Kenny's alarm went off. Still Alive from Portal. How incredibly apt. He reached out and hit the Snooze button on his phone, then rolled back over. He could hear his parents at each others' throats on the far side of the house. He was staying out of it.
So he didn't get out of bed. After nine minutes the phone started singing again and Kenny shut it up. He scuttled up to sit on his pillow and think about exactly what had happened. It had been pretty simple - he'd fallen far too quickly and broken his face on the ground. He started setting rules for himself.
Firstly, no more flips until he could actually do the damn things. Secondly, he was going to have to find a way of arresting momentum somehow during falling - if he was unlucky enough to be caught in that situation again, he didn't want to have to waste ten minutes looking for a fire escape only to find his target gone and someone else in a puddle of blood.
Christ he thought, when the fuck did doing what's right become so fucking difficult?
He got up and pulled on his orange stuff, leaving aside the navy clothes. He headed to his closet and looked through his stuff, but found nothing that would do the job. Kenny groaned and turned around. His bedclothes caught his eye.
Specifically, a blanket under his bed, a heavy old black thing that came in useful on cold nights. But he'd grown used to being cold and he had multiple spare parkas. He pulled it out and looked at it. It was heavy and dark - those were pretty much the conditions.
Kenny grinned and pulled out his old sewing kit from his home economics period.
The result, despite his initial enthusiasm, wasn't so great. Kenny looked at it distastefully - he'd put a neck hole far too far back and because of that the fabric was rolled up a lot around the front, which wasn't especially comfortable. Kenny sighed and went to the kitchen for breakfast.
He shrewdly dodged a flying beer bottle as it missed his father. "YOU'RE A DRUNK PIECE OF SHIT, STUART! YOU FUCKING GOT US DONE!" Ah, they were still fighting over ending up in jail. Kenny stayed out of it. He put frozen poptarts into the toaster and waited.
"YOU WERE DRUNK TOO, BITCH!" That was his masterstroke comeback. Kenny payed no heed.
"YOU'RE THE ONE WHO PEED ALL OVER A COP!" Kenny held back the laugh as another crash came. "WE HAD TO SIT IN A FUCKING HOLDING CELL FOR THREE DAYS!" Crash! "NOTHING TO DRINK, NOTHING TO SMOKE!" Kenny heard a punch get thrown. He threw a Eh, what can we do? glance at Karen, who threw one right back.
The toaster spat breakfast out. "AND THERE WAS NO FUCKING TV SO THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO EXCEPT LISTEN TO BULLSHIT RUMOURS!" Kenny sat down across from his sister.
"HEY, THEY AREN'T BULLSHIT! I-"
Carol had run out of bottles by now so started throwing the crockery. "ANYTHING STARTED BY ALEX FUCKING JONES IS BULLSHIT! I… GAH!" She banged her hands down on the table, rattling Kenny's plate. That generally meant she wanted attention - Kenny looked up.
"Kenny, explain something to your father. The dumb bastard-"
"I'm not a dumb bastard!"
"The dumb bastard," Carol repeated, slurring it out a bit more, which in the thick redneckish drawl was especially effective, "is buying into this dumb idea that the army's going to take over."
Kenny had heard that one before several thousand times. It hadn't happened yet, so he wasn't convinced.
"Tell him why that's not going to happen," his mother ordered. Since his father had taken several litres of booze to the liver and many breakable things to the face, Kenny figured the best option was to side with his currently much more valid mother. He turned to Stuart.
"Dad," he said, "the army will not take over. If they can't invade a Middle East country that aren't expecting it, they aren't going to be able to take over the US if we are."
"Shut up, son!" Stuart yelled, pulling a shard of plate out of his cheek. "It's true, Jimbo said so!" Kenny was all too ready to dismiss that out of hand. "So'd Tommy, and- OW!" That was the plate Kenny had just finished eating off hitting Stuart in the face. It was just as well Kenny had perked up a bit.
Jimbo Kern believing shit like that was one thing, but Thomas Tucker, Craig's dad, was a bit different. Kenny got on with Craig, he knew Thomas as well as he could know someone whose primary method of communication was to flip the bird. That was worth investigating. Kenny stood up and ushered Karen away before things got any more dramatic.
Once she was safely in her room he changed into navy, grabbed his repurposed blanket and climbed out the window, faceplanting gracelessly into the snow.
He started towards town, pulling the blanket over his head. The way it had turned out was sort of like a cloak that he could wrap around himself, but had a slightly curved bottom. That way surface area was maximised during falls. It wouldn't save him from a great height but for short falls, maybe up to five or so floors, he was willing to try.
One problem was he needed to stop the back from flapping about instead of generating the drag it was there to generate, for which reason he'd keep the middle part of the material pressed between his shoes. It would look ridiculous, and it would necessitate swan diving, but it should work.
The plan for the day was simple. Get up on roofs, work out for a while. Double shift it, being as he had promised Karen he'd tell her stories later. Then on the way back, swing by Craig's and chat with his dad. Go back home, avoid parents, tell stories.
So far so good then. He began running towards town. He was getting faster and stronger. Slowly, sure, but he was making progress. Which, being the entire point of the exercise regimen, was convincing Kenny to continue to follow it.
It was a good three hours before he found himself out of breath, lying on a rooftop, red in the face and sweating into his clothes. He lay there for a few minutes just to get his breath back, then went over a few rooftops to where he knew all too well there was a skip in an alleyway. He took hold of the edges of the blanket arrangement and trapped the back between his heels, then held his arms out. That stretched out the material. Then he swan dived into the open skip.
He sank down into the reeking contents quite a bit, but the impact was a lot slower than it would have been. Though Kenny suspected it had looked ridiculous, the important thing was that it seemed to work. He smiled to himself then made for Craig's place. He removed the silly cloak-blanket thing when he got to the door and then knocked.
Craig answered, still in his pyjamas. Kenny couldn't blame him - school was out, they should all really have been sleeping in. "What do you want?" he asked in absolute monotone.
"Can I talk to your dad?"
There was a very long pause. "What?"
"Your-"
"Terrorists are literally attacking imagination. Your friends have disappeared some place. And you want to talk to my asshole dad."
"Yes."
Craig stared blankly for a moment, then stepped aside. Kenny entered, registering the middle finger that was being sent his way by Craig but not acknowledging it.
Kenny headed through to the kitchen, where Thomas Tucker was doing something on his laptop. Kenny noted he looked a bit disheveled - to be expected from someone who'd apparently recently spent a few days in a holding cell. There was a noticable smell, like he hadn't gotten around to showering yet - and even by Kenny's impoverished standards, that was just sickening.
Thomas glanced up. Recognising Kenny's face, he promptly flipped him off, which coming from a guy whose hair was as messy as Kenny's but wasn't usually was actually rather amusing. "Mr. Tucker, I need to ask you something."
"What is it?"
Kenny thought about how to ask. "My dad says you think something about some kind of-"
"What, the army thing? Yeah, what about it?"
Kenny had no idea how Thomas had guessed. "Well… What exactly the fuck is it?"
Thomas rubbed his forehead with exhaustion and talked. "Well, it's just a rumour. But it's something like an army base out of town, the guys there are gearing up for something big, only Skeeter, my brother, he says they've got nothing planned or anything. No deployments. Seems suspicious. But it's just rumours, you know?"
Kenny ticked that over, trying not to feel too guilty about chatting to the brother of someone who he'd slightly concussed. "Dad says you believe it."
"I guess I did for a while but it's been a few days, nothing's happened. I guess it was just, like, weird circumstances or something. Sort of stuff that dipshit of a father of yours - no offence - would believe, even after military service."
Kenny nodded. "None taken. I'd trade him in any day."
Thomas nodded. He paused for a second. "What's with that blanket?" he asked.
Kenny didn't hesitate. "Dry cleaning."
"Oh."
Kenny left after that, getting flipped off by Craig on the way out, as per. His initial worries of any kind of military takeover were subdued now - just a misunderstanding between a rumour and a gullible person.
Which, naturally, meant it came as rather a surprise when it happened.
It had been a few days since that conversation when weird things started happening. Out on his exercise routine, which Kenny had modified to include some freerunning practice, something he had turned out to have talent for, Kenny had stopped when he saw three soldiers idling down the street.
That in itself was not entirely unusual, in uniform soldiers were an occasional sight. It was the way they were armed and were walking more purposefully than normal. The jeep that then passed by didn't really help things. Kenny swore to himself and walked up to them.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Go to the town hall," the lead soldier said in a very bored voice. "All will be explained over there." Kenny noted a hint of monotony in the voice, that reminded him a bit of Craig except higher in pitch. It freaked him out, and how they just walked on afterwards. Kenny wrote it off as having to repeat the same thing to everyone, though, and started jogging towards the town hall.
Sure enough, there was a small gathering there. A guy was up on a podium speaking, with Mayor McDaniels sitting behind him looking extremely pissed off.
"…so in light of the current crisis, the military is reinforcing the police in towns and cities across America as a precaution. That way, in the event this crisis does escalate, the population will have nothing to worry about."
That seemed fair enough. But Kenny thought that maybe he was being a bit naïve on that front - certainly the mob of townpeople in front of the guy's podium wasn't buying the story. They were being civil enough, but that might have been to do with the line of soldiers between them and the podium rather than actual will to behave themselves.
"As a result of this," the guy said - Kenny thought he saw a colonel's rank patch (Oak leaf was colonel, right? Or was that the bird?) on the guy's uniform, but he couldn't be sure both from the distance and his knowledge of rank patches coming from first person military shooters that he didn't really enjoy playing all that much anyway, partly because after his experience of death he didn't like the thought of gunning down hordes of technologically inferior enemies, but mostly because he was a just a little bit jealous of people who could afford games like that in the first place. In short: Fuck if Kenny knew. "I expect you to respect my men like you'd respect any other cop."
Kenny chuckled at the thought of Barbrady getting any respect. "By and large your day to day lives will be the same." Somehow, Kenny detected a With a small but manageable increase in oppression in the subtext of that sentence. He ousted that thought from his head, though. He put it down to the redneck in him just being mistrustful of anyone with any kind of official authority. And if there was one thing Kenny never wanted to be, it was a redneck.
Kenny was about to turn around and write it off as some kind of standard procedure when the next sentence caught his ear and latched him in place like a very inappropriately placed padlock attached to a door that had just been violently slammed, stopping him from turning around. "As part of this, the town will be fortified to protect you in the event of an attack by the imagination creatures."
There was a very loud groan, and Kenny saw a beer can fly from somewhere in the crowd to the colonel or whatever's face. He grunted. "Right! Who threw that?" Silence. "Come on, who threw that?" A sheepish hand went up. The speaker picked up the can and threw it right back - it burst on the guy's face and spattered beer over him and the surrounding five people.
Silence. Again. Then… Kenny had never known how a laugh could be described as "uproarious" but he got a pretty good impression from the crowd. Apparently a throw like that could win a crowd of rednecks over.
Still, Kenny wasn't convinced. He'd been a bit turned off this idea by fortification. That seemed like a bit of a waste of resources. Fortification of every town in America would be a drain, wouldn't it? What about the state guards, the National Guard?
But then, Kenny didn't understand politics. With that thought in mind, he decided that the best course of action might be to just roll with it for now.
Which didn't mean he wouldn't be keeping an eye on these guys. He wasn't sure.