Letty

Shit.

Seriously, shit.

Like, holy shitcakes to the power of bacon. The shit that shit has a shit about. That's a lot of shit.

Then again, you'd probably react similarly if the person you're kind of supposed to protect from dying for the agenda of an evil dude starts falling with his wings out of commission. I mean, I didn't go to school, but even I know that's a bad thing. Oh lordie this is bad.

Zamboni's gonna kill me. He's gonna freak out that his mutant mercenaries are attacking his beloved Iggy, but afterwards he'd kill me.

Oh? You mean those mutants attacking Iggy are working for Zamboni? Damn straight. Every wealthy businessman has a secret army of cloned mutants. I thought the memo had gone out.

I snapped out my mental rant and shook my sight back into my eyes, and immediately took off to find where Iggy was going to land to try to stop him from dying. I shot like a rocket through the woods, dodging over fallen trunks and traipsing under branches. I was a freakin' blur to the naked eye, were anyone in the forests of Illinois at the time. I stopped to try to see where he was falling, but my mind had other plans and decided to show me how Max was handling the situation. Which was really weird, since I usually never paid much attention to her and now all of a sudden my subconscious cares?

Hey, subconscious? If you know something I don't, now would be a great time to let me in on the secret. Thanks.

Max had just finished off a hybrid of a bird and deer or something like that when she heard Fang yell Iggy's name. It took her about five seconds to take in what was happening and about two seconds to act on it. Within ten seconds of his fall, Max had taken out another mercenary and was diving at supersonic speeds after Iggy. Since they weren't around any kind of civilization, the flock had been flying a little lower than usual, so Iggy wasn't all that far from hitting the tall canopy extending over the Illinois country side. Max threw her arm out and willed herself to close the last space between them and caught hold of the net holding Iggy. She extended her wings out and folded them to catch the wind and pull her up, but the force of her pulling up on the net and the weight of Iggy's fall caused the net to snap.

This was when Iggy came alive. The whole time he'd been falling he was silent, his sightless eyes wide in Max's view, but now he had a second wind of energy, and he used it. Iggy began to flap his wings and free himself of the net, but he was running on adrenaline and he only managed to tangle the ropes in his wings and in the next moment he crashed through the trees and disappeared from Max's grasp. The whole thing happened in under three seconds, which wasn't enough time for Max to fly back down and catch him again, and when he disappeared Max started screaming.

"IGGY!" She tried to break through the canopy but it was too thick of anything short of a fall to get through. Branches weaved through, though a large hole was broken branch and twigs. As much as it obviously pained her to say it (or think of it), Max knew she couldn't get through there. She had to find another opening. So she did.

"No." I breathed as I came to, and I was off again. I didn't really know where he was, but the loud crash that followed just after I came back to myself was him then finding him wouldn't be a problem. I ran, and soon I was upon the crumpled heap of rope and feathers that appeared to be Iggy. I looked up, and saw a piece of his shirt and feathers hanging off a branch, so he wasn't dead. Max plus the force of the branches hitting him and getting caught had to have broken his fall enough to just be really friggin' painful.

Keep telling yourself that, Letty. I cautiously picked my way over to him, and he was definitely out. He had various cuts and scratches on his arms and face, but other than that he was okay. He would be in a craptastic amount of pain when he woke up, but he would live.

"Iggy!" Shit, it's Max! I pulled a swiss army knife I found in a camp ground like two weeks ago (you never know when this kind of stuff comes in handy, and right now was perfect testament) and began cutting away at the ropes tangled in his wings. I could hear Max calling Iggy's name, and my heartbeat doubled its pace as I had an adrenaline overload. My hands started shaking and soon I had almost all the rope cut. I finished the last connected net near his wing joint, which was where I screwed up. As I yanked the knife back to put it away, I gave my hand a seriously gnarly gash. Forgetting where I was and what I was doing, I swore very loudly, and Iggy's eyes popped open; for a moment it was like he saw me.

Then, y'know, I remembered that he can't actually see anything. The whole 'being blind' thing.

Iggy started to move and I scrambled back into the shadows of the forest, pressing myself against a tree and held my breath.

"Iggy!" Max came bounding onto the scene, and Iggy made a grunting sound to let Max know she was about to step on him.

"Iggy, you're okay!" She looked like she was about to cry, but quickly composed herself for her leader-stoic persona she's incapable of doing well.

"'Okay' is a relative term, but I'm alive." Iggy replied in a strained voice. I missed the rest of the conversation because I had made my escape but I think Iggy had asked something about if Max had heard anything or something. Who knows.

Sometimes having the last bacon sandwich of the day makes you want to cry. If I was capable of normal emotions (just kidding) then I'd probably be bawling. But I hadn't planned on keeping them longer than a day and bacon sandwiches don't last a long time very well. But still, I was a long ways from any kind of civilization and in the middle of a desert in Texas and wishing I had taken the Flock's route through Nebraska, so I needed to keep my food as long as I could. I don't even remember how I got here. Or when it became nighttime.

Now that I think about it, it's really dark, and by dark I mean like advanced darkness. This is the kind of dark that dark is afraid of. Creepy.

It had to be around ten at night, and I planned on stopping when it got dark but I landed in this desert in between Bumsville and Nowhereland. So that plan is out the window. The Flock had already found a place to stay for the night, and I couldn't stop until I found a town.

Wait, what was that?

...That was a car. Cars mean a road, and a road means...

A town would fall along the road eventually. Immediately I began the trek towards the road, and about thirty minutes later I was walking on the shoulder, slightly more optimistic about life. Finally overcome by hunger and the need for bacon I ate my final bacon sandwich, which gave me an extra boost of energy to get me to a motel.

"Hey!" Who the hell would be driving at this time of night in the middle of nowhere?

...This guy. Creeper to the max, with a creeper 'stache and gross acne and just altogether made me want to cringe. I adjusted my hat to cover my ears and kept walking. Senor Creepermeister didn't get that I was ignoring and followed me.

"Hey, a kid like you shouldn't be walking out here so late at night. There's a town ten miles up the road - lemme give you a ride."

I bet you would, you pedophile. I shook my head, trying to look courteous.

"Thanks but no thanks. I'm fine." Senor Creeper frowned, looking through the windshield with his look of deep contemplation. Then he sighed and looked back at me.

"I won't try to force you, but there are gonna be people worse than me driving around soon. What a kid your age is doing out here so late without your parents is beyond me, but I got a daughter your age." Everything about this radiated "no get away go now now now" but for some inexplicable reason I found myself in Creeper (whose real name is Coop)'s backseat listening to The Smiths, which is always a pretty good thing.

The next thing I remember is waking up in a shabby motel fully-clothed vaguely remembering falling asleep in Coop's car and him getting this room for me before leaving. A note stood on the bedside table that read, quite simply: Your secret's safe with me.

Now I understand how perverted all that sounds, but I think my hat fell off last night while I was being moved from car-to-bed.

You gutter-minded perverts.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, save for an incident in New Mexico involving the police, an orangutan and an ice cream truck, but that's completely and embarrassingly irrelevant.

I ended up in Mesa a day later than I expected to, but it was only Thursday and Zamboni wasn't coming in 'til Sunday (Changed his mind about Friday I guess. We going to forget to mention Iggy's almost dying in the forest issue)

As soon as I go to Mesa I headed toward the foreclosed housing district and started preparing for, eventually, Iggy.

I only hope he'll still want to go through the surgery after yesterday.

I certainly would.