Day 6
Nazz didn't sleep at all that night. In the very early morning hours, she sat up again from her blanket and looked over at Cheryl and Brainiac. Both looked to be asleep, although Nazz could see Brainiac might be pretending so as to catch her in the act. But he wouldn't have been able to know when Nazz would be getting up and she didn't really think he was all that smart to try to catch her in the first place. She quietly stood and grabbed up her bags and slipped around the back of the encampment, the pavilion barred by canvas tents housing sleeping survivalists, heading to the front to see what kind of condition Kevin's bike was in. If she just left it behind, Kevin would totally freak. Not to mention it would take forever to walk back home, especially with the bags she'd packed like a moron.
She reached the front and emerged into the pavilion, where she found Molly sitting in the same spot as yesterday evening, still working away at Nazz's bike, mumbling in irritation and cursing to herself intermittently. Nazz froze and stared at the back of Molly's shoulder-length raven hair as it swayed back and forth with each twist of the bolts Molly had a hold of with her wrench, trying to figure out what to do.
Nazz stepped off the concrete pavilion into the field and approached Molly through it, each step swishing through the tall grass. Molly could hear someone creeping up behind her and spun, eyes briefly frightened and wild. Her shoulders dropped in relief when she realized it was Nazz, however. "Jesus, Nazz. You could a' given me a heart attack. You never know who's coming up behind you out here. Could be anybody."
"How's my bike looking?" Nazz said, her voice high in pitch for a reason Nazz couldn't quite determine. It was like when she used to talk to Kevin or any other guy she found attractive. But Nazz wasn't gay as far as she was aware. Maybe Molly was just butch enough for Nazz's body to consider her a man.
Molly turned and looked the bike over, then waved Nazz over closer to look at it. "Oh wow," Nazz said. Molly had perfectly reconstructed the handlebars and, except for some scratches and dents, they looked good as new. The front wheel was still off, however.
Nazz looked at Molly but Molly was looking at Nazz's bags. "You leavin', Nazz? Already?"
"No," Nazz said maybe a little too quickly, a little too defensively. Nazz thought she could see Molly lean back from Nazz and regard her with apprehension, maybe a little bit of suspicion.
"Good," Molly said. "We'd hate to lose you so soon. Especially as hurt as you are."
"I'm totally fine," Nazz said, trying to sound super chill and relaxed, putting on a half-cocked smile to look nonchalant. But Molly wasn't buying it. Her jaw only grew more tense and her lips straighter and more firm. She stared at Nazz for a moment before turning away with a low sigh and picking the front wheel of the bike up off the bench. She turned back to Nazz and let her inspect it. It was beaten to shit. Some of the spokes were twisted or missing and the wheel itself was battered out of shape.
"It's fucked," she said, monotone and bored. "Pretty much, anyways. I could try to beat the wheel back into shape but I don't know how stable it'll be with all those spokes missing. But I don't know shit about bikes, so take that with a grain of salt. Not to mention the tire's flatter n' the Great Plains. I'll see what I can do, but you might have to go find a bike shop and pick up a new wheel."
"There's no shops open."
"Does it matter?"
Nazz thought a moment and sighed. "Yeah, I guess not," she said, but she really guessed so, but didn't want to say that and antagonize Molly any further. She just wanted to get out of there now, since she'd fucked it all up with Molly (who'd no doubt let the whole group know about her suspicions of Nazz's untrustworthiness) but she couldn't just run for fear of what Molly would do and what would come of Kevin's bike. There was also the part of Nazz that really wanted to please Molly, to bring herself back into favor.
As Molly took the tire back from Nazz, Nazz got a good look at the watch on Molly's wrist. It was baby blue, small, and had a small cartoon of Donald Duck on the watch face beneath the two ticking hands. She had the same watch as Nazz's mother had, which had been a children's watch but Mom (and apparently Molly) had had such small wrists it fit perfectly. Mom had been a nurse at Peach Creek Elementary, and she had gotten the watch to go along with the scrubs she wore every day to school, each of which sporting a different cartoon character in various poses. It looked just like Mom's watch and filled Nazz with such a sense of longing just looking at Molly, who was older than Nazz if only by ten years. Nazz wanted a mother more than anything. A parent, more than anything. Despite how much she wanted to leave this camp, there was part of her that loved the fact that she was surrounded by adults who could tell her what to do, and who could take care of her so she wouldn't have to take care of herself yet. She wasn't ready to be an adult. She hadn't even graduated high school yet.
It looked just like Mom's watch. Mom, who was lying dead in a field not a half mile ago from Nazz's exact location.
Nazz thought about Mr. Penny's slim gold chain, which had reminded her of her father's chain, which Dad had worn under his shirt so as to avoid looking like he thought the jewelry made him hot shit, which was not the real reason but the one commonly expressed by her father. The real reason had been that he thought that wearing gold chains made you look like trash, because he associated such jewelry with blacks (her father, despite being less than forty, was a man of old ways, many of which Nazz did not agree with), so he did not wear the chain on the outside. But he insisted on wearing it because his beloved brother had purchased it for him.
Nazz knew that Molly with a watch just like Mom's and Mr. Penny with a chain that looked just like Dad's was no coincidence. Nazz hadn't even been able to look at her parents' bodies when she'd found them alongside Jonny's mom and dad, and she sure as hell didn't check them for their personal belongings, although she had suspected that they had been robbed and killed.
Now, she knew who had done it.
Nazz filled with rage and fear. Who knew how long this camp had welcomed her parents before offing them? Maybe they had just happened upon them at the gas station whilst looting it for everything it was worth and had done what they deemed fit with them. They were very much, it seemed to Nazz, the pragmatic types who cared very little for people who weren't them.
Nazz had to go, and she had to go now. If she didn't, who knew what would happen to her? Moreover, what stupid bullshit would she try to pull against them in a careless attempt at vengeance?
She couldn't just walk away out front. Molly would see her and maybe she'd take one of those rifles from the tent in the back and put a bullet between Nazz's shoulder blades. So she'd go around back and slip into the woods maybe, or just tread through the grassland behind the camp's line of sight in the dark, where they couldn't see her, and at a satisfactory distance cut across back onto the road and keep walking. No. She couldn't just walk back. She would leave, yes, but she would leave and slip around across the road immediately and watch Molly from the grass on the other side until she left the bike, then she'd grab its pieces and haul it off with her, and she'd figure out a way to put it back together when she got somewhere safe. How would she carry everything? Both bags and the bike? She decided she'd just drop one of the bags, didn't matter which one. All the shit inside was useless to her anyways. Why had she even bothered to bring it?
She excused herself from Molly's side in a way that certainly wouldn't make Molly like her more, but Nazz didn't much care about that now. She told Molly she was going to go back to bed and left, heading back around the side of the pavilion. When she got there, she pressed herself up against the canvas hiding her from Molly's sight and tried to let out the horror, angry and frustration building inside her. She wanted her head clear, so she decided she'd need to cry it all out. But nothing came. She tried to force it but she could hardly even manage to get her eyes to well up. It all only made her more angry and more frustrated.
She didn't know what she intended to do with it, but she pulled out the handgun she'd stolen from Kevin and clutched it in her hands, and it was very cold and somewhat heavy. Her hands were shaking as she turned it over in her hands and made sure the safety was off and pulled back the slide to make sure a round was chambered. But her hands were sweating in addition to shaking and it slipped from her grip and snapped back into place a bit more loudly than she intended. She grabbed the slide more firmly and pulled it back, and found a brass bullet waiting for her signal inside the chamber. She slowly brought the slide back to its normal position.
She crept to the back of the encampment where they'd laid out her blanket. Her mind was racing and she was planning everything all at once. She decided to hide her bags in the woods behind the camp for now and she'd come back later and grab them. She looked over to see if Brainiac or Cheryl were awake and saw Brainiac sitting upright on their mattress, rubbing his eyes and looking around for Nazz from where he sat. Nazz hit the ground and took both bags off her shoulders to make herself as small and as difficult to make out over the tall grass as possible. She would just try and make it to the woods like this, crawling through the tall grass for fear that Brainiac would see her. She wondered if Brainiac had been involved in the killings, and she couldn't fathom that he had been. For that matter, she couldn't fathom that Mr. Penny had been involved either, but then she remembered he said that his granddaughter had given it to him. She had assumed that meant a long time ago but obviously his granddaughter was among the camp and had given it to him after scavenging it off her parents' corpses.
Nazz felt a wave of rage wash over her that made her face hot. She remembered she'd seen a bit in a movie where a killer shot a gun through a pillow and it had silence the shot. She could take the pillow Brewis and Nat had given her and put it up to Brainiac's head and kill him then Cheryl to keep them off her ass, but then she remembered that maybe, just maybe, Brainiac had had nothing to do with it, and that fell by the wayside. Besides, she was no cold blooded killer, and she was definitely no contract killer from a Liam Neeson movie.
She'd just crawl across the field then, and she'd figure out how to get over the fissure when she came to it. But how'd she get the bags to the woods with her? She couldn't push them along or drag them. It would be too difficult to do over such a long distance and would make her shape more obvious in the grass. Then should she just leave those, too, and wait for Brainiac to go back to bed and come back for them, grab them and go to the woods, come back and cross the road and watch and wait till Molly left the bike, hide that in the grass on that side, go back for one of the bags and then take that bag with her back across the road, where she'd most likely have to push or drag both along with her as she crawled clandestinely through the grass? It was all too convoluted, she realized. She had to stop and think and figure out something that was half-smart. She was thinking too quickly and doing a poor job at the whole thing. She just had to lie there and wait, and calm down and then maybe Brainiac would be asleep again. She should just go ahead and take the bags around front and get them in the grass on the other side, or, better yet, to the woods over there instead. Then she'd go back for the bike and get it to the woods on that side of the road as well, and then she could move through the woods on that side without having to worry about getting herself seen by Brainiac or that bitch Cheryl or anybody else for that matter. She'd be safe and free.
That was about when Nazz heard Brainiac mumble something to the effect of "What the fuck?" and then he screamed, and Nazz heard him jump up to his feet and then heard Cheryl start screaming as well. She heard ripping and a crashing sound and rose from the grass, and she saw that Brainiac had gone tearing through the canvas tent behind him and was clambering through with Cheryl on his ass, and they were both looking back at something behind them.
Nazz looked up and saw three - no, four - no, five - no, six glowing red eyes gliding through the darkness toward the woodline behind the camp, coming from the glowing fissure sawing through the earth back there, storming toward the pavilion. And just barely, Nazz could make out the forms of their silhouettes, darker than all surrounding shadow. She saw more demons than the three storming toward the tent, but the others were distant and running the other way.
Brainiac was gone inside the tent, and he shouted, "THERE'S SOMETHING COMING!" And she heard others in other canvas tents moving around.
Nazz jumped up, spun and took off for the road.
Brainiac came back out of the torn tent with one of the rifles, and he opened fire at the demons crossing the grasslands toward them.
The demons changed their trajectory to sprint right at Brainiac, and they reached him before he could get off a sixth shot from his rifle, and they had torn him apart before anyone else had gotten to the rifles.
Nazz's sneakers touched the road and she heard shouts behind her, and the whole camp lit up in deafening roars of gunfire and screams, unearthly shrieks and more earthly ones. Nazz ran off into the field on the other side, listening to the bullet whizzing through the tents behind her and cracking through wood and flesh. Men and women screamed. Children screamed. Demons screamed, chanting some unintelligible language.
The gunfire echoed back and forth across the fields that lined the road for miles and miles, rolling down them and then rolling back. With the echoes, it sounded like a thunderstorm was raging overhead in addition to the demonic firefight below.
Somehow, a bullet whizzed past Nazz's head, not close enough for her to feel the air move, but close enough to scare the shit out of her and she hit the ground, which hurt her already injured hands and knees. She didn't know if someone was shooting at her or if that was a just a stray shot fired at random.
Nazz dropped one of her bags and kept the other hooked onto her arm as she crawled through the field slowly, quietly, in complete opposition to the deafening, hellish fireworks display behind her.
Nazz heard running footsteps coming her direction across the road.
More gunshots cracked and bullets and buckshot whizzed through the air her way, beating at the grass surrounding her.
The running footsteps were only getting closer.
Nazz got up and ran. The footfalls were quickly gaining. She knew by how fast it moved it wasn't a human being after her. She looked over her shoulder at the beast behind her. Like the others, it had obsidian skin and big, gnashing teeth, but this one had many twisting horns upon its head that looked almost like a cornucopia in a twisted painting. It wasn't running right behind her, but to the side of her. Its infernal eyes met hers but it didn't change course to come after her. It just ran.
Men and women fired at it, running after it across the road. One man stood in the tall grass behind them, firing a shotgun.
Within seconds, the demon met and exceeded Nazz's pace across the field and sprinted past her.
A stray round of buckshot missed its target and peppered Nazz's back, and she went down again and heard the demon's footsteps race quickly past her. She heard the man gasp, "Oh God!" And she heard the demo make a loop around as the man with the shotgun continued firing at it. After a moment, she heard a noise like ripping fabric and something heavy and wet splat onto the ground, followed by a heavy fall, and then the demon came back around and ran again for the woods past Nazz. It didn't stop to kill her like she thought it would.
Bullets tore across the night every which way.
Finally, Nazz had begun to sob. Her tears must have been loosened by the pain of the buckshot burning between her shoulder blades and above her waist. After a moment, Nazz jumped back up and fled across the field again. The demon was nowhere in sight. She ran and ran and ran.
She kept running even when she made it to the woods. After a while of running, she was too tired and had lost too much blood and fell into the pine needles bedding the forest floor. She tried to get up to run some more but her limbs shook too much to lift her weight. Then she passed out again, for the second time in 12 hours.
Sarah lay in the dark of her brother's room in the basement and let slim tears roll from either side of her eyes as she stared at the ceiling. She had heard Ed get up and leave maybe an hour ago. She could have gotten up to see what he was up to. But she didn't really care. There wasn't really much she cared about at that moment, except feeling like shit, and with feeling.
She just lay there and thought about terrible things, and intermittently not think of anything at all; she'd slip into vague meditation to just wallow in the dark sense of grief that had heavily permeated every moment of her being since she'd escaped the house last night and fallen into Kevin's arms in the driveway. She hated the feeling, but never even really tried to slip from it. She couldn't summon any energy to do it, just like she couldn't summon any to get up from Ed's bed despite the stench or even to move at all.
For the first time in her life, without the hyperbole involved with great teenage angst or vindictive rage, she considered the pros and cons of suicide. She felt empty. She felt like there just wasn't anything left to fill her up anymore. She had nothing left to latch onto. Her parents were dead. Jimmy was fucked. She couldn't latch onto Ed. He was just too weird for her, always had been. She knew Ed, and she loved Ed. But she couldn't bare to get into his head and live off him like she could with her parents (well, mom at least) or Jimmy.
So, she was alone. And she was empty. She'd cried everything out, and she felt too sluggish to even move. She really just didn't want to be alive anymore. There was nothing left there for her, really.
Kevin woke up in the morning to heavy knocking at the front door, feeling much better than he had in the night. Right before falling asleep, he had gotten the cold sweats and a shiver that wouldn't quit. He wasn't sweating anymore and he wasn't shaking either. He sat up and rubbed his face, trying to wake himself up and get reoriented to life before beginning his day. But the knocks at the door only got more ferocious and aggressive.
Kevin sighed, stood up and crossed over to the door but the knocking cut short before he reached it. Instead, the tarp he'd re-stapled to the bay window ripped free of its bindings in a bottom corner and Rolf stuck his head through, pivoting it around to look at Kevin. "The door for you!" His head retracted from the tarp. Kevin approached the door and waited. Rolf rapped his knuckles on the door and before he could do it again Kevin yanked the door open.
"Yeah?" Kevin said, irritable.
"You have only just awoken, no? You must be ready for the day! Get dressed in no more than urchin's clothing. No wear for fanciful event. There is much to do!" And Rolf turned and walked off. Kevin scratched his balls through his boxers and went upstairs to get dressed.
Rolf had not left come morning. He'd heard the shots across the Cul-de-Sac last night and gone running over with Friedbjorn's elephant gun, only to find Kevin had already dispatched his adversary. He'd walked in on the aftermath, with Kevin's nausea, Sarah's inconsolable, maniacal sobbing and Ed's stoicism. No one would tell Rolf what had happened, be it Kevin who refused because he was still pissed at Rolf or Ed, because he refused to acknowledge what had just happened. Rolf had seen the bullet holes in the kitchen window frame, gone inside to find Ed's father, still alive at the time in an expanding pool of his own blood, riddled with holes like a chunk of Swiss cheese. Rolf could smell the scent of death from elsewhere in the house and explored it accordingly. As he did, he took a flat cap off a hat rack in the foyer and fitted it over his own head. Upstairs, he'd found the source. Ed's mother dead in a tangle of bed sheets, her stomach and sternum split open in a pair of gaping, gory pits incurred by shotgun blasts. He'd taken the cap off he'd taken from the foyer and held it to his chest in mourning for the poor woman.
He'd gone back downstairs and replaced the cap on its rack and stepped back outside. By that time, the rest of the Cul-de-Sac had accumulated in the yard around the house, the unbereaved Eds surrounding their friend in an attempt to comfort him, but he just sat on the back steps, arms propped on his knees, fingers interlocked between them, staring out at the back yard with his brow low and angry, his lower lip stuck out like a pouting neanderthal. Jonny stood by Kevin's side as Kevin's hackles raised further and further, Jonny trying hopelessly to comfort his new friend.
Rolf noticed that Sarah sat quietly around the front of the house, all alone and sorrowful. He wondered how the others stood crowded around a grown man in tears and yet neglected the weeping girl on the porch. The image of her there reminded Rolf of his boyhood after his mother's passing, where he sat on the steps of their great familial farmhouse from the old country and mourned alone, for all the men were too stern for pleasantries such as tears or the implications of feebleness they brought. Only Great Nana sat with him, and yet she was the most sorrowful of them all, having outlived a daughter, except perhaps Rolf, who had lost his mother. Seeing no alternatives, Rolf took up a seat next to Sarah and patted her back. "There, little one," he'd said. "It's best to feel these things now, yes? So that they do not blindside you in your later years, when you are enfeebled and weakened by age, where it can only cause greater harm. You are lucky, just as Rolf is lucky, to have suffered this great loss when you are strong enough to overcome it! All shall be well in due time, girl. All shall be well." Sarah had leaned her head into Rolf's chest and sidled up against him. She'd said nothing in response. He'd held her close as she sobbed into him, shushing her in the fashion his Great Nana had before her own untimely passing at the youthful-yet age of 98. He clutched her, petted her, and hummed to her as she sobbed into his clothes.
Perhaps twenty minutes in, Ed came out from the front door and sat next to them in silence and stared out over the neighborhood. Mayhaps, Rolf had reckoned, he desired such comforts as Rolf was bestowing upon his sister. But he was a man yet, yes? And he would have to do the sucking up or look for comfort elsewhere. Ed did not acknowledge either his sister or Rolf as he sat there with them, and neither did Rolf acknowledge him. After he'd been there a couple minutes, Sarah slipped from Rolf's grasp into her brother's, and Rolf sat beside them a moment as she cried into his arms. Soon, Ed's eyes grew moist as well, and Rolf determined his presence was no longer necessary and left.
Double Dee awoke early in the morning and went right over to Nazz's house. He felt it was very unlike himself, but he let himself in anyway without asking anyone's permission. He had no intention of dillying about, so he went straight to the stairs without looking at anything else and hurried up them. At the top, he went straight to the guest bedroom, where Jimmy was being housed.
He swung the door open in relative silence, the same silence with which he had scaled the rest of the house, and found the bed was empty but for the slight indentation of Jimmy's form. But Jimmy wasn't there. Double Dee heard a door creak open behind him and turned, and found Jimmy frozen stiff halfway through emerging from the guest bath down the hall. "Jimmy," Double Dee said.
Jimmy stared at Double Dee wide-eyed for a moment, then went back to moving. It was slow and subtle at first as he returned to chewing something in his mouth. Then, he blinked. Swallowed. He slowly brought his hand up to his mouth as if doing so slowly would make Double Dee less likely to notice. Then he took a bite out of the PB&J he held in between his fingers. He chewed it and gulped it down. "Double Dee," Jimmy said, still with surprise in his voice. "I'm in no place to speak with you right now. I would appreciate it if you'd leave me alone."
Jimmy limped back to the bedroom past Double Dee on his crutches. "So you're catatonic, eh?" Double Dee spat as Jimmy slipped past him.
"I'm just terribly upset. I must get back to bed." Jimmy put his crutches down and climbed back into the bed, grunting with pain as he lifted his busted leg onto the sheets with the rest of him.
"You don't suppose Sarah would want to see you?"
"I shouldn't see her," Jimmy said, rolling over onto his side, facing away from Double Dee, who stood in the doorway now with his fists balled up. "I haven't a thing to say to her."
"Do you know, Jimmy? Or don't you care, in this 'state' you're in?" Jimmy said nothing, returning to his catatonia. "Did you hear the shots last night? Late in the evening? Well it sure wasn't target practice going on outside! Do you know what happened? Do you care to know? Her father took a rifle from the garage and shot her mother dead."
Jimmy spun in the bed to face Double Dee. "What?" he shouted.
"And her father's dead now too, not that it's much of a burden on anyone."
Jimmy flung himself out of the bed. "Where is she?" He yanked the crutches off the nightstand and hopped around the side of the bed.
Double Dee followed behind him as he hurried out the door and toward the stairs. "Probably still sleeping in Ed's room. Or trying to, at least." Jimmy began down the stairs. "Jimmy," Double Dee called. Jimmy took the stairs almost two at a time. "Jimmy! Be careful, man!" But Jimmy made it to the bottom of the stairs with no problem, and swung his crutches as fast as legs as he rushed for the door.
Last night, Rolf had rousted Kevin from his seat, zoned out sitting cross-legged in the side yard of Ed and Sarah's house, and together they'd dragged the siblings' dead father out the back door and laid him out in the yard. They'd gone upstairs next, wrapped their dead mother up in her bed's comforter, wrapped her up in it and carried her out as well, laying her out in the back yard a ways from her husband and murderer's body and Ed and Sarah had been given the chance to see them before Kevin pulled his truck around and Rolf loaded them into the truck bed. The truck, its rear end swarming with flies and other curious insects, now sat in the driveway at Kevin's house in the light of the morning, with Rolf standing regally to its side awaiting Kevin and leaned up on a shovel he'd buried up to its hilt beside the driveway.
And Ed stood at the foot of his mother's bed, staring at the brown-ish stain marking the center of its sheets. Blood dried brown, Ed had quickly learned. When dried, it was hard to determine just what the stain's origin was. But Ed knew good and well what this was.
He pulled up the sheets, balled them up in his hands and tossed them to the side. But, still, staining the center of the mattress, was a large brown spot. Ed hoisted the mattress off the bedframe and sat it up on its side, then slid it out the door ahead of him. He grabbed up the bloody sheets on his way out and carried them with him as he pushed the mattress down the hall.
Slowly, carefully, Ed brought the mattress down the stairs where, just a few hours ago, he'd been in a mortal conflict with his one and only father, who a neighborhood bully, who nonetheless Ed considered a friend of his, had shot to death in his very own kitchen. It made Ed angry that Kevin had killed Dad, but Ed knew it was wrong and foolish to feel that way, that Kevin saved his life, that he was a hero at least in that moment. Perhaps it was because Kevin had taken away Ed's only surviving parent who Ed had perhaps hoped to nurse back to sanity and to forgive, or perhaps it was because Kevin had taken away his opportunity to kill his father first. Maybe it was because he wanted to be the hero, or maybe he wanted no saving at all and wished only to die then and there, the burden of no one and having gone out fighting. But here he stood with the mattress, alive and well.
He was careful with the mattress instead of just letting it tumble down the stairs because beneath the floor at the base of those stairs was Ed's room, and inside Ed's room slept his baby sister, who laid conked out on his bed, had done all night, while Ed slept in his recliner. Ed had slept very poorly and wondered how his baby sister managed to saw a log even from exhaustion under the same roof where both parents had died. Ed was saddened by the thought, but knew he'd never want to sleep in his own room or own house again. Even the sight of his comics brought him no reprieve.
At the base of the stairs, Ed brought the mattress around and shoved it toward the back door, pushing it through the smear of blood neither Ed nor Sarah had bothered to scrub out of the floor last night, and then he let it fall down the back steps out onto the back yard. He dragged it out to the middle of the yard, next to the pond and tossed the sheets on top.
He went back inside and walked to the garage, and just after he entered he heard his front door open and two people enter, one clumsily on crutches. He heard Double Dee's voice call from the foyer, "Careful of the rug, Jimmy."
"I see it, I see it," huffed the high-pitched Jimmy through his ring brace.
Ed grabbed up a can of gasoline from a shelf and went back out to the kitchen as Jimmy let himself through the basement door and Double Dee followed him down the stairs, sure to keep Jimmy from falling down them on his crutches.
Ed went to the kitchen and grabbed a utility lighter from a drawer and walked back outside.
He popped the cap off the gas can and sloshed the whole thing out onto the mattress and soaked the sheets balled up on top of it with it as well. Then he stepped back, waited till he smelled gas fumes and lit the lighter up.
And the whole back yard went up in a blast of flame that sucked air but starved because there was too little of it, and it sank down to the size of a regular fire as Ed watched the mattress burn.
He went back inside and down the stairs to his room, where he joined Double Dee's side to watch Jimmy comfort Sarah. Jimmy clutched Sarah, his arms locked around her and holding her close. She cried into his chest. "I know, Sarah," he said softly. "I know."
"I missed you, Jimmy," she said.
"I'm so sorry, Sarah. I was so selfish."
Ed could see, even from the corner of his eye, that Double Dee was deeply moved by their tearful reunion, his lips quivering and his hands up under his chin with his fingers interlocked.
But Ed was just sad, and kind of angry. Sarah didn't act that way toward him. She'd just used him as a shoulder to cry on till she could recede into her own mind. And then she just sat there in bed for the longest time. But Jimmy came through and made her feel better. He could never have done that. She didn't need him to feel better. He couldn't help her.
Ed saw Double Dee turn to him from the side of his eye. Double Dee struggled for words for a moment, then said, in the most generous tone he could muster without seeming saccharine: "How are you holding up, Ed?"
"I'm fine," he said, then turned and left. Double Dee could see his friend was upset, so he followed him.
"Are you sure, Ed?" Double Dee called after him as Ed climbed the stairs to the first floor.
"Yeah. Thanks, Double Dee," Ed said, and walked out of the basement. Double Dee went to follow but Ed shut the door in his face. Double Dee snatched his head back from the door to avoid taking it to the face and possibly obtaining a pretty ugly bloody nose, and in doing so nearly stepped back off the top step and fell down the stairs. But he pinwheeled his arms till he was back upright at the top step. He opened the door and went out after Ed, but couldn't find him. He checked around the house and the nearby surrounding neighborhood. He was gone.
He walked through the neighborhood and saw Kevin, Rolf and Jonny loading supplies into the back of Kevin's father's truck, Rolf barking incessant orders at the other two boys with him while also constantly insulting their intelligence. "Do not pack in this way!" Rolf insisted, then followed it up with the vindictive whisper, "Do you live in a shoe?"
Double Dee continued through the Cul-de-Sac until he ran into Eddy. He convinced him to help look for Ed and they went off to search for him.
Nazz woke up just before midday with a start. It took her a minute to remember why she was lying there in the middle of the woods. There wasn't much of a comfort in remembering though.
She found that when she'd fallen in the early morning she'd sent half the items in her bag flying through the pine needles. She stuffed them back inside and tried to work out a plan for the day. Dreadfully, she knew there was no way she could avoid going back to the encampment for both Kevin's bike and, had the entirety of the camp been slaughtered, her parents' things.
She slung the bag onto her back and gasped in pain as he landed smack-dab between her shoulder blades. She dropped the bag and just barely avoided letting her knees buckle from the pain. Somehow, between the rest of the pain throbbing across her body, she'd completely forgotten about being shot in the back last night, writing it off as general back pain from carrying too much weight.
She let out a quivering breath and set out back through the woods.
Kevin, Jonny, and Rolf dug two more graves out of the cold, dry soil of the Pit, right next to the first pair of dead. Kevin stood with Jonny, working on one hole while Rolf worked alone on the other. Kevin dug out one half of the grave while Jonny did the other. Kevin was much deeper than Jonny, whose languid movement as he stuck the spade in and thrust dirt out brought out more and more of Kevin's building anger. He dug faster and faster to work it off. He didn't need to explode on Jonny today, or any day, for that matter. Nor did he need to blow up at Rolf, who would probably, in his state of mind, lay Kevin out with ease.
Rolf would raise his head from his grave intermittently to check on their work, letting out grunts of dissatisfaction each time before dropping his head back down. His grunts only brought Kevin closer to the edge. He jammed the blade of his shovel into the soft dirt below and kicked once, then twice as hard as he could. The blade was fully entrenched in the earth. Kevin adjusted his grip on the shovel's handle to try to excavate the heavy load. He managed to hoist it up with shaking arms (his lack of strength frustrated him further) but couldn't get it up over the side of the hole, spilling it back in. "Goddamn it!" he shouted, taking off his hat and throwing it onto the soil.
"Hey, don't worry about it, Kev," Jonny said, leaning over his shovel handle, then mumbling, "...in." He cleared his throat. "Maybe you need a break, huh, buddy?"
"I do not need a break, Jonny," Kevin grunted. "We gotta get this done."
"Yeah, I guess so. Ain't it weird we were just out here yesterday, burying Jimmy's parents? And now we got Ed's. Seems an awful lot like they're all droppin' like flies, don't it, Kevin?"
"I guess so, Jonny."
"Gee. Looks like we're runnin' out of adult supervision, huh? We're all alone on the Cul-de-Sac. That is, till Nazz comes back with her parents and mine. Hopefully, at least. Or maybe your Dad'll get back. Or Double Dee's parents. Eddy's mom. We can't be all alone, right?"
"Right, Jonny," Kevin said, distracted, as he kept digging. Kevin didn't turn to look but it sounded an awful lot like Jonny wasn't still digging too.
"Maybe it's something with their minds. They're older. They're set in their ways, like roots in the ground. They can't adapt to something like this happening. But us, Kevin? We're young, and we got brains like Play-Doh, and we can come to accept anything. That's why you gotta learn languages when you're little. Cuz it's harder to do when you're old, cuz it's harder to accept somethin' different when you're that old. But we can adapt to anything, us young'uns."
"Jonny the woodboy!" Rolf shrieked and Jonny turned his head. Rolf had risen from his own grave and stood over Jonny and Kevin on one knee, leering down at them. With the sun behind his head like it was, he looked like a perched gargoyle. "Perhaps this motley crew would have finished the burial by now were the third member of our party less of a girlish weevil, yes? Perhaps this gravedigging would benefit without the constant inane jabberings of a maddened hippie boy with hunk of wood, yes?" As he shouted, he moved closer and closer to Jonny until their faces were inches apart. Jonny stumbled back and his back hit the wall of the grave. Jonny looked so small to Kevin. He was just a kid.
Kevin cleared his throat and rolled his shoulders. "Yo, Rolf," he called from the other side of the hole. Rolf spun on his heel to glare at him. "Lay off the dork, will ya?"
"Our number is sullied, dear shovelchin Kevin! This boy is nothing but a rapscallion bottom feeder, yes?"
"Why are you acting like such a dick head, dude?" Kevin sneered. "What's got into you?"
"Do Rolf's ears betray Rolf! What has Rolf's supposed compatriot called the son of the shepherd?" Rolf crossed the half-dug grave to Kevin, who stood with his legs out and chin stuck out. Ready for anything.
"I ain't called you nothin'. I said," Kevin taunted, "you're acting like a real dick, Rolf. I know English isn't your first language, dude, but you gotta know the difference by now."
"Is this the pat-pat on the back that Rolf gets?" Rolf's lip twitched incessantly, his eyes burning with fire. "Rolf had no inclination to help in the burial of the Dumb-as-Rock Ed Boy's parents but, as you say, my friend, we are all family here in Cul-de-Sac! Rolf tries to help in the digging but what does he get? A lazed baboon and a malcontent 'brother' in arms who can go not three of the king's feet without questioning the will of Rolf, the inner workings of Rolf? A 'brother' more like a wife who nags!"
"Are you pissed off about your dad, Rolf?" Kevin said and immediately regretted it.
Nazz stood along the treeline and peered across the field and road to the pavilion, which had been ransacked in the night and torn apart. The roof was caved in and what was left of the tents had been torn to ribbons. Bodies lie strewn about the tall grass and even the road. But beneath the collapsed roof under a cracked picnic table, Nazz saw a glint of silver - the finish of Kevin's bike, which couldn't be sullied in a crash nor in the destruction of the roof above it.
Nazz scanned the tall grass for movement and found none. She walked through the field and scanned for her other bag among the grass. She overshot it and found instead the disemboweled body of a brawny man in the matted grass, his face gray, his eyes filmed over and buzzing with flies. He smelled terrible. He must have shat himself with whatever bowels he'd had left. Nazz uncurled his hand from the shotgun in his grip and picked it up, looking it over. She tried to rack it but found it initially more difficult than expected. No matter. She tried again, putting more force into it and found no trouble. The shotgun ejected a shell and Nazz knelt to pick it up, gagging as she bent close to the gunman's rank corpse. She grabbed it and found it had expelled its buckshot payload and was useless to her. She brought the pump back again but no shell was jacked from the port. The shotgun was empty. She dropped it atop the man's corpse and he let out a sudden gasp that caused Nazz to jump back in shocked terror. She backed from the corpse, thinking it had come to life, but after watching it remain motionless for a moment more she realized it must have just been a death rattle shaken free by the shotgun's weight on his stomach. How irrational.
She went back through the field and found her other bag. She brought it out to the road and left it on the shoulder, then crossed the asphalt strip to the field which held the devastated encampment.
She moved between the bodies laying in the wreckage and didn't recognize one of them. There was no Brewis, no Natasha, no Molly or even a Cheryl or, god forbid, a Mr. Penny among them. But then again, she might not have recognized them given the states of some of the bodies. Several had been decapitated with no heads in sight, others with their faces heartily bashed in by their demonic foes or completely bitten off. Nazz passed the body of a little girl face down and slick with blood, almost entirely hidden by the grass, which seemed to have purposefully overtaken her. She passed severed limbs as well. A leg here, an arm there. One of the arms she passed was feminine and clutched a silver revolver. Nazz tried to pry the hand's finger open to grab the pistol but found it more work than it was worth for a gun that was empty anyways.
As she approached the pavilion, she approached a putrid corpse among the others that stood out. For one thing, its long, curled black horns jutted above the tall grass, and for another, its body seemed to absorb light like a black hole. It was nearly impossible to miss it in the pale field. It had been riddled with bullets. It seemed the demons that now stalked the Earth were not invincible. They could be destroyed. She wondered briefly if demons had souls to be sent back to Hell or not.
She reached the destroyed pavilion and knelt by the edge of its shingle roof. She crawled underneath and grabbed Kevin's bike by its middle, propping her legs on the picnic table it had fallen under and putting all her force into dragging it out from under the wreckage and into the field beyond. It wasn't much worse for fare than it had been before Nazz had left Molly's side. It was still missing its front wheel. Nazz went back under the pavilion's roof once more and quickly found that, as well as one or two of what she could only assume were Molly's tools. While the bike's body hadn't been any more badly damaged, the wheel had taken a beating. It was bent even worse than before. Now, it was almost twisted into a 90 degree angle. One of the tools Nazz had pulled from the pavilion was a hammer. She would have to put it to good use if she wanted to use that bike again. That was, if she could even get it back on there without all the parts.
Nazz decided to put that off and went around the side of the pavilion. The restrooms had not been damaged much at all. The roof overhanging that portion of the pavilion was all that was left standing of it.
When Nazz got around the back of the pavilion, she saw Mr. Penny's body lying in the grass, pale and prone, eyes shut with arms to his sides. Nazz approached him. She forgot about the gold chain for a moment and just wanted to see if he was still alive. No one else had been, though, so she didn't figure the poor old man would be any different.
Then, she noticed he had been covered in a blanket up to his breasts. She froze in the spot. That meant someone else had made it out of the demon attack. That meant Mr. Penny had made it long enough to be covered up. If he had been dead when he'd been covered, the blanket would have been pulled up over his head. But it wasn't.
Nazz could see his chest slowly rise and fall. She shook free of her paralysis and continued toward poor old Mr. Penny. Blood had seeped through the blanket over his chest. He'd been injured and Nazz only hoped he had somehow managed to get out with a mere flesh wound. Although that didn't seem likely.
She was so distracted with Mr. Penny she didn't hear the men's room door slowly creaking open, scraping softly across the concrete under the pavilion's awning.
But she heard it swing back shut and especially heard the running footsteps coming up behind her and the huffing breathing accompanying it.
She turned, but by the time she got all the way around, Brewis had gone down, and he pulled Nazz's legs out from under her, the bag flying off her arm, and she fell hard onto the ground with a shout of pain as nerves shot unhappily across her back. "We saw you! We saw you go! You brought them here! Whatever the hell they were!" Then he screamed, "Mr. Penny!"
And Mr. Penny sat upright, suddenly wide awake. Clumsily, he made his way to his feet with many grunts and pained exhalations, but he made it, and he picked up a bolt rifle on his way. He approached the pair on the ground. Nazz looked into Mr. Penny's eyes. His face was clenched, taut. His brow tight and furrowed low over his eyes. Squinting slightly. She could barely even see the two blue eyes nestled comfortably above his still rosy cheeks. His face looked agonized, and he shook his head.
"You see what you did? Look at this place. You got us all torn apart!" Brewis cried in tearful betrayal. "You got all killed! Our loved ones, killed! You got my wife killed! His granddaughter killed!" Brewis motioned to the frowning Mr. Penny. "She never trusted you, just like she never trusted anybody! I should'a listened to her, but no, I had to be the altruist, the one who tried to see people for their good sides. I had to trust every little blond girl that crashed their bikes into our camps, no matter how much she lied to us!"
"Brewis," Mr Penny wheezed. "Be reasonable. Be calm, Brewis. Brewis." Brewis wasn't listening very well.
Nazz struggled with him, but he was tall and strong and was seating across her hips, his fists squeezing her arms tight enough to hurt them. Mr. Penny just gazed on, looking pained.
"You killed them," Nazz squeaked, fighting with Brewis's weight on top of her. She gave up trying to knock him off and began scrounging with her hands trying to find where her bag had dropped. She looked up at Mr. Penny. "He killed them, Mr. Penny!"
"I didn't kill anyone! I didn't kill anyone!" he shouted into her face, as if trying to get it through her thick skull, his, and Mr. Penny's as well for that matter.
"You killed my parents," Nazz choked. "They're dead behind the gas station. The CEFCO just down the road. You shot them. You killed them."
"I don't know about this, Avery," Brewis spat. "I don't know what she's talking about. She hurt us."
"What is it you intend on doing with her, Brewis?" Mr. Penny asked.
"She got our girl killed, didn't she? She did. Whadda you wanna do with her?"
Mr. Penny just stared at him stoically from underneath his bushy eyebrows.
"Whadda you think we should do with her?" Brewis asked again, nearly crying. Nazz knew what he was implying. He was asking Mr. Penny for permission to kill her.
"They're dead at the gas station, Mr. Penny!" Nazz called. And as one last ditch effort, she tried to give Mr. Penny the hero slot. "I'll show them to you! Don't kill me, please, Mr. Penny! Don't let him hurt me!" Please, Mr. Penny, save the defenseless little girl from the big brutal man.
Both men were taken aback by her blunt request, so it kind of worked. Even Brewis horrified by that thought being out in the open, tearing the lid off his violence. There was shame, terror, horror in his wide eyes. But he wasn't finished, not with all this rage. He needed somewhere and someone to put it all on. Nazz pictured him screaming at Mr. Penny before her arrival before he saw her as a new conduit to unleash his sorrows on.
Nazz's left hand found the strap of her bag and she pulled it closer. "Your necklace, the one your granddaughter gave you, it was my dad's! She took it off him after she killed him!" She worked the zipper open with her fingers and dug her hand inside. Was she escalating this? Could she have talked him down? She was scared and desperate.
"Don't speak about my granddaughter like that," Mr. Penny said softly, almost begging.
"I'll show you. I'll prove it to you right now, if you let me. Your people killed my parents and my friends' parents."
"Whatever happened to your mean old man?" Brewis sneered at Nazz. He put his hands on her throat. "Did you lie about them, too?" She had screwed this all up. Maybe she could have been honest. Maybe she could have kept her mouth shut. She wished she could start over at the last checkpoint and play through this differently. She just wanted him to get off her.
"Brewis!" Mr. Penny shouted, and Nazz didn't know if he was shouting his name to demand he let go or to warn him about the pistol Nazz had just pulled from her bag, Kevin's pistol, that she brought up and stuck in the side of Brewis's stomach, jabbing it into the slightest muffin top he wore atop his pants.
Nazz looked Brewis in the eyes and saw the fire within them and she shot him. The bullet hit hard enough to blast blood out his other side, and his stomach tensed in surprise and his eyes went open, his jaw dropping, and they only ratcheted wider and wider and lower and lower with the next two shots Nazz fired into him, running the gun up to his lower hanging ribs for the second, then his upper ribs for the next. He doubled over and cast his torso back from Nazz's pistol an instant later, and Nazz, figuring it might only get worse from her from her and without really giving the subject much more thought, brought the gun up to the space between herself and Brewis, aiming for his chin, and she shot him again, missing his chin and hitting him right between the clavicles. She shot him again immediately and the bullet hit him in the jaw, rippling his face and snatching his head to one side. Bone chips and blood shot out the exit wound.
"Ah," Brewis gasped, "Ah." And he fell back off of Nazz into the tall grass. Nazz swung the gun around and aimed it right at Mr. Penny, who was aiming his hunting rifle right back at her, eyes wide and frantic, horrified and confused.
Nazz kicked back across the field to the pavilion, away from both Brewis, who rolled in the grass in pain, and Mr. Penny, keeping the gun up at Mr. Penny's chest as he aimed likewise at her. She wasn't afraid to not look at Brewis again. He was pouring out of too many holes to give much thought to her anymore. All he could do now was roll around in the grass and wait to die. She'd shot him too many times and they were too far away from town, not to mention the state of the hospitals. She cast the thought out of her mind when she realized that for all intents and purposes, no fooling herself otherwise, she had killed him. She probably didn't have to but she did so don't beat yourself up over this, kid, she told her childish self with a gruff, tough, hardboiled voice in her head, but she didn't believe it and felt embarrassed for trying.
Mr. Penny was also not afraid to take his eyes off Nazz to cast nervous looks at Brewis. She could have shot him any time his eyes flitted to Brewis and he wouldn't have gotten off a shot, but she didn't really want to kill him too if she didn't have to. She didn't want to have much of a body count to her name. She just wanted to run away now. She should never have come back for Kevin's bike. It was a huge mistake.
For a moment, she saw the situation from the outside and felt a bit of pride. She was now in control of the situation. She'd gotten the best of two grown men, albeit ones who were in intense emotional duress; two logical, intelligent men would have had her, no doubt. But Brewis had taken her to the ground without even knowing what to do with her. He was just heartbroken and looking to lash out. At the end of the day, he was harmless. She was a murderer now.
Mr. Penny looked from the dying Brewis to Nazz, begging her with his eyes. She saw in his eyes he needed to get to his grandson-in-law's side that instant, and also saw in the softness in those eyes he didn't have the heart to kill Nazz either. He was too old and too gentlemanly to shoot a little blond girl.
Nazz lowered the gun and Mr. Penny hurried to Brewis's side, putting the rifle down and hitting his knees, hard, next to Brewis with a grunt. Brewis stuck his bloody hand up and Mr. Penny grabbed a hold of it. Nazz had blown the younger man's jaw hinge to smithereens and he couldn't manage to speak anything other than a soft moan of pain, a low mewling howl of agony. Mr. Penny sat with him in near silence, but would intermittently nod and whisper, "I know. I know." Nazz stood there and waited, watching Brewis die. She felt no relief that one of the men who had killed her and Jonny's parents was dead. If anything, she felt horror, but even that slipped from her grasp after looking at Brewis's shattered form long enough.
Brewis died less than three minutes after Nazz shot him. Mr. Penny sat, staring at him for another couple minutes or so. Nazz just stood there and waited. She didn't even try to reason with herself why she didn't just leave for the longest time. But the closer Mr. Penny got to talking, the more she wondered why she was still there.
"Why don't you go?" Mr. Penny said softly. Nazz knew he'd ask.
"I want my dad's necklace back."
Mr. Penny reached up and held the necklace with his bloody hand. "It's still a gift from my granddaughter. She's gone now."
Nazz tried to speak but only exhaled at Mr. Penny. But she sucked more air in and let it out with bitterness as she said, "I don't care."
Mr. Penny's breathing grew low and harsh and he pulled the necklace taut on his neck and then pulled again, and it snapped free. He extended his hand over Brewis's body and offered the chain to Nazz. Nazz hesitated, then crossed the few feet between her and her father's necklace, and she took it from his hand. She stepped back quickly in case the sorrow got to Penny and he tried something. "Where's Molly?"
"I don't know," he said.
"She's got my mom's watch."
"I don't know where she is." He looked at her with his cool blue eyes and Nazz knew he was telling the truth. Nazz backed away from him. "You said he and Nat killed some people?" he said just before Nazz turned to leave. Nazz stopped and looked at him again.
"My parents. My friends' parents too."
"Take me to them. Please. You need to prove it so that this isn't senseless."
Nazz led Mr. Penny across the field to the CEFCO. She had to stop to let Mr. Penny catch his breath halfway. They didn't say a word the whole time. When they made it to the back of the gas station where the six bodies lay and rotted, swarming with bugs both airborne and less so. They stood next to one another for a couple minutes and stared at the bodies. She was scared shitless she'd get over there with him and look at Dad and the necklace would still be strung around his neck and then there would be no justice in killing Brewis and it was just brutality for nothing.
Nazz took in her parents' bodies for the first time. She wished she'd gotten the look yesterday. Now they were turning colors like rotting fruit. Their stomachs were beginning to collapse and swarmed with the most flies. They were liquifying in their clothes, dissolving in the baking sun. Leaking fluids from the small, round bullet holes in their faces. No jewelry around their necks. Awfully, she thought thank God. Thank God her parents had really, actually, definitely been robbed and murdered. Thank God.
After a moment, Nazz decided to bite the bullet and approached. Mr. Penny stood by as she held her shirt over her nose and knelt over her father. She strung his chain around his neck. "How do you know they killed them?" Mr. Penny asked.
"They had their jewelry," Nazz said softly. "If someone else had killed them, they'd have taken Dad's necklace first. They wouldn't have just left it for scavengers. They would have taken it."
"I see," Mr. Penny said, his voice cracking, then spat, "Hell." He paused and looked at the bodies. He knelt next to the last one on the line, which was some woman Nazz had never seen before, but she lay next to the dead owner of the CEFCO, so she could make a fair assumption that she was his girlfriend or wife. Sister maybe. Mr. Penny looked at the bullet hole in her cheek. He sighed. "Yep," he said. He pushed up off the ground, his hands on his knees, and he stood in front of Nazz again. "Are you alone now?" he asked, keeping emotion from his voice.
"I have my friends back home," she said.
"Where's that?"
"Peach Creek."
"Well. You'd best be off then. I'll bury them if you'd like."
"If you want to," Nazz said.
"Alright, then," he said softly. They stood around looking at the bodies for another few moments before Nazz turned to go.
"I didn't bring those things here. I'm sorry I killed Brewis."
"Well, he needed to go anyway, if he really did do this." His words were cold, bitter and empty.
Nazz went back to the pavilion, picked up her bag and stuck the gun back in it. She slung it over her shoulder and went over to the bike. She had completely forgotten needing to put it back together. She sat on the ground and started work on it. A half hour into putting it back together, Mr. Penny shuffled back over and sat next to her. "Hand me the wheel," he said. It was the last time she ever heard him speak. She handed it over. He took the hammer and started beating it back into shape.
Nazz searched the wreckage around the picnic table the parts had been housed on and found a pair of nuts and bolts. By the time she was done, Mr. Penny had beaten the wheel back into some kind of shape. She used the bolts to hold the wheel on its stem, twisting one on with her fingers on one side while Mr. Penny did the other. It hurt her hands to squeeze them shut in the way that was necessary in tightening the bolts, but the pain grew less and less apparent the more she worked. Soon, the bike was back in something like working order. All she needed to do now was string the chain back on and that was very simple to do. She went over for the other bag on the side of the road and returned to the pavilion where Mr. Penny stood with the bike. She strung the bag onto the back of the bike and mounted it. She began pedaling and didn't even look back. Maybe it was cruel. Maybe it made him think she was heartless, that she didn't care about him. And why should she? A stranger. Kin to murderers. She rode the bike away nearly in tears with the only consolation in her mind being that she would most likely never see Mr. Penny again.
But that was just wishful thinking.
Double Dee and Eddy had turned the whole Cul-de-Sac over looking for Ed. They went back through Ed's house in hopes of finding him hiding out somewhere inside, but all threy found was Jimmy and Sarah wallowing in their sorrows together and a smoldering mattress out back. They searched through their own houses, Nazz's house, went searching all the way through the woods surrounding the Cul-de-Sac, through the lane, the playground, construction site, even the Park'N'Flush, which they found mysteriously devoid of any Kanker sores, which, strangely, brought Eddy no happiness. The disappearance of their trailer and themselves along with it only served to yank another sequence of routine from Eddy's life and hollow out another nightmarish hole in Eddy's mind. Eddy had the creeping suspicion that he would never see the Kankers again in his life. He was right. Eddy and Double Dee split up after finding the creekbed and glowing fissure devoid of Ed. Double Dee would trek back through the Cul-de-Sac and overturn every other corner of the neighborhood in search of their brother and Eddy would check the school and its surroundings.
Before departing, an increasingly anxious Double Dee muttered, "I hope he hasn't done anything drastic."
"Nah, Lumpy don't got it in him. You worry too much." Double Dee mumbled something half-heartedly affirming Eddy's thoughts, then they broke off. But Eddy was starting to feel hopeless. He was no point in chasing after Ed. If they hadn't found him now, where the hell else could he possibly be? Nowhere they'd find. So Eddy waited until Double Dee was out of view, walked back to the playground, laid down on the merry-go-round and tried to take a nap.
But Double Dee didn't give up so easy. Though he was still easily winded, partially due to his feeble nature and partially because of his injuries in the earthquake, and he had to stop and rest many time on his walk back to the Cul-de-Sac, he was intent on finding his dear pal. He was beginning to notice how easily his mind had shifted off the demon in the dog kennel in his garage to finding Ed and decided that he was just desperate to distract himself and maybe none of this, finding Ed or researching that beast, really mattered at all.
But, no matter, he was back to the Cul-de-Sac in no time. He went straight to Ed and Sarah's house to see if Ed had come back on his own and to check up on poor grieving Sarah. He arrived to a dismal stillness that made him shudder to his very bones at the thought of what had transpired here last night. On his way to the basement, he wondered just what was going through Ed's dad's head that drove him to such grave lengths.
He knew it had to do with that thing in his garage. That evil thing.
No, Double Dee didn't believe in evil. He believed in evil about as much as he did God in any traditional sense. At least, that's what he told himself. Faith was a strange concept in his household. His family was a scientific one, and though that might imply a certain curiosity, there was no such thing between Double Dee's parents. They were just as close-minded and ignorant as that religious fervor they hated so much. Double Dee had grown up afraid, afraid of death and the nightmare thoughts of what that meant, and he resented his parents for not bestoying that idea of God and an afterlife unto him, no matter if it was true or not. At the very least, they could have slacked off enough to give him Santa Claus. He hated how annoyed he used to get when classmates spoke of Santa. Idiots, he thought. What morons.
But all that self-righteousness was behind him now. He was determined to better himself always, and if he ever found a mate who loved him dearly enough, he was determined to give their progeny a flight of fantasy called Santa Claus.
He found the basement quiet and at the bottom of the stairs he peeked into Ed's bedroom, where he found Jimmy and Sarah asleep together on the bed. Curled up like yin-yang symbols in complementing fetal positions.
Double Dee smiled, happy that they could take comfort in one another, and went back upstairs.
He was afraid, but he hid that away with logical thinking. Of course Ed was fine. He was too strong to let even a hellspawn best him in combat and he was certainly not foolish enough to contemplate suicide.
Double Dee exited the house through the front door and took a deep calming breath to mellow himself out. It was quiet and calm. Stillness was his drug and he needed to indulge.
So he walked out into the lawn and took the stillness of the day in, and tried not to be concerned that even the sounds of nature had fled the valley. He turned around to look back at the house and saw a pair of ratty old sneakers hanging over the gutter on the edge of the roof. "Ed?" he called. No response. He re-entered the house and climbed the stairs, avoided the stillness of Ed's mother's bedroom and entered Sarah's. It was more muted in its aggressive pinkness than he'd last seen it, but Double Dee decided now was no time to snoop in Sarah's fading adolescence and continued across the room to the window, unlatching it and sliding it up, and with great care he scaled the side of the house and climbed onto the roof where he joined a pitiful looking Ed surveilling the neighborhood.
Nearby, Eddy grew tired of his sleeplessness and began his slow, bitter walk back to the Cul-de-Sac.
Kevin roused from unconsciousness in a place he'd never wanted to be. In Jonny's arms. His head on the boy's lap.
He sat bolt upright and looked around the Pit. He and Jonny were between the two graves. Rolf's grave had been finished whereas Kevin and Jonny's hadn't seen any more work. Rolf was gone. "Where'd Rolfy Boy go?"
"He got mad and left," Jonny shrugged.
"Did he…" Kevin rubbed his face, which throbbed. He felt a lump on his cheek that stung like a motherfucker to the touch. "Did Rolf…?" He couldn't bare to corporealize the idea by talking about it.
"He sure knocked the shit outta you, Kevin," Jonny said, more excited than he cared to let on. He'd never seen somebody go out like Kevin had. And from just one punch!
"Great," Kevin grumbled as he climbed up to his feet, swaying a bit, still lightheaded. "Let's get this done, Jonny. I'm tired'a smellin' 'em."
Double Dee was taken aback by the imagery of destruction that was spread out in front of him beyond the roof of Ed's home. It seemed that despite the dangerous cracked and weakened foundations of the houses on the Cul-de-Sac, they were very fortunate indeed. Smoke rose in pillars across Peach Creek and in the distance from the cityscape of Lemon Brook on the skyline. Many houses and buildings across their fair village had collapsed or otherwise suffered some grave tragedy. So many lives and memories ruined. Double Dee had not considered this yet; he had done too much of an outstanding job distracting himself from the horrors around him.
It would take years to repair these damages, years of struggling and fear and loss and confusion. This was a living nightmare. But no matter. Double Dee was not here to gawk at the horrors of the earthquake's wrath. He was here to console his friend.
"Hi, Ed," Double Dee said. Ed had yet to acknowledge Double Dee's presence. He reminded Double Dee of a time long gone, of a time he'd once loathed but now regarded fondly and with melancholy. He smiled. "Ed? Do you remember that day you suffered the misfortune of a rock in your shoe? And how Eddy and I toiled over a solution to your time of distress when we had no idea what to do? Well, despite all that, it was a good day."
Ed pulled his legs up and wrapped his arms around them. Double Dee sat and tried to enjoy the colors of the mounting evening lights. The horizon shimmered. Ed was silent. They watched Kevin's dad's pickup return to the Cul-de-Sac with Kevin and Jonny inside. The thought of what they had just come from doing hung heavy in Double Dee's mind and he figured it held similarly in Ed's, too. They watched Jonny talk Kevin's ear off on their way into Kevin's house. They entered via the tarp covering the hole in Kevin's house, Kevin grunting half-hearted 'yep's and 'uh-huh's to Jonny's endless rambling. In moments, they were gone and Double Dee and Ed were once again alone.
"Is Sarah okay?" Ed asked it softly.
"She and Jimmy are getting along about as well as can be expected. Um. How are you, Ed?"
"Good." Stoic and emotionless. Frustrating.
Double Dee thought long and hard about his response. "Now, I don't think that's true, is it?"
"Sarah doesn't need me, Double Dee. I can't make her feel good."
"Well sure you can! You just need to be there for her, Ed."
"I am. She doesn't need me."
"Oh, she most definitely does. If you left, she wouldn't know what to do with herself. Do you know how much she'd cry? Oh, she'd drown the whole Cul-de-Sac. She's a little kid, Ed. She doesn't know how to express herself. She needs you."
"She needs Jimmy."
"Were you sitting up here the whole time? Did you see Eddy and I looking high and low for you? We must have looked like two chickens with our heads cut off. We were worried about you."
"Sorry."
"No, it's fine. We just hoped you were okay. We just wanted to be there for you." Double Dee decided he needed to take some kind of initiative and patted Ed on his back. Pat, pat, pat. Double Dee felt silly but he kept doing it. Maybe too long. So he wrapped his arm around Ed's neck and hugged him slightly. Ed was still looking ahead.
Double Dee sighed and heard a shrill voice below. "How'd he even get up there?" Double Dee and Ed looked down and saw Eddy standing in the yard, craning his neck to gaze at them, shielding his eyes in the diminishing light of the afternoon.
"Hi, Eddy," Ed said sluggishly, with a heartbreaking lack of enthusiasm.
"Gimme a second, would ya?" The two boys on the roof watched Eddy put his hands on his hips and consider how he was gonna tackle this thing. They watched him slowly inch up to the drainage pipe leading down the wall and tap it, grab it, grab it with both hands and shake it. Eddy grumbled and stepped back and looked up at the others for recommendations and suggestions. None came.
Grumbling, Eddy mounted the pipe and began his ascent upwards, muttering a series of expletives on his way up that brought smiles to Double Dee and Ed's faces. With Eddy out of sight, all they had to go by for how Eddy was doing was how much the gutter was shaking and how much Eddy was swearing. They heard his sneakers squeak and hands flounder on the pipe and shimmy up toward them, and within minutes, Eddy's hand clasped the gutter and he skittered up onto the roof. He caught his breath, legs hanging off the edge, and he turned to look at his friends at the sounds of their chuckling. They were smiling and laughing at him. "Hardy har har, yuck it up, dillweeds."
"Eddy, you could have climbed up through the window," Double Dee managed through chuckles.
"Oh, fuck off, sockhead.' The laughter echoed across the Cul-de-Sac. Ed dropped a heavy mitt on Eddy's shoulder and Double Dee's and pulled them close. The other Eds held tight to their buddy as his laughter turned to tears. You know, in all their years of friendship, Eddy couldn't think of a single time they'd seen Ed cry. Though that said more about Eddy than it did about Ed. They held him dearly.
Nazz rode the mangled bike back slowly but surely, afraid that it was gonna come apart underneath her. It was getting dark and getting colder. She was dressed well enough, in one of Kevin's green long sleeve turtlenecks she'd snagged with the rest of his gear. She'd changed into it after her accident by the pavillion; there had been blood on her shirt and she'd ripped it up pretty good. She thought of Mr. Penny. When he saw that shirt before dinner, he smiled and said, "Why, that's a peculiar shirt for a girl. It fits you well enough."
"Thanks. It belongs to my - to my friend. He's got a whole closet full of shirts like these."
"What draws him to such a singular style?"
"I never thought about it before, really. I have no idea. He just likes 'em, wears 'em everyday."
Now, Kevin's turtleneck was covered in blood. Brewis's blood. The shirt was sticky and stuck to her goose-pimpled flesh. Nazz thought about poor old Mr. Penny and dug out some extra garments she'd stored in the bags to add extra heat, wincing as she slipped them over tender wounds.
Her whole body throbbed in pain and her forearm was swelling where she'd stuck it full of glass. She could feel the pulse pumping through her there, and it twanged off her nerves like strings on a guitar. Her hands pulsed hot, too hot as she gripped the split the scabs on her knees with each pump of her legs to keep the bike going and she felt a trickle of blood every once in a while running down her legs and from the buckshot wounds in her back which should have been healing over by now but weren't. She was in bad shape, hurting badly and frustrated by the pain, letting out dry sobs of anger as she rode back toward Peach Creek which with each passing minute felt further and further away.
She made sure to avoid the major metropolitan part of Lemon Brook, kept to the quieter side streets which held less panic and people but more danger in the dark corners and shadows. The lights were out all over town and only the full moonlight led her way. It was eerie seeing the city glowing under only the pallid shine of the moon. She was used to seeing these streets painted in orange streetlight and storming with cars.
Few cars ran through these streets, and fewer sat parked on curbs. She feared an attack by a rapist or a mugger and kept Kevin's pistol in her left front pocket, ready to pull at any sign of danger though she wondered what she'd really do if faced by danger.
She heard voices inside some shopfronts and moans from deeper within the city, as well as the screams and gunshots she had grown used to hearing. As she rode, a massive explosion blasted nearby, deafening her, shaking the streets and knocking her off the bike. A few frantic seconds passed as she leapt up, went after the pistol which had skid across the ground and remounted the bike. She had no idea what could have caused such a huge blast and didn't care to find out. She rode.
She made it back through Lemon Brook and into the countryside which separated the city from Peach Creek. She frantically, if sluggishly, dove off the bike at each sign of headlights and dragged the bike to the woods with each passing car, which made slow going at first but soon very few cars rode through. Soon, she was alone with the moonlight glowing off the asphalt.
Then the front wheel, which Mr. Penny had so kindly beaten back into shape for her, crumpled and she tumbled onto the road.
She hit the blacktop and pain thrummed through her like a battery charge. She didn't pry herself up off the road instantly. She just sat there with the side of her face pressed to the cold pavement and groaned a word in frustration and pain she didn't often say. "Fuuuuuuuuuck."
Rolf had no time to waste. When he sent news of his father's passing to Cousin Bob, Bob determined he was no longer coming to Peach Creek and had demanded that Rolf come and join him sooner or Rolf would be left behind, left alone in the crumbling nation to fend for himself. Rolf's attempt at help with his supposed American "family" had left him red-faced both from rage and embarrassment and he had lost time attempting to assist Kevin and the woodboy in the burial process. He still had to finish packing the house and gather up the animals for the commute.
Knowing this commute would be long and arduous, he would need to put everything in Papa's pickup truck and transport everything that way instead of making Wilfred carry everything on his back. The hog would surely rebel if faced with such labor. So he would pack up everything in his father's truck, including the animals. The only problem with this plan was that Rolf had no idea how to acquire the so-called 'gasoline' for the machine, having only ever seen his father taking out the bucket and sucking tube for illegal siphoning from neighbors and townspeople. Papa had been clever like that. Had been.
He had no time to waste if he meant to meet with Cousin Bob. Cousin Bob was no individual to dally around with. To tell the truth, Rolf was terrified of Bob, but with no other true family in sight, he had no other alternative.
Jonny trailed behind Kevin on their way across the garage, Kevin punting jawbreakers across the concrete like soccer balls on his way to the minifridge tucked in an unsuspecting corner. Jonny listened intently as Kevin let it all out. Kevin threw the fridge door open and extracted two of Kevin's dad's coveted 'tall boys' from within. He popped the top off one and shoved Jonny the other as he ran his mouth, lowering himself onto the floor, where Jonny followed him, sitting criss-cross applesauce on his sandals. Before accepting the beverage, Jonny noticed Kevin's hand shaking. "And just who the fuck does he think he is ordering us around like he was? Can't he see this ain't the time or the place to pull the tough guy card? I mean Ed's folks are catchin' flies in the bed of the truck and he's comin' at you, Jonny fuckin' 2x4, who's just tryna work through this situation, and here Rolf comes with some old country macho bullshit he pulled out of his furry blue ass? It's an insult to us, Jon, and it's an insult to Ed, to that little brat sister'a his, to their parents' memory, to-to-to - what's wrong with it?"
Kevin, of course, was referring to the tall boy Jonny clasped uncomfortably in his hands, which he hadn't even broken the seal of. "Oh, nothin'. Just - I don't know if I'm thirsty, Kevin."
"You don't gotta be thirsty, the whole - you ever drank a beer before? No, I take it." Jonny sheepishly shook his head 'no.' Kevin's eyes flitted to the wall, where Plank sat disapprovingly. Kevin whispered to Jonny, cupping his mouth so as no to let Plank read his lips, and said, "Has he ever had one?"
"Um. No, we haven't. We aren't old enough."
"Who gives a fuck?" Kevin had hardly cut into his supply and already he was playing up being tipsy. "Look, if you're worried my Dad's gonna find out or whatever, it's not like I haven't been dipping into the reserves for the past couple years or anything. He just thinks he drank the ones that are missing when he was blacked out or something. C'mon, Jonny boy, at least take a sip."
"I dunno, Kevin. Plank and me - "
"What?" Kevin's eyes slipped over to Plank. "What's that?" He picked up Plank and Jonny grew tense, suddenly afraid of an image in his head of Kevin snapping Plank in half over his knee in a drunken frat boy fit of rage. Kevin instead put Plank up to his ear. "You do? He says he wants a taste."
"No, he doesn't."
"That's not what he's tellin' me. He tells me he wants to see what all the fuss is about. He wants you two to try your first sip'a alcohol together, whadda ya say?"
Despite knowing Plank definitely did not say that, Jonny shifted on his legs, eyeing the tall boy curiously, also wanting to see what all the fuss was about, but afraid of...afraid of what, exactly? It's not like it was such a big deal or anything. Not to mention he didn't want to screw up his chance to hang out with Kevin. He really didn't want to leave him all by himself after that stuff with Ed's dad and now Rolf. And Nazz still wasn't back. He didn't want to upset his new friend any further. But still, apprehension took hold.
But no, he wasn't really doing anything wrong in the grand scheme of things. Who cared if a couple kids took the edge off in the midst of a world crisis? He popped the top off the bottle and swallowed anxiety. So what if he wasn't a kid anymore? And so what he was getting older and more mature and actually really wanted to try it? Really wanted to get drunk off his butt? So what? "Yeah...okay."
As night fell over Peach Creek, the three Eds finally broke from their embrace. They sat for a while staring at the stars; they weren't usually so vibrant or visible considering the light pollution. But now, with the power out pretty much everywhere, the night skies shone clearly and beautifully. But enough time had passed, Double Dee had decided, and he needed to go check in with his Luciferian house guest.
With Ed and Eddy's help, he crawled back into the window, downed the stairs and headed back to his house at the other end of the street while Ed and Eddy climbed down themselves. Ed dropped down the drainage pipe like a firefighter down a pole. "I like the way you did it, Eddy!" Ed said, not being able to help himself and sounding excited.
Double Dee walked down the street with a smile on his face, listening to the silence of the neighborhood. The only sounds came from Ed and Eddy's bickering, a bunch of frenzied movement in Rolf's house, and laughter from Kevin's garage.
Double Dee let himself into his house with his key, because especially in situations like these you need to be careful with leaving your home and belongings locked up. He tried to flip on the lights before realizing with a goodhearted chuckle that the lights were out, grabbing up the big yellow flashlight from the couch and flipping it on.
He stepped into the kitchen and trained the light through the doorway into the garage on his new pet in its kennel.
Only the kennel was in pieces. A putrid stink caught Double Dee's nose and he saw a severed obsidian arm lying in the middle of the cage wreckage, talons curled inward like the legs of a dead insect. Chains and duct tape strewn about. Terror suddenly struck Double Dee and all he could manage to do or say was mutter, "Oh dear."
His mind reeled; first things first, get away from here. He'd seen no wreckage of the garage door outside so he needed to get out of the house ASAP. He backed away from the garage and turned for the front door. Next, he'd need to alert the others. They could have a -
Double Dee felt something tug his shirt from behind and for a moment thought he'd gotten caught on something. Then he snatched backwards and knew he had no such luck. He was yanked backwards off his feet, sailing through the air, through the garage door and slamming hard into the wall on the other side, dropping to the floor in a tangle of kennel parts.
He looked up and found himself faced with a pair of hateful glowing red eyes next to the doorway.. Even without the flashlight, in the darkness of the basement Double Dee could make out its shape - it was, after all, blacker than night. He could see how its left arm ended at its very root; the beast had somehow managed to tear or bite its own limb off at the shoulder in order to escape its restraints.
Regaining his bearings and updating the plan of action, Double Dee could only see one more chess move in his escape plan. His all-or-nothing last ditch effort. Scream like hell. So he commenced.
"HELP ME! SOMEBODY HELP ME FOR GOD'S SAKE! THE THING IS LOOSE! HELP ME!"
The beast charged. Double Dee did his best at leaping out of its way, skittering out of range of its mighty blows of fists and mighty slashes of claws and horns, but it was no use. Its reach was too great, yanking him back into easy grasp and thrusting him painfully into the corner of the wall and concrete floor.
Double Dee gaped at the thing and just barely ducked his head to miss its sweeping horns as it head dropped down toward him. He put out his arms to defend himself and nearly broke his wrists against its immovable frame. Still screaming.
The demon's jaws dropped into Double Dee's shoulder and dug in deep. It shook its head brutally, ripping his supple flesh and cracking him in the temple with the side of a razor-sharp horn, the horn and the pain in his shoulder forcing his brain to shut down for a moment, muting his cries. His body still waging against the beast's freezing cold impenetrable leather skin, clawing uselessly at it. He lost a couple fingernails doing this.
He slipped back into consciousness almost immediately as the demon dug its talons into the flesh of Double Dee's shoulder and drug them down his arm, shredding it painfully in what Double Dee would imagine as vengeance for its lost limb. Even through this, or perhaps especially because of this, Double Dee kept screaming; he did not fall into the cold sweats of shock, not yet.
He struck the beast with his uninjured arm and kicked at it with his legs. The beast dropped backward and for a desperate moment Double Dee thought he'd fought it off as its head spun to look toward the street through the garage door, but it rushed back forward almost immediately and rammed him with its pinprick sharp horns into his upper body, their span wide enough to just puncture each shoulder.
The feeling Double Dee experienced as the horns impaled both shoulders was immense. One could not call it pain specifically, but it did send fireworks blasting in his vision. There was a particular horror that came with being penetrated in this way, feeling the cold horns inside him, widening their entry wounds with their expanding girth toward their base, but it was somehow muted and Double Dee was somehow distant from it despite or maybe because he knew exactly what was happening.
It rose with Double Dee stuck on its horns and he slapped and batted at its face, so delirious from pain and terror he didn't even consider the possibility of the demon biting his fingers off or maybe even the whole hand. He just wanted to gouge out its eyes but couldn't quite locate them in his feverish quest.
It swung its head and Double Dee felt himself slide off its horns with more pain than what he felt when they entered him. He sailed across the room like a ballerina in air and struck the garage door with enough force to startle everyone who was rushing toward it from the other side. Then Double Dee hit the cold concrete ground.
At the sound of Double Dee's cries, Kevin and Jonny had bolted to their feet. Jonny raced after Kevin who leapt through the garage into the hallway where Kevin had accumulated his arsenal. Kevin grabbed up a pump-action shotgun - a sleek black riotgun - in one hand and a silver pistol in the other. He turned and tossed the pistol at Jonny, who fumbled the catch but Kevin paid no mind, rushing into the living room and tearing the tarp off the wall, racing across the street on bare feet, seeing from the corner of his eye the other two Eds running toward the Double Dork's house, Rolf emerging from his front door as Kevin and Jonny closed in on Double Dee's garage door.
Suddenly the door burst open in the middle and a black form poured out onto the driveway in a tangle of limbs that Kevin immediately identified as being minus something. The demon scrambled up and Kevin managed to pump two shells of buckshot into its hide but it just kept coming. Kevin lost control of the wheel and something else piloted him, forcing him almost against his will to cry, "Not again!" and dive out of the way, ducking under the safety of his arms onto the pavement.
He expected something to hit him, to sting when it did and for him to only think he'd been punched but rise to his feet to continue fighting and realize by a spread of blood on his shirt that he'd been skewered like a kabob. But it didn't happen.
He heard heavy footfalls book it past him and more footsteps skidding to a halt behind him, Jonny crying out and fumbling with the pistol. Kevin heard the gun discharge and heard a bullet ricochet off the asphalt terrifyingly close to his head.
He wanted to pry himself up off the ground but couldn't, his primal fight or flight instincts shorting out and insisting fuck it, neither. He was breathing rapidly and baring his teeth, ready for a barrage of stabs or punches but nothing happened. He just heard the demon retreat toward the construction site and the two Eds and Jonny catch their breath and make inane comments about how close that was.
When Kevin finally forced himself to look up, he saw Rolf standing the yard ahead. The son of a shepherd tightened his jaw, shook his head and walked back inside. Kevin rose to his feet, eyeing Rolf's house until Double Dee started screaming again.
Soon, even Sarah and Jimmy were outside watching. When Jonny, Ed, and Eddy made it to the hole in Double Dee's garage door, they were all taken aback by one thing; there was blood everywhere. On the walls, pooling on the floors, and all over Double Dee, who screamed in agony, clutching a ruined, blood-slick arm to his chest with the frail grip of the other, desperately sucking air between screams so as not to pass out so as to be able to keep screaming. Eddy was the first to hit his knees and pile both hands over one of Double Dee's shoulder wounds, turning to the others with wild eyes and shouting, "Help me with this, would ya!"
Kevin watched on from a distance, gaping in horror. From his stance, it was like Double Dee was a zombie, he was so bloody and so fucked up looking. Only after Eddy stepped in did Kevin step forward to help stanch the blood flow. They found it difficult with Double Dee writhing around the way he was and, once again, Rolf was forced to step in and be the big man.
And soon, Kevin sat alone on the curb looking at his bloody hands. The whole Cul-de-Sac was piled into Double Dee's house nursing him. Rolf tied a belt at Double Dee's shoulder as a tourniquet for the arm wounds which were steadily chuting out blood. Jimmy and Sarah clutched towels to either side of his shoulder wounds to stop up the expulsion of blood as well. And Kevin had done nothing except watch. He watched the others discuss whether or not to lift him from the coffee table on which he lay to the bed upstairs and had contributed nothing of value to the discussion. However, when Eddy and Ed went upstairs to carry down Double Dee's mattress he tagged along and helped very little, knowing that the two Eds wondered why he'd bothered to even join them. But Eddy relented and let Kevin carry one end, Eddy picking up Double Dee's precious cactus and taking it downstairs with them.
And so, having no useful contributions, Kevin got himself out of the way and sat on the curb and caught his breath. After a few minutes, he heard something fall in the woods across the street behind his house and the Lane. He knew that was the direction the thing had gone when he'd pissed himself in the road. He wanted to find it and kill it, lop its fucking head off and parade it back onto the Cul-de-Sac and drop it with a heavy, satisfying thud onto the TV stand in Double Dee's house. There you go, dorks. Fixed that for ya. So he decided to make himself useful, picked up his shotgun and went demon hunting.
Finally, Nazz picked herself up off the pavement, grabbed her bags and the gun once again, then gathered up the bike's ruined tire and, sticking it in one of the bags, slung the bags on her shoulders with the expected shots of pain and grabbed up the rest of the bike by the handlebars and dragged it and herself back down the long road home.
Kevin never found that one-armed demon. He found a trail of its blood on the street outside the Cul-de-Sac (despite the severity of its injuries, it had bled so discouragingly little) but it dissipated into nothing by the time he reached the construction site. Still, he searched the site and came up empty. Returning to the trail of blood, he knelt touched the blood with his pointer finger and brought it up to his face. It looks alarmingly human; Kevin realized that this wasn't its blood at all, but Double Dee's. Fear wracked Kevin and he was too afraid to even get up for a few seconds for fear that that evil thing would be staring at him when he looked up and would take that moment to rush and skewer Kevin like it had skewered Double Dee. Finally Kevin gathered enough courage to rise, rifle at the ready, but he found himself alone in the dark.
He spent the rest of the walk looking over his shoulders.
Eventually he called it quits for the night and stumbled back home, thoughts racing, exhausted. He re-stapled the tarp up to the wall in his house and loaded two fresh shells into the shotgun, placing the weapon back in its place in his floor-bound arms collection.
But wait a minute - there was another weapon missing. A hunting rifle-shaped hole in the artillery. Kevin picked his shotgun back up and searched the house, finding the tarp that had been stapled to the back wall torn down. Something had been there. Something had taken his rifle. And Kevin knew he had a good idea as to what had done it.
On a rooftop down the street, at a house once populated by a small Italian family named the Marcoreaus, a shape darker than night sat, overlooking mayhem, trying to figure out the rifle in its remaining forelimb. When it discovered what the bolt did and how it worked, it was ready to inflict some torment unlegislated by its deceased overlord.
And less than a mile away, in the deep, dark woods, another demon rose from the infernal depths, its sleek black form rutted with putrid, ragged gashes sloshing torrents of inhuman blood, and it clambered clumsily from the fissure behind the Park N' Flush and fled from Peach Creek forever.
And Hell followed with it.
