kerr

I should be dead.
Instead, I'm not. How does that work? I mean, really.

Let me tell you about Mr. Kerr.
Mr. Kerr runs a small clinic, it's not important where this clinic is. A major city, suffice it to say. High population density.
I've been avoiding them thusfar. Why? Probability says that the more people there are in one place, the better the chances you have of finding a particular subset, if that subset can exist. In this case, the more people there are, the better your chances are of finding Us.

Stalked. Runners, fighters, whatever the fuck you decide to call yourself. Big cities are a breeding ground it seems, so long as there's an internet connection and at least one unlucky bastard. And where you find Us, you find the other guys. Them. You know the ones I'm talking about, Agents, Proxies, Hallowed (god I hate that word). Call them whatever the fuck you like. The Competition.

Into this mix, enters Mr. Kerr. Mr. Kerr is not exactly a doctor. Mr. Kerr was an EMT. You know, ambulance man. And apparently a volunteer with the Red Cross during some disruption of civilized life.
Mr. Kerr is of an indeterminate age, an undisclosed race, weight and height, as none of those are particularly important.

What is important, is that Mr. Kerr is aware of this particular mess. And it is to Mr. Kerr that I owe my continued survival at this particular moment.

You know what can happen, I'm not going to bore you with the fucking details of how it happened. Suffice it to say I was on the receiving end of a particularly deconstructive variety of mask wearing freak. He got the worst of it but I needed something more than improvised first aid. Bullet wounds are like that.

So how does Mr. Kerr enter into the picture? I stumbled into his "clinic". The reason I say "clinic" is because it's not marked like one. In fact, it looks like a drug store. Which admittedly amounts to almost the same thing. Only the staff don't tend to actually practice anything resembling medicine.

I stumble in. While I'm trying to purchase the supplies I intend to try to patch myself up with and trying very hard not to bleed through the bandage and tourniquet, he starts to describe a certain general sort of portrait which might describe any of us.
"Stop me if any of this sounds familiar," he says, "You're a runaway? Some masked guys in hoodies did this? Tall fellow in a suit." I nodded, admittedly I wasn't in any state for more violence. He offered to patch me up. Apparently good samaritans do exist. They're just few and far between. Colour me fucking surprised.

Judging by the way he acted, I'm not the first unlucky bastard to have stumbled in here. Not sure how Mr. Kerr is involved. The way he talks, he's not exactly in the know. I imagine he's taken pains to avoid that. I also think that the rather large gun under the counter isn't just for would-be bandits.
You people love your damned amendment, don't you?

Did a pretty good job of cleaning me up. I'm apparently lucky that the bullet didn't hit anything particularly important but my arm is going to be a little more useless that it was before. That's alright. I've had broken arms before.

Rocked the boat

Someone tried to kill me today.

That feels new, oddly enough. It's not that it's never been a possibility, but this time it was different.
You can kill people lots of ways, we're fragile, breakable little things.  Before it was always a chance that you'd live through being stabbed or bludgeoned. This one had a gun.

Stupid. Was he trying to get himself killed?

Maybe. That's the point of a gun. You can, presumably not kill someone with it, but at the end of the day, it's what it was made for. Killing. Using it another way goes against what it was made for. Against it's... purpose, so to speak.

He's not exactly doing so well.
Bullet wounds will do that.

Gun's mine now. Not doing so well though. But I'm still alive.

The important bit, right?

Right.

Back on the fucking road then.

I don't think my arm should feel numb like this.
Not important. Getting it on with this.

I still don't remember much from around the car crash. I'm assuming that a low speed collision with a treeon top of a recovering concussion isn't a recipe for a healthy mind. Everything before I woke up in that room
Needless to say it's not something I'm in a hurry to review again.

They drugged me, I think. They did something to my head.

I feel like I can hear a pin drop though. My head is absolutely fucking killing me. I wonder if this is what a hangover feels like.

Oh. Hello there.
Time for more running it seems.

On Compulsion

Not sure why I'm still blogging.

I mean, the sane thing to do would be to not only delete the fucking blog, but change the password to this account to something random and lock myself out of it, just to be safe. At least some of us have the good sense not to broadcast their movements for all the world to see.

I mean it doesn't make any sense outside of viewing this all as fiction does it?
The poor sods keep blogging while their world falls to pieces around them despite their minds coming entirely unhinged? Half the people who blog would be in mental facilities.

And the other half would be dead or in prison.

But it's the expectation of the fucking genre, isn't it? The slow, murderous descent into madness and mayhem. Clawing at what scraps of sanity we have left. Hounded at every fucking turn by a fucking faceless thing in a suit.

Actually let's take a fucking look at that for a second. IT WEARS A FUCKING SUIT. Can you comprehend that? There are people, in the world right this minute, being chased by a faceless abomination from god fucking knows where who is genteel enough to put on a suit and tie before he does so. And his fucked up little... what? What do you even call these people? I'm not even sure. But can you start to understand just how absolutely goddamned insane that is?

I really don't think I understand it. I don't think anyone does. Not really. They pretend to but that's getting off of the fucking topic.
But it gets played out. And people watch. It's god damned sickening. I'm ashamed to have been guilty of it, at this point.
But then I never claimed to be a saint.


The compulsion to keep writing, even as one is being devoured.


Lovecraft, at least, would be proud.

Something interesting happened

Beat the living shit out of someone? Fine. Knife one of those mask-wearing crazies in the shoulder? Done that, not a problem. Suppose I have to add homicide to the list.

It's getting to be a pretty long one at this point. So you killed a person. That's done. Bravo. No point in dwelling on it, right? I thought you'd gotten over this already. It's been two days.

I just killed a person. Fuck.

Obviously not, you've reduced a human being to a bloody pulp. That's murder, remember?
Never mind that you don't remember doing it yourself, that's just making it fucking worse, isn't it Robin?

Leave it up to the imagination to fill in the blanks in the most unpleasant way possible.

It was a mask-wearing prick who wasn't all there. You could hear it in his voice. Sick, like a rabid animal.
Was he really even human at that point?

I don't know; you're the one fucking asking.

It was shaped like a human being. It moved like one, but it was wrong. Wrong shape, something just fundamentally wrong about it. Not that that it matters either. He's dead. Done, over with.

Oh fucking hardly, or you wouldn't be fucking monologuing over it, would you? Dumbass.
Are you even sure you're feeling guilty about that? And besides, you stopped going to church years ago. After she died, remember?


No point in stopping now, is there?

Doesn't seem to be. At this point you're fucked either way, so what's the harm in a little more? You'll go crazy and die, or get murdered by some idiot in an out-of-season halloween costume.

You really don't have time to waste, do you?

And to be perfectly fair, it'd be lying if you said you didn't enjoy it just a little bit.