Now that most of the cards have been thrown upon the table with enough force to sever several vital blood vessels in the neck it may be a nice easy ride from here on in. Or it may not. I'm making this up on the fly, even I don't know what's going to happen. Escalation, maybe. I once again thank you all for bearing with this for so long and remind you of where the review box is. Down there. So...enjoy, I guess.

I'm aware I'm not good at these ANs. Ask me why I bother.


Kenny's parents' sobriety meant the house was unusually quiet. Which was very nice for him, because it gave him a lot of quiet time to mull over a very unattractive thought.

Crab people.

Fucking crab people.

Kenny was still processing that one and despite his assertion that it did, in fact, make sense, he was having a lot of trouble.

He was busy staring up at his ceiling while ticking it all over. On the bright side, it made a lot of things easier - as Damien had told him, killing these things would be significantly easier on him and there wouldn't be any heavy moral issues there either. On the other hand, how did one kill crab people?

Kenny knew someone who knew. He picked his phone up and was on the verge of texting Kyle, when he remembered partly through memory but mostly through his having no bars of reception that the army… No, the crab people, they were jamming everything.

God, he still thought of them as army. No, they were actually crab people. But Kenny just couldn't process that.

It was revolting. Partly the fact that presumably they had to kill six hundred odd people and flay the corpses in order to get the appropriate skin suits that they were now using, but mostly just because he found the idea that those….things existed. He couldn't even think the words without gagging up a minor natural disaster's worth of bile.

Kenny had to distract himself. He forced his way up so he was sitting on the edge of his bed, then stood up - painfully. There were several cracks and clicks as he made his way up, which could only mean that he'd been lying down a little longer than he'd thought. He checked his phone again - three hours, he'd spent.

Three hours trying to force his brain to be a little more open to the idea of anthropomorphic crustaceans and his brain refusing to comply.

Kenny decided some brain numbing television was in order. He fished out some of his old NASCAR videos and headed through to the lounge. He spent five further hours watching cars driving in circles before giving up completely.

He needed to be sure.

Back to his room. As ever, the clothes he'd been wearing had regenerated. Kenny had meant to add the hood he'd devised the night before in a more permanent fashion to his cape arrangement, and Kenny decided he was just going to call it a cape from now on because it always momentarily distracted him, thinking about exactly what it was. But he'd forgotten to do that.

Kenny pulled everything on and climbed out of the window. His first stop was barely ten metres away: the kitchen. All the food he'd stolen a few weeks prior was gone by now, so it was back to its normal state of being not very well stocked, but they still have a few decent knives in there. As Kenny had seen the window open on his way to his room, he was able to just reach in and grab one. Not a large one, of course; a sharp one.

He stowed it away in the back of his belt then started running towards town.

"Alright," Kenny said to himself, "all I have to do is get one, and make absolutely sure that…" There was something else. He stopped in his run and retreated under the bridge he had been crossing. He had been finding that talking in the ski mask was incredibly uncomfortable because the material was a bit too rough around the jaw.

He pulled the mask off and then got the knife out. Then, he hacked a large segment of material around the mouth off the garment. Then he tried it back on.

Now the mask covered down to Kenny's nose, then his jaw and the top of his neck were exposed. The other side of the hole was below where the cape was bunched up around his neck but was intact so as the mask didn't flap around too much if the air caught it.

Kenny threw the cut away section into the river, where it floated merrily away downstream to another shit hole. That is if it didn't get caught in the huge fucking wall that had been built around the town.

He resumed running.

Forward he went before once again running into a patrol. Two men. Or crabs. Or whatever. Kenny jumped into the next road he passed and pressed himself to the wall. Then as the patrol passed, he struck.

He managed to keep it quieter and quicker than the previous night. Kenny stabbed the first soldier through the neck, then slashed the other's throat within a few seconds. As soon as he saw the blood come out blue, he knew that the assessment that every soldier was actually a crab was right but he wanted to see what he was dealing with properly.

Kenny began slicing through the skin suit, which wasn't much less than a centimetre thick and not that strong against the knife. It took five minutes to fully remove it, and more than once he cut through the carapace of the creature inside, spilling more thin blue bile everywhere. But the finished product, so to speak, was quite a sight.

The crab had been compressed into the suit some. It would have better fit a bodybuilder's skin, and a taller than average one at that. But, Kenny saw, despite the size the carapace itself was pretty weak. Kenny could push down on it and cause it to crack with relative ease, and an experimental snapping of the neck was unexpectedly easy.

There was still an obvious problem, though - most of the time they would have guns and Kenny would be unarmed, and they'd proven they could use them even with pincers in place of fingers and opposable thumbs. And they were planning on moving on to Denver, Greg had said.

Kenny needed to stall them, and sooner would be better than later. How could he stall them though?

He cycled through a few ideas then took the least terrible one. The school was barely a mile out of his way, anyway. He threw the bodies of the crabs and the shredded skin suit into the first dumpster he passed and started running, unconsciously avoiding lit areas.

At the school he picked up a single piece of paper and wrote a short message on it in green chalk. As an afterthought, he drew a large, squat question mark on the other side of the sheet. Then he started running again. Somewhere he registered that he could run a lot further before getting too out of breath now.

He found his fire escape, onto the roofs. He ran to the city hall again, got as close as he could without having to leave the cover of the roof and waited. He needed to think. Specifically he needed to think about where he'd been in that building the night he'd had enough lead pumped into him to fuel all the batteries that NASCAR would need for the foreseeable future.

He'd started on the far side of the build from where he was now and headed inwards. He'd ended on the same floor, despite a detour through the upstairs bathrooms, so he concentrated on his left-right directions.

After five minutes of frustrated confusion, though, he saw a very recognisable goatee past an open window. How convenient. Kenny folded his note up into a paper aeroplane with the question mark on top and the message on the underside.

Kenny was quite the paper plane thrower, due to a very mischievous childhood. Paper planes were something he did when he wasn't busy getting into fights with the fatass or reading magazines whose primary content involved stonking great titties. So when he threw, even from across a road and a few metres of grass, the plane flew straight through the window and slid along the table it landed on.

Kenny watched Greg from beneath his cape, hiding the lighter purple clothes behind the ledge of the roof. He watched him unfold the note and regard the squat punctuation mark with some confusion, then flip the page and intake breath a little sharply as he saw the words, emblazoned in bright green, CRAB PEOPLE staring at him.

Greg glanced out of the window to see where the plane may have come from, but saw nothing. Kenny smiled and, as soon as Greg was distracted with his radio, fell back some. He had to stay around to watch what would happen, naturally.

Activity heightened, that was for sure. Quite a few patrols went out, more heavily armed than Kenny had seen previously. A few people with fancier rank patches that Kenny didn't have a hope in hell of correctly identifying hurried indoors. Clearly there was something about to happen that was worth listening in on.

The thing was Kenny wasn't up for dying again. He needed a way to listen in without risking getting shot at, and given the situation that was to be a tall order. The only thing in his favour was the increase in patrols - enough to warrant being called a search - meant there were fewer soldiers around the camp. There were more blind spots, but still not really enough. It'd have to do, though - Kenny made the drop, holding his cape out parachute style.

He stayed in the shadows. He edged along the wall, trying to keep still when he saw someone looking in his direction and always being a little wary of being caught. Eventually, though, he came to the road. Well lit and too wide. Kenny glanced around for a few seconds then, as soon as he thought it safe, bolted.

He dived into the bushes that lined the town hall building and waited. There was no alert or sound that indicated he'd been seen, and a glance around confirmed business as normal. Kenny smiled then started edging through the bush to Greg's window.

Whatever meeting was going to happen had yet to start so Kenny waited. It was tempting for him to pull his phone out and play games or something, but fifteen minutes in he hear Greg's voice. "Gentlemen," he started, and Kenny couldn't help a small, hushed laugh at how seriously they took the charade that they kept it up in private, "we have a minor issue."

There was a thud, followed by a few inquisitive sounds then a collective gasp a couple of seconds later. "Somebody knows?" asked some underling.

"Apparently so," Greg sighed. Kenny had to give the guy credit, he could keep his cool. "Options," he ordered.

"What is that emblem?" asked the underling.

"Just a question mark. Nothing I've seen before so I've elected to ignore it. What's more important is this." There was a pause and a scrape of wood on floor. Kenny guessed Greg had stood up. "What effect does this have on the schedule?" A pause.

A new voice spoke up. "The remainder of the army was due to make their way up to the surface tomorrow, we were due to move out the day after. Do we accelerate?"

Another pause. "No," Greg replied. "We wait." Then another gasp. "We can't continue with someone knowing this."

"Excuse me," came a particularly weedy sounding voice, "as far as we know this is just one person. What can one person do?" There was five seconds of silence, maybe.

Then Greg's voice came again. "This." BANG. Thump. Once again, Kenny found himself admiring Greg somewhat - that was perhaps the finest answer ever offered to that statement. "I hated that guy… Alright. We will hold this fort for longer. Our window of opportunity is short, if we haven't taken at least one major city before the imagination crisis is over this plan will fail."

That was good news. Kenny just had to stall them.

"But while we probably could afford to risk having someone running around knowing about us, I do not want to take that risk unless absolutely necessary. So we stay here, we find this person or people, we silence them, then we can move." Another pause. Kenny could see that whatever this plan of theirs was, he was their proverbial spanner in the works. And he was a tricky spanner to get rid of on a permanent basis.

"In the meantime, we keep the jammers working, we keep-"

The door opened violently, startling Kenny even from the other side of the room and out of the window. "Colonel?"

"Yes?"

The new voice sighed loudly, exasperatedly. "Two more."

The silence that followed could have been cut with a spoon. "Brilliant…" Greg groaned. "So this mysterious person is now not just taunting us with paper missiles, he is also picking us off. Step security up. Investigate suspicious activity. And for fuck's sake, stay safe. I don't want to lose any more soldiers." Kenny smiled briefly.

Out of sight, he made his way away from the town square and began wondering what his next move should be. He needed some information on the crab people and Kyle was the obvious person to go to, but those jammers Greg had mentioned twice now were in the way. Taking those down was a logical step. But Kenny saw one problem.

He had no idea where these jammers were, what they looked like, or how they worked. All of which he could do with knowing before he was able to break them.