Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone.
There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on...
-Les Miserables-
But each time I tell myself that I, well I can't stand the pain,
But when you hold me in your arms, I'll sing it once again.
"Piece Of My Heart", Janis Joplin
Chapter One: Crawfish
While the roads might have been devoid of other cars and no speed limits had yet been established, that didn't stop the lone driver from getting the hell out of that neighborhood as fast as the gas pedal would take him. Five bleeding corpses had been his only prize after breaking into the wrong house, and if he hadn't thought to get down and slip his way back through the cracked door, he would definitely have been Dead Body No. 6. As luck would have it, though—or madness, or fate, or some other unseen force without a name—he'd made it out of there with nothing but a bullet hole through the arm.
He might not have had any medical knowledge to his name, but at least he'd remembered to plug up the holes and add a thick bandage or two for later. Somewhere between one city limit and another (he didn't bother checking the names, that would have been too much of a distraction), the sharp pain coming from just above his left elbow finally started to fade.
About time, too, because he had a lot of driving ahead of him...and as it had often meant for him in the past, a lot of driving meant a lot of thinking.
Just who the fuck was that crazy man?
Where on earth had he managed to find that German rifle?
How had he turned the tables on the gang so quickly, and ambushed them all before they could even blink?
Just when had he learned to kill so many people in so short of a time?
Most of all, though...why had his voice and killing style seemed so familiar? Had he been with that Lieutenant that the driver himself had spoken to only three months beforehand? Couldn't have been. He'd only heard of five others associated with that infamous rogue, and with four of them long proclaimed dead while the fifth had already been named and described, there couldn't possibly be any others hiding in the woodwork someplace. Not when there was no such thing as horrific curses or monstrous immortality in real life. Not when the monsters only existed in movies, and not under your bed or hiding in the closet. Not when the dead stayed dead, unless...
"...No fuckin' way."
There was no such thing as ghosts, either...or restless souls, or reanimated corpses, or whatever bogeyman threatened to take over his imagination in the middle of the night. Whoever or whatever he thought he'd gone up against an hour ago, it wasn't one of Raine's boys. After all, with most of them dead and in the ground or nothing but ashes, there was no chance in hell or heaven that one of them might actually come back, right...?
One minute later, when the highway stretched out before him and his mental fog started to clear, he wasted no time in turning that car as far northwest as he could possibly get. Crazy surprise attacker or not, the driver had just been given a harsh glimpse of the future...and if he hoped to survive it, even if just by a thread, he would have to learn how to kill just as ruthlessly.