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.

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.