A snarl painted his aged face while he fought the pain which stiffened his back. The car hit a bump and Magnus hissed when his back spasmed, hunching him even further oh how he wished that were his head…

It didn't matter though, he told himself; he would find him. Magnus knew better than anyone else that even with his legs unfettered Nathan had been in no condition to run anywhere. He would get him back soon, yes, and then he would be right where he belonged again. He would make him sorry, regret ever thinking that he could escape from him.

Magnus's teeth clenched tighter and tighter the closer he got to town, the more splits in the road he found still with no sign of Nathan. So many ways he could have gone, so little time. He turned left, moving all the way past the lumber mill, through an intersection and into a more populated skirt of the town which was almost entirely empty with the fall of night. He drove by a small market along with an even tinier gas station and began approaching a hardware store, where the man still in uniform waved cheerily to him as he left. Magnus simply bit his lip, still scanning the streets.

Had Nathan taken shelter in any of the few stores that were still open at this hour, or God forbid another house?

He'd crested around another curve when something caught Magnus's eye, and he slammed the brakes.

-.-.-

Terror.

That would be the only thing to register to Nathan when he heard the tires, approaching footsteps; he flew into fight or flight and he didn't think, couldn't think, nothing existed in his mind except absolute panic. He started to shriek — a noise which tore a hot bolt of agony up his throat and wrung even more cries from him — scrambling away from the noise while concrete further tore up his mutilated heel and he slipped in his own blood. He'd found him, the one thought howling through Nathan's hysterical mind; he found him and he would be brought right back to the lion's den. He would surely kill him; he'd said time and time again that he never would, but after everything he did to get this far…

His knees gave out and Nathan fell to the ground again as dizziness tore through him. No, he thought, no, this could not happen again, he would never be able to stand back up. He dug his nails into the cement; he had to move, he screamed to himself. And yet, his body had been sapped of every ounce of adrenaline it could supply. A shadow loomed, towering over him like a giant and he had already started to huddle against the sidewalk, a hand still clamped over his eye while the other arm struggled to raise itself, preemptively shielding him. He leaned even closer, Nathan whimpered when he touched him; no pain came however.

"Sir? Can you hear me? Are you hurt?"

The hands were moving to his bony shoulders to guide him into a sitting position, and Nathan focused on the man now in front of him, still firing questions. Plump, kindly, head struggling not to gag at his odor perched on a torso wrapped in a recognizable badged uniform.

"Sir—"

Nathan threw himself at the lawman and both hands flew out to cling onto his shoulders, smearing blood all over his uniform from their scraped up backs. He shook and held him closer and almost wept with his blood-crusted, grimy face right into the chest of this man, this officer, his sole lifeline in the middle of a roiling ocean. Even when he attempted to pry him off, careful as he was, Nathan only tightened his grip and more tears were wrung from their ducts to set into the sockets like acid.

"Sir, I need you to let go."

The man disconnected him and Nathan was drowning again; he fell back to the sidewalk, and he was drowning. His body curled, he reached up to cover his eye again when those hands were on him. He recoiled and the man spoke, gentle this time. Words of comfort, Nathan recognized. Soft assurances said between jargon spouted into his radio, repeated over and over like a desperate mantra that circled and constricted his head and drowned him.

"An ambulance is on its way," the man said. "Sir, do you want to wait in my car? Would that make you feel better?"

Nathan jerked up on too-thin limbs, only to almost fall back again when he offered a hand; it felt warm, a little rough against his while it helped pull the former singer to his feet. As Nathan's body shifted, a dried patch of blood on his bathrobe scraped open a scabbed slash on his back, adding another spot to the mosaic of reds and faded pinks which stained the once white robe. He winced, and his legs quaked under his own meager weight, his heel gushing more blood while he wobbled and limped behind the officer, toward that white and green chariot of protection.

Dixie County Sheriff.

He'd barely opened the door for him when Nathan threw himself inside. With the space separating the back and front seats too narrow to fit his wide frame, he instead elected to stretch himself as flat as possible across the seats. Away from the windows. Nathan hissed when the swollen flesh on his face brushed the hard plastic; far too bruised and sensitive to rest comfortably.

The officer stared at him with a face like he looked at a wounded dog.

"It's okay, sir…" he murmured. "You're safe in here. Whoever might be looking for you, they won't be able to get to you now."

He backed away from the still open door, circling around the back to retrieve something unknown from the trunk. Nathan felt tempted to crawl back and close the door for him, only for the man to return with a bottle of water.

"Here, drink this."

Nathan's hand sprang back to snatch it from him; he fumbled with the cap for a moment before he let it fall to the floor and brought the bottle to his mouth. Gulping, he cared not for the deepening vertigo nor for the liquid that spilled down his chin to roll onto his chest, he would be only grateful for the chance to quench his dry mouth, along with the fact that the stray water would wash away some of the blood and dirt.

The sheriff, meanwhile, just kept watching him.

Lights filled the car as Nathan sagged against the seats, sirens wailing into his ears and making the ache in his spinning head all the more noticeable. Nathan dared push himself up again — despite how heavy his body felt — to peer through the back window, and he spotted a white and blue truck that pulled up just behind the squad car.

"They're here to help," the officer went on. "The ambulance is here, they're going to help you, it's all okay."

Nothing had been okay, for seven years.

-.-.-

Magnus had passed a church when he saw them. Lights, red and blue and flashing from a distance away in what he knew was one of the neighborhoods. His head spun, pulse roaring in his ears — no, he thought with a gag and lurch of his stomach that shot biting bile into the back of his throat, this could not happen.

No no no no—

Hacking back his own sick, Magnus crept the car down the streets, and for the first time in decades the man prayed; Magnus prayed with whitening knuckles around the wheel that all he would find was a house fire or a car accident around the next corner which he crept closer to. Instead, he spotted an ambulance parked in the street with a trio of paramedics huddled around a gurney which their bodies obscured his view of. When it was hoisted up and wheeled into the back, he caught a glimpse of the gaunt, beaten man huddled like a frightened animal on the stretcher, choppy black hair obscuring his bruised face as a lacerated hand remained clasped almost on instinct over the left eye.

Magnus peered around, and he could see the town's residents peeking between their blinds and through curtains, oblivious to him with eyes fearful and questioning and trained on the gurney in silent pity. His teeth ground together even harder. Too many eyes here, around him. No way to enter and take him back unseen. Not on his own.

Seven years, he had lasted seven years without it crashing down like this. And now…

With clammy palms and a bloody thumb slipping on his sweat-drenched wheel Magnus spun the car around in a tight U-turn and sped back the way he came with the screeching of tires and the reek of burning rubber.

-.-.-

"Native American male, mid-forties…"

The doors slammed, and the ambulance started to move.

Nathan's head twisted back and forth to follow the chaos unfolding around him. Monitors were being flipped on, bags full of bandages, antiseptics, and cotton pads pulled out, a mask and tubes upon tubes. The three medics glanced at him, taking in the years-old reek of an unwashed body and waste of both human and animal nature alike, and they passed around a small bottle filled with something sweet-smelling that they began to apply underneath their masks.

Nathan shrank away when one of them turned and reached out a gloved hand, only for his sleeve to be rolled up and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around the arm still holding a hand to that eye. The medic meanwhile looked on in horror at the cuts and small, round burns that twined the limb, a sight which surely matched the other three. Another set of hands started to undo his bathrobe and panic shot through him; Nathan fought to sit up as he painfully brought his weaker arm up, only for the medic to hold him gently by his shoulders and urge him back down.

"Sir, just lie back for me. Let us help you, okay?"

Nathan resigned himself to watching with wide-eyed caution while all three paramedics would shimmy down the bathrobe to where the chains wrapped around his waist and gaze upon the expanse of injuries across his chest along with his stomach. As badly bruised as his face, as though he'd been severely beaten, covered in open, flaky red sores, with a faded scar embedded in his gut. What their eyes lingered on however — what drew the most horror — was the branded inscription carved into his protruding ribs, between his pectorals; an M and an H, a pair of initials joined by their bordering sides.

The paramedics just started their work, the heel missing a large chunk of itself the first part of him to be disinfected and bandaged. Nathan winced, hissing as the antiseptic fizzled and bubbled against raw, bloody flesh; this however would be overshadowed by one of the medics, a woman, now trying to tug his hand from his eye. Nathan jerked away and shook his head, pressing the hand tighter.

"Please, sir, whatever it is that's wrong with it, we need to see it to treat you—"

Nathan simply shook his head harder.

"Can you tell me why not? Does it hurt at all?"

He finally nodded.

"We can give you an anesthetic, but we do need to see what's wrong."

After a long moment's hesitation, Nathan nodded again. She lowered his hand and gave a thanks, revealing a pair of irritated red eyelids pasted shut with crusted pus. Careful, she scraped away at the flakes with a latex covered fingernail until she was able to separate them; Nathan released a whimper when air hit his eye in a rush of runny pus as well as a foul reek that sent all three medics reeling. With the lids finally opened, an eye with a scarred white disk set into his cornea was exposed, covered in a white film that resembled a layer of curdled milk.

"Jesus Christ…"

Her hands shaking, the woman covered the eye with a gauze pad that she taped in place.

"W-We're going to roll you next, sir…"

Nathan let out a panicked squeal and clutched onto the gurney's rails when they abruptly moved him onto his side. A knobby spine propping up shoulder blades that bulged from his back like a pair of bony wings was bared to them, all balanced precariously on a protubent pelvis, and his xylophone ribs were rippled with raised, overlapping scars gnarling bruised and more sore-riddled flesh all the way down to his hips. They were punctuated by welts as well as fresh slashes; some stitched shut — crudely — all of them red, pus-festering, and swollen with infection.

"Stay still, okay sir? We're going to treat those as best we can until we get you to the hospital, but you have to work with us here."

Despite the pain of the antiseptics, Nathan thought, it felt good to have dressings shielding his wounds instead of just his robe and poorly sewn threads.

Once he had been bandaged they let him rest on his back again, and the woman wrote something on a clipboard while her partner checked Nathan's temperature. The monitor next to him started to beep panicked and rapid notes when a pair of electrode patches were placed on his torso.

"Tachypneic at twenty-five to thirty resps, tachycardic at one-twenty, systolic maintained at eighty with a body temperature of one-hundred and three…" she murmured to herself as questions from the other two swirled around Nathan's head.

"Are you on any medications? Any allergies at all?"

"Any medical conditions we should know about?"

"Numbness or tingling?"

"Have you been eating or drinking anything?"

He let out a bitter chuckle at that, and something passed over his head.

"You'll feel a small pinch here, it might be a bit uncomfortable…"

A medic crouching at his side pushed a needle connected to a bag filled with what looked to Nathan like water into the back of his hand, shifting it in place until he found the vein, an act which elicited an odd, almost painful tugging sensation.

"Look here."

He looked in the direction of the other man's voice and a plastic mask was placed over his nose and mouth.

"Sir, can you tell us what happened to you?" he asked him.

Nathan just stared before he shook his head; all three exchanged glances.

"Did someone do all this to you?"

His head bobbed up and down. More glances.

"Sir, pay attention here…" the woman suddenly said, and she flashed a little light in his eyes. "Follow the light, don't move your head."

Nathan squinted as the light darted in front of him, struggling to follow its path like he had been told. Try as he may though, it blurred and duplicated in front of him, drifting and splitting in his vision until a fresh bolt of pain ripped through his head again. Hunching over, Nathan clutched at his forehead and groaned.

She returned to the clipboard. "Blunt force trauma, chronic wounds, possible traumatic brain injury…"

One of the other medics helped Nathan move upright, then back and nestled into the gurney's embrace, and he placed a cold pack of ice on his head. "You're doing great…"

Nathan only blinked at him, as though surprised with something.

"Sir?" the man started, scraps of hesitation in a voice that reverberated down Nathan's ears like a breath through a winding tunnel.

He blinked at him again — slowly this time — through rapidly tunneling vision. His head lolled as it floated and spun as though filled with gas and a taste like burning sugar seared itself into his tongue.

The man leaned forward and caught the compress about to fall off his forehead. "Sir, what's your name? Can you at least tell us who you are?"

Nathan forced his head up despite the weight resting behind his eyes, and he clenched a wavering fist above his flattened hand to gesture over it. Something in the medic's eyes lit up, and he passed him a little flipbook along with a pen. It jittered in his hand as Nathan wrote, making his writing almost illegible when the pen suddenly paused over the pad. He felt as though he hovered miles above his body, the gurney, even the ambulance he rode in, like an astronaut from his own mind.

His vision faded more, and he drifted even further. A dull blade of panic sliced through the thick fog in Nathan's mind; a part of him indeed almost feared that if he fell any farther, his bond would be severed and he would be forever lost, rendered a forsaken specter among the clouds. And yet, he already knew that nothing he could do could reel him back.

"Nathan… Explosion?"

His eardrums exploded with a long, piercing shrill, and the tie broke.

Consciousness was a horrid thing.

Nathan's eye drooped open as his muscles screamed — the monitors' wailing mixing with the high-pitched squealing still ringing his ears. His head had burst, he felt sure of it; it ached and throbbed all the way through his brain as though an icepick had been driven through it. He also became aware of the fact that the vehicle had stopped, of the sound of doors opening followed by a rush of muggy air. The stretcher bounced, aggravating Nathan's head even more.

"Careful when you unload him," a familiar voice said and the gurney dipped.

Shouts, lights, running footsteps, more voices.

"Is he stable?"

"Barely. He's going into shock and he's spiking a fever. He started convulsing on the way here too."

"Just prep the ambulance again. We can treat the surface wounds here, but we're going to have to transfer him to the city."

-.-.-

A buzz against his skin jolted Pickles awake.

To wake up sprawled across his bedspread in his underwear was not an unusual occurrence for the drummer; indeed, it would happen many times throughout his life, especially so within the past seven years. With a groan Pickles rolled over, ignoring the ache on his hip while he lifted the spiked phone to look at the screen through squinting eyes and a wondering mind. One of his investigators?

Pickles jolted his body upright, a move which only worsened his nausea, when a familiar number pushed itself through swimming vision. Charles, he'd realized with a rush of sobriety.

"Offdensen?" he asked into the receiver as he struggled to keep the slur from his words.

The voice on the other end sounded strange to Pickles. Shaky, faint, so unlike Charles's voice. "Pickles, where are the other boys right now?"

"I— I don't fuckin' know. Dude, what the fuck—?"

"Pickles, I need to know right now. Where are Toki, Skwisgaar, and Murderface?"

"Offdensen, what the Hell is goin' on?"

Charles sucked in a breath, and he said in a voice barely above a whisper. "They found him. Nathan, he's alive."

The pause that followed suffused the air with a shock thick as syrup. Then, Pickles exploded in an uproar of shouts and questions all stumbling over each other, fighting to be heard first.

"Are you serious?! When did this happen, why are you just tellin' me now? Wh-Where the Hell is he?"

"Pickles—"

"What even happened? Is he okay, when can I see 'im?"

"Pickles—!"

"Wait, who found 'im? W-Was it…?"

"No, none of your people. A police officer out in Florida—"

"Florida?!" he screeched through a gulp of air and dragged himself out of bed, knocking bottles and the inhaler off his nightstand as he went.

Charles could only release a heavy sigh. "Listen. He's, uh, he's being sent to a hospital out in Jacksonville right now."

Pinning the phone between his shoulder and his cheek, Pickles tried to disregard the growing band of pressure around his chest and started scrambling to find a pair of pants in the pile of clothing at the foot of his bed. "How bad is it, then?"

"I… don't know yet. I'm on my way over there right now, and I think you should all do the same. I'll call the Gears in the meantime; just, uh, go to the landing strip, they'll know where to take you. You need to get the others though."

He threw on his bathrobe, and his phone slipped from his shoulder to hit the ground with a thump along with the snap of one of its protruding blades. Pickles cursed between wheezes as he scrabbled to retrieve it, even louder when one of its spikes nicked the pad of his finger.

"Goddamn phone… fuck! Get the fuck… back here!" he snarled, and his hands finally caught the device.

Pickles slammed the phone back to his face, ignoring how the prods jabbed into his ear. "Dude… Skwisgaar's not here," he snapped. "He's at one of those stupid… fuckin' TV gigs! I have no goddamn idea where he is."

"Toki and Murderface?"

His slippers were next to be snatched up. "They're around here… probably in the studio."

"Get them then, I'll find Skwisgaar. I'll see you at the hospital, okay?"

Before Charles could hang up, Pickles paused with one of the slippers halfway on his foot. "Offdensen… what about Abigail? Does she know?"

Another pause. "She has a right to know, Pickles."

He forced the slipper on. "Yeah, yeah, I know—"

"I can call her for you."

Scooping his inhaler from the floor, Pickles took a puff from it while he rushed for his door, still unsteady on his feet.

"No…" he eventually gasped. "No, we'll tell her. She should hear the news from us."

"Be sensitive about it, Pickles."

"C'mon man, who do you think we are, a bunch of assholes? Of course we would be."

"Mhm, sure. I'll see you in Jacksonville."

The phone rang as soon as Pickles hung up, and while he stumbled down the yard he spotted several missed calls popping up on his screen. He'd only barely answered, no time to even utter a greeting before the caller spoke, his high voice echoing down the line.

"Pickle?! Ams it true, about Nathans?"

He hiccuped. "D…ude, Offdensen just called, h-how do you—"

"The phone's been ringing off the line ever shince the news came out!" Murderface's lisp chimed in. "Are you fucking drunk again?!"

"I don't know, are you still smoking?"

"Fuck you—!"

"Is they right?" Toki interrupted. "Ams it really him?"

"I… I think so. Offdensen sure thinks so anyway," Pickles replied, and he slipped inside the main hall.

Landing strip, should be this way, the landing strip…

"Look, I need to get ahold of Abigail and let her know, so—"

"It's been sheven fucking years though!" Murderface protested. "We all thought he was dead, we—"

"Don't says that! It ams him, Toki knows that Pickle don't lie!"

"Hey, don't yell at me! At least I'm not the one who brought Magnus right to him! Maybe then he wouldn't have been gone at all, did you ever think of that?"

Toki let out a little choke, and Pickles drew a sharp breath as he turned a corner. "Murderface, just shut the fuck up!"

"M-My Lord?"

Pickles jumped, and he almost tripped over his own two feet when a pair of hands caught him, careful in their handling. One of the Klokateers, he recognized; the eyes peering back from cut holes stared back with a wide expression of concern as those hands straightened his swaying body.

"My Lord, are you—?"

"I'm fine," Pickles said. "I need to get to the landin' strip! Jacksonville, Nathan…"

Something in those eyes flickered, and they nodded. "Of course, my Lord."

When the Klokateer led the man to the landing strip, Pickles spotted the waiting helicopter along with Toki and Murderface; with their clothing disheveled as their hair, they surely looked as much a wreck as him. Toki and Murderface meanwhile continued to glare at each other from the corners of their eyes while Toki fiddled with his insulin pump.

Though the vibrantly purple and pink lighted recreational room on the copter had been outfitted to its charges' whims with arcade games, pool tables, and a bar, the boys resigned themselves to the overly plush seats. Still, Pickles could not resist the temptation to snatch a bottle of vodka from the counter when he passed. He cradled it like a mother holding a newborn, delicately removing the cork to begin drinking.

"I'ms gonna call Abigail."

"Whatever," Murderface snapped and lit up a cigarette; Pickles just shrugged as he continued to swallow.

-.-.-

"Mr. Skwigelf!"

The door slammed open and the elaborate metal armor strapped to his body clattered when Skwisgaar jumped, wiping his face with a quick swipe of his fingers that smeared his running makeup in the process. Pivoting in his seat, he glared at the man — a scruffy studio assistant with a phone still in hand — who dared interrupt him.

"What do you wants?! Can't you sees I ams busy?"

The man winced, and he stepped further into the room filled with racks of clothes and costumes along with the empty box that once contained Skwisgaar's armor. "I'm sorry, Mr. Skwigelf, it's just that I received some very big news that—"

He turned away, back to the vanity housing boxes of makeup and a television remote. "Unless someone ams dead, I don't cares."

Silence followed, yet still the man did not leave. Instead, he picked up the remote and turned the TV on, flipping through channels.

"What ams you doing?"

"Mr. Skwigelf, look."

Skwisgaar glanced through the mirror and jerked when he saw a familiar face on the screen. An image of Nathan in all his glory, in his concert makeup with his broad chest puffed out as he stood frozen in a mighty bellow into his microphone.

"…An update from Dixie County on the 2010 case…"

The blade glided over the carcass's flesh, flaying it open and exposing a bloody underbelly in a long red peel. In the flickering light of the bare tile room, the only company to be found inside were the gutted and dismembered bodies hanging in a row from the ceiling, along with the radio which played its crackling tunes.

"…The world-famous Dethklok vocalist, Nathan Explosion, was found, alive, in the town of Cross City, Florida. County officials have yet to release an official statement…"

The masked man's head raised.


If only back-to-back battle scenes were easier to write like this, I would be making monthly updates to Phoenix like I originally intended.