Day 7

The world had begun to burn.

It belched forth onto the surface with a putrid stink. It smelt like a dumpster full of rotting dead dogs, a convicted sex offender named Oscar who lived in the Park N' Flush would reckon later that day, still nursing terrible wounds from an honest-to-goodness goddamned fuckin' demon assault on his mobile home. He knew that he was nearing his end and it brought an existential dread upon him which he hadn't known since his childhood when he first gave such concepts as death and reaching that big STOP sign at the end of the road any thought. He thought his injuries would kill him, thought he felt killing things burrowing in his flesh like worms but that was just paranoia and effects of a brain-melting affliction from which Oscar suffered and which he bought by the ounce from a man affectionately called Hotdog. His thoughts turning to those ancient memories from a childhood long buried under booze and affliction made Oscar wonder if this was what that whole "life flashing before your eyes" business was all about. If it was just these memories bubbling back to the surface. He thought it would be a slideshow. Here's potty training, here's Mama's sexy work friend, here's the first vice and the ninth and tenth too while we're at it, and, oh, by the way, there's one last thing - fuck you Oscar. That part would come out in his mother's voice. He figured that was a worthy thing to end on. Start and end with Mama and use dialogue from real life for an added little touch of realism.

He was too stoned to know that the thing rocking his trailer was real and not just the swirls of drunkenness. He heard the first thing pierce the trailer's wall but gave it no mind. Then more things came through and pulled him out, wet, fresh and naked, into a whole new world of pain. His final thought on the matter and on all matters was as follows: fuck you, Oscar. And that was that and all it ever was.

Jimmy woke up in the early morning before first light. He was in the dark, curled up with Sarah, whose form he could just barely make out in the dark. He noticed that her breathing wasn't rhythmic enough for her to be sleeping. He wondered if she could tell he was awake too.

They lay in Double Dee's guest bedroom in the dark. They had returned to their complementing fetal positions with their faces so close together. Jimmy could smell her.

Jimmy could hear the morning mounting at the bedroom window. He heard the chirp of the morning birds between thrums of the night bugs. He could smell the dew on the lawns. After maybe fifteen minutes of lying there with her, he rolled on his hip onto his back for an exaggerated stretch to show Sarah he was awake too, should she need the comfort.

He slid back into fetal position facing her but with his eyes open and he didn't know for sure but thought he saw Sarah's eyes glistening in the moonlight through the window. He stared at her in the dark, slightly hoping she was staring too, though that made him feel dirty and ashamed. He knew Sarah couldn't be thinking about that. He knew she didn't even think of him in that way, though he wished he could tell her. He wasn't even sure she believed him when he told her he wasn't gay.

He gave up on the hope of Sarah and receded back into thoughts that brought along with them horror and fear. Perhaps they gave off a pheromone because almost immediately Sarah stirred and reached up and touched dear old Jimmy's face with both hands with a tenderness unlike her.

She rubbed his face and they stared at each other. Jimmy's heart jackhammered and once again he felt shame. But the burning of Jimmy's cheeks were interrupted as Sarah rose on an arm and kissed Jimmy on the lips.

He nearly had a heart attack. She kept kissing him too so it hadn't been a mistake. He felt like he was going to die, his heart was pounding so bad. Dear God, it was happening. But Jimmy didn't feel what he thought he'd feel if or when Sarah had ever gotten the memo. He thought he would feel elation, the peace that came with the resolution of such long standing feelings, but he didn't.

He just felt a ping of rage. Rage at Sarah of all people. It horrified him but not as much as she did. How could she do this now? How could she abandon her grief, her parents' memories? How could she disrespect Jimmy's lost family? How could she?

Goddammit, he thought, why can't you just enjoy the moment?

Frustration ran through Jimmy and he shook his body in a violent thrash that Sarah mistook for passion and she moved to lie next to him and press herself against him. Jimmy let himself fall in rhythm with her. He was astonished at how easy falling into the rhythm was.

Sarah, who thought Jimmy was the safest place in the world right now, was Jimmy's first kiss. She was his one and only.

Downstairs, Double Dee lay dead to the world on a blood-stained mattress as hot blood struggled in circles to escape his body through one of its many holes. He was slick with cold sweat and slid in and out of consciousness all night to whimper softly and sometimes loudly, though he would never remember his half-dreamt pain staring at the ceiling and walls of the living room, thinking, Oh dear, what am I doing sleeping in the living room? Better yet, what are Ed and Eddy and Jonny 2x4 doing here next to me? Mother and Father will be so cross with me when they wake.

Then, bizarrely, he fell into a fever dream of a place called Golgotha, where he met on a great hill the messiah his parents never taught him about; the Nazarene, a sage, blood-slicked bearded man with dark leathery skin dangling from outstretched and punctured limbs, staring down at him from sunken eyes hollow and haunted by an infinity of pain. Staring without seeing, his lips slightly parted, he made no effort to move but to blink and showed no signs of consciousness. In this way, he was just like one of the statues you would find in a church or chapel. Sorrow washed over Double Dee's dream body as he realized that Christ had never ever gotten off that cross. In his dream, among the hanging thieves, a storm the color of rust raged and kicked up a wind reminiscent of the apocalypse which howled and pounded Double Dee's dream body with viciously blasting sand.

It was Eddy's duty that night to keep watch over his sock-headed friend, though he'd lost track of that and now slept on the couch with Ed sleeping on the floor, dreaming equally frightening things (a monster made of scrap metal and rotten wood, a demonic Tinman with his father's face stretched across its unsanded wooden skull, afixed by barbed wire and rusty bent nails, chasing him through the junkyard with jerking, squeaking limbs in need of being oiled, holding him down and licking him clean with it's splinter-ridden tongue like a dog mom licks its young; after all, Ed was still his father's boy), at his feet near Jonny, who'd retrieved his sleeping bag from his home as well as Plank's and now they slept next to each other in unison, sharing dreams. When Jonny would later awake just before dawn he would wonder where Kevin had gone and if he was okay and would set out with Plank in search of him.

But now he slept, though Kevin wasn't so lucky, lying on his couch, staring at the ceiling, listening to the birds outside the big hole in his wall. He swore if one of those chipper fucks pressed through the tarp into his house, he would grab the thing by the neck and beat it into the floorboards. But no such thing happened. Many thoughts rushed through his head but most of them regarded a beautiful girl named Nazz.

Nazz was the first to meet the thing which crept from the fissures as she reentered Peach Creek for the last time in the early hours of the morning, Kevin's mangled bike by her side. She shuffled forward, too exhausted to even lift her feet but too determined to stop walking. The night had passed slowly but she was intent on making it back to Peach Creek where Kevin and the others awaited her, hopefully worried sick and ready to shower her in affection and medical attention.

Several times throughout the night she had considered bedding down off the side of the road in the woods, but she was so close to Peach Creek, though so close ended up being false most of the time. She saw the shadowy silhouettes of Main Street ahead and knew she couldn't stop now. She could make it home now, easy-peasy lemon squeezy.

She heard it before she saw it, mistaking the sounds of its misshapen form moving and slithering across the asphalt as the low growls of a wolf on the prowl, though as she crept up on it she began to notice its glow like the last embers from the bonfire that last night before everything fell apart. She missed that night so much now.

She stopped to regard it in utter confusion. Now that she saw the vague ember-glow, she could see and feel it shifting on the ground only feet in front of her. She had no idea what it was and considered the idea that maybe it was a hallucination, because there was no way lava with kicking arms and flailing legs was bubbling up from the street now, was there?

She remembered the fissure she'd encountered on the way out of Peach Creek the first time, let alone the fact that the fissures had already been coughing up demons all over the place to begin with, and the impossible ideas grew less impossible. She began backing away from it, trying to keep the bike's squeaking rear wheel as quiet as possible as she rerouted to the sidewalk to avoid it. She shook her head; she thought herself a fool for hiding the sound of a squeaky wheel from something as unintelligent as lava flow, fearing that it would strike out and seize her and burn her away to the bone.

She heard another noise she thought she had mistaken for growling, but that was exactly what it was. A pair of beady eyes shone in the moonlight barely distinguishable from the ember-glow of that blob, eyes like that mean old bull terrier that had hated her so much when she was younger. The growling made her think of it and the fear she had felt returned to her mind, clear as day.

The fear of the Marcoreaus' devil dog with its little black eyes and bared yellow teeth. It had hunted her from the other side of the fence for years, chomping at the wood, gnawing at it like it was trying to get at her through it, trying to bust it down and take her apart.

She remembered when she was young, still big and fat and ugly, walking with Kevin down the Lane when the dog had knocked a board off its fence with its thick-skulled head. She remembered how Kevin had stepped between her and the glistening eyes and bared teeth and how he had taken the ferocious chomps of the dog's teeth instead of her, wrestling with it on the ground of the Lane while screaming at her with that little kid voice of his, "Run, Nazz! Get away from it! GO!"

She'd bounded off in blind fear, huffing and puffing with her legs and throat burning, sure with every earth-shaking step of her fat legs that it would leave Kevin and come down on her, that she had damned herself with her weight - it was a beacon to that dog and it would have no trouble tracking her.

She hadn't stopped running until she made it back to the Cul-de-Sac, back to her house, crashing through the front door, huffing and puffing, her mom and dad picking her up and asking her why she was crying. Through tears, she told them to go after Kevin.

He still had the faint divots where deep scars had been on his arm where he'd saved her.

She nearly cried thinking about that on the way past the glowing, slithering thing on the street. She barely even realized what had brought the fear back to her, even as she left those hateful eyes behind on Main Street, her mind refusing to accept the possibility that that impossible thing knew a thing in the world about her past, distant or recent, though it was much more difficult to ignore the other noises that the hulking, squirming thing made for her benefit, sounds not unlike those you might hear coming from a man struggling to breath through a body shot full of holes, choking on his own blood and whimpering, whimpering like a dying dog with its jaw hinge blown off.

Yessiree, it surely was coming. Coming for Peach Creek. Coming for the Cul-de-Sac and the kids who lived on it. The Amputee knew that, felt it coming in its quivering flesh as it nursed its injuries and waited. But it didn't care about the Abomination any more. All it cared about was flesh. Flesh for flesh. Sure, it had taken the scrawny thing's arm to shreds and likely done the same to its feeble life. But it wanted more. It wanted to take everything. Like the Abomination had taken everything from it. It would keep taking, too, and maybe, just maybe, the one-armed demon thought, the acts of hatred, murder and violence (which it was well-accustomed to) it was planning would be acts of much mercy indeed.

In the woods behind the Park N' Flush, trees cracked and shuddered as they were felled. Had the Eds been sitting on that roof this morning, they would have been able to turn at the shrill sound of falling trees and would have seen the canopy of the woods dropping in increments as the Apocalypse came for Peach Creek once and for all.

No fooling.

Before the sun even had time to rise, It had taken Oscar the sex offender in its arms and made him disappear. Then it did the same with the Park N' Flush. In increments, like the woods before it prying off rows of trailers like slats of clapboard off the wall of a barn.

Kevin had only nodded off minutes previously when he heard the sharp crack as another tree fell. He sat bolt-upright, sweating from a nightmare. He had dreamt that the demon that had attacked Double Dee had taken him in the street just like he'd thought it would, tearing his arms from his shoulders as he screamed desperately, pleadingly for help, but the whole Cul-de-sac just kept going. Cars went off to work and the Eds, Double Dee no longer wounded, trundling off toward the Lane to enact some new asinine dorkery on the kids; Rolf humming as he worked the fields; Nazz dancing on roller skates right past Kevin as he jabbed his blood-spurting shoulder joints at her as if extending the arms he no longer had, wheezing for help as his legs too were torn raggedly from the socket joints of his hips. His blood jetted in hot streams, washing the asphalt in the blood of a coward, and running in rivulets down into the storm drains.

Wide awake now, he sat on the couch trying to figure out if he was really awake for a few minutes before he began to hear the rhythmic squeaking.

He got up and listened. It was coming from the street. He was moving toward the front door, toward the tarp through which the earliest of morning light infiltrated at the gaps, when he heard another crack and an earth-shaking THUD as yet another tree dropped. It made his heart jump and he took a moment, leaning on the couch, to calm down so his heart wouldn't explode. But the squeaking noises were only getting closer.

He slipped into the kitchen and took up arms, then clung to the wall next to the front door and took a deep breath, closed his eyes. He wanted to take in the peace and silence for a moment before running into combat but the silence was pierced by that infernal squeaking and another CRACK-and-THUD. Oh, well, he thought and threw the door open, taking aim at the center of the Cul-de-Sac.

It was his bike making the noise. And she had been torn to pieces. "Oh, man," Kevin muttered under his breath, "What'd they do to you?" He was already running out into the street in nothing but his skivvies when he realized it was Nazz and not another monster holding his bike and limping toward him. "Holy shit, Nazz." She could've hit him.

Eddy awoke to the sounds of the falling trees only minutes after Kevin. He sat up and looked around the dark living room. He saw Double Dee cold and clammy-lookin' writhing on the mattress in semi-consciousness with Ed lying beside him, sawing two or three logs at a time with that slack jaw of his.

"What the hell is that?" Eddy asked shrilly enough to rouse Ed, who bolted to his feet in a second, leaving his blanket to float to the ground in his wake, his eyes wild and dazed-looking. He grabbed up his shotgun from the corner next to the door and threw the door open, looking out at the early morning haze. He caught a glimpse of Kevin's bike, in ruins, falling to the asphalt as Kevin carried a bloody, weak-looking Nazz back to his house.

Ed walked out onto the lawn, Eddy trailing behind. Ed saw movement to his left in his peripheral vision and turned to see Rolf emerging from his front door, passing by the ancient-looking pickup truck packed to the gills in his driveway, looking past the Cul-de-Sac and toward the Park N' Flush. In his hands he clutched his father's elephant gun.

Then they heard a sound in the same direction not much unlike the cracking of the trees - a gunshot.

Jonny knew someone or something was following him. With last night's demon escape still fresh in his mind, he was beginning to regret going out to look for Kevin. But Kevin was his friend and maybe he was in trouble somewhere, so Jonny would rather fight this thing with his bare hands than turn back now. He couldn't wait to save Kevin from the fissure he'd fallen into or whatever so that he could tell him how brave he'd been.

He thought he heard rustling in the trees behind him as he passed the playground. He turned to look up into the canopies but he couldn't make anything out in the darkness. He heard a branch snap though. He was so scared he almost forgot to be outraged someone (or something!) was out there harming Plank's distant grand-oaks. The sound echoed across the playground to the road and Jonny lifted his pistol toward the trees in reciprocation.

A moment passed in silence before a deafening CRACK made Jonny leap into the air, nearly dropping the pistol and tripping over his sandals in the road. He patted himself all over, feeling for blood - but he didn't find any. He calmed himself down and rose back to his feet, turning toward the noise - it had come behind him from the trailer park. He turned and ran toward the sound, regardless of knowing that was where the Kankers lurked, running to save Kevin from whatever that sound had been. Heck, maybe it was the Kanker Sisters!

The Amputee lowered the rifle, watching the bald-headed boy with the pistol run off out of sight. It had taken aim and pulled the trigger at the boy, but much to its disappointment, the weapon still wouldn't fire. It contemplated chasing the boy and simply beating him to death with the rifle or perhaps shredding him with its bare claws or teeth, but it could feel the Abomination approaching and couldn't overcome its fear to bridge the distance even with revenge ravaging its brain. Sadistic joy bubbled poisonously in its stomach as it realized the bald-headed boy would surely run right into the Abomination's loving arms and his screams would never end, no matter how quickly his vocal cords were burned through.

Kevin brought Nazz to the couch and helped her lay down across it, flinching as he heard her pained grunts as she lowered herself to the cushions. He felt all the tension drain from her and she dangled limp in his arms. He slipped his arms from under her and sat with her on the couch. "What happened, dude? I thought you were dead. Are you okay?"

He watched her face crumple up as she tried to cry but couldn't. She tried two more times but Kevin couldn't watch and turned away. He patted her on the shoulder, but she flinched and wheezed with pain and he pulled away. Her breathing was ragged and heavy. "I just wanna go to sleep, Kev. We can talk about it later, please, please, please."

As they spoke, there were more of those nightmarish CRACK-and-THUD noises. They, and Nazz's dazed glazed off eyes and terrible injuries, made Kevin feel like he was in Hell.

"Of course - of course," he said, nodding swiftly. The desperation in her voice had scared the shit out of him. He rose from the couch and watched as Nazz fell asleep or passed out before his very eyes. As she dozed Kevin released the pent-up frustration, fear and uneasiness with a short, dry sob. More like a heavy sigh. His face scrunched up like Nazz's, but like Nazz he couldn't make himself cry. It only added to the frustration.

He took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, then headed off into the half-bath downstairs where he'd filled the tub with water immediately after the earthquake - just like Dad had taught him. He hit his knees in front of the tub and stuffed his face in the water and screamed.

Nazz hadn't gotten even a minute's rest before the gunshots rang out.

Jonny kicked back across the grass and gravel at the edge of the Park N' Flush. In the dark of the very early morning, he had nearly walked right into it but had just barely evaded the reach of a swinging tentacle of what appeared to be burnt flesh. If Jonny hadn't known any better, he would have said that at the end of the tentacle had been chomping razor-sharp teeth.

But he hadn't taken much time to check before he fell to the ground, rolled on his back and shot the tentacle with accuracy that surprised even Jonny. He fired at the creeping terror that was making its way toward him with whipping tentacles two more times in rapid succession but missed both subsequent shots wildly. The first shot had been beginner's luck, he supposed.

Sound overwhelmed Jonny as he backed himself into the tin siding of an old trailer. He heard a tree crack and deafeningly topple to the ground just meters away beyond the tree line and he heard metal shriek as the massive fleshy blob-thing, probably almost as large as the cafeteria at school (heck, maybe bigger!), coming from the woods tore an old single-wide in the back corner of the trailer park to pieces and hoisted it off its foundations in a nightmarish feat of strength, rolling the torn open side on top of it as a formation like a wide, licking tongue rose from its toothy surface and prodded inside the trailer, which quickly burst into flame which licked up the old siding.

A third sound whispered through them all to Jonny. A sound almost like the voices of Jimmy's parents came from down the edge of the encroaching thing, which lapped at the lawns ahead of it like a beach shore. (Three smaller tendrils caught a lawn gnome in their grips but, realizing this was no living prey, crushed it and tossed it away.) Jonny gaped and listened as the approaching waves whispered with Jimmy's parents' voices, moaning softly, then rising in pitch until they were screaming, screaming at Jonny, and Jonny saw two faces rise on the edge of the creeping thing, purple and cold faces that quickly melted back into the burning hot thing's surface. But arms still reached.

A fire-hot tentacle whipped past Jonny and grazed his leg, burning through the fabric of his jeans like they were nothing and giving him a small third-degree burn on his shin. He screamed and slid along the side of the trailer, firing two more shots into the bulk of the fleshy thing before running empty as it squirmed across flaming grass toward him, gaining ground one or two inches at a time which seemed too quick for comfort for Jonny, who rounded the side of the trailer and ran, his leg feeling hot and heavy and painful, from that horrible thing. He hoped to God it hadn't gotten to Kevin.

He thought about the moaning voices of Jimmy's parents and how they distracted him from the thing in front of him. For a moment he considered that the creeping thing had been doing it on purpose, trying to get the drop on him. But that was impossible.

Halfway back to the Cul-de-Sac, he realized his pants were on fire.

It hadn't noticed the switch on the side of the rifle, but when it shifted the switch and it pulled the rifle's trigger again, the barrel leapt and fire erupted from one end. For a moment, the Amputee felt like it was at home in the flames. But enough of that - remembering its home was a fool's errand; why reminisce on that which no longer existed? - now was the time. It circled back to the Cul-de-Sac and closed in on a familiar home, the home of what the Amputee figured was likely the most dangerous prey and the first it must annihilate to ensure its success with the others.

Sarah took the time to readjust Double Dee's hat on top of his head before she and Jimmy went out onto the street but Double Dee wasn't nearly coherent enough to thank her. She glanced at his stiff arm which they'd wrapped in bandages from a couple of Double Dee's parents' many first aid kits. She hazarded a look at his hand which was unbandaged. It was swollen and she could tell it was changing colors even in the darkness of the living room.

Jimmy couldn't help but feel a bit jealous of Double Dee despite the geek's terrible injuries. He knew Sarah at one point in the past had a crush on him, and, though his feelings regarding her were a bit confused at the moment, he knew he didn't like the prospect of her kissing other guys.

He noticed a dark shape on the floor near Double Dee's mattress. He approached it and kicked it. "Ouchee!" It hurt his foot and skidded across the living room floor. Jimmy knelt and picked it up, holding it by the faint light coming through the curtains, though he was pretty sure he knew what it was. It was Jonny's old pal Plank. Jimmy felt a tinge of anxiety knowing Jonny wouldn't just leave Plank lying around for no good reason. He considered the prospect that the escaped demon that had hurt Double Dee last night had come back and taken Jonny, though he didn't know how it could have gotten around Ed and Eddy.

Sarah rose from Double Dee's side and joined Jimmy and together they walked out onto the lawn with Ed, Eddy and Rolf. By the time they finally exited the house, maybe five gunshots had been fired in the distance. It brought back bad memories. Across the street, Kevin emerged with the type of weapon you only see in action movies. To Sarah and Jimmy's surprise, Nazz stumbled out behind him and even more surprisingly she looked the worst they'd ever seen her look. She looked double her years and half as alive as when they had last seen her.

Behind them, towards Main Street, something very large fell and shook the very earth they stood on. Now things were coming from both directions. They became aware then that there was a constant noise; a rumbling. A crackling. It was soft enough and pervasive enough they had already managed to tune it out. It sounded as natural as anything to them; as natural as the end of the world.

Eddy wanted to grab Ed and Sockhead and get the hell out of Dodge, or at least Peach Creek. His mom's car (a '93 Toyota minivan with the paint flecking off because apparently Dad could fork over dough for his own ride but not one for the "love of his life") sat in their garage gathering dust. He knew it had a full tank and he wasn't afraid to use it if things got too hot…

He looked at Ed, who gripped that shotgun, the one he'd retrieved from his house in the middle of the night, the very shotgun which had killed his mother and nearly taken Ed and Sarah's lives too, with a white knuckle tautness. His eyes searched over the roofs of the houses across the street but they couldn't see anything.

Another gunshot erupted but it sounded closer. Eddy readied himself for something bad. The gunshot sounded like it came from the woods right on the other side of the Lane.

Eddy jumped when Rolf turned and hurried back inside his house, slamming the door behind him.A muffled shout from inside: "Wilfred!"

All in all, they'd heard six gunshots by the time Jimmy came running back into the Cul-de-Sac, one pant leg missing up nearly to the hip, showing off scorched tighty-whities, screaming about a thing out in the trailer park. Eddy shunned the desire to make a joke that the whole thing was the work of the Kankers.

"It's HUGE! It's bigger than a gosh-dang house! And it's comin' right for us!" Jonny cried.

Ed smirked and forgot everything for a moment. "Cool."

Kevin approached Jonny with his machine gun-lookin' thing. "What's goin' on, Jonny boy? Where is it?"

"It's - it's - it's at the trailer park! It's coming out of that hole in the ground! It's like a pile of meat with these arms and these eyes and it's HUGE and it's got these teeth and - oh golly gee willickers, where's Plank?"

Jimmy stepped forward with Jonny's bosom buddy and the woodboy wrapped his arms around Plank and held him so tight he must've gotten some splinters for his worries. "I...I need more bullets. For my gun, Kev," Jonny muttered, his mouth hidden by Plank's tranquil face.

"Sure, man. Go to the house and pick 'em up. They're in the cabinet. .38 shells. Can you remember that, dude?" The others were surprised by the soft friendliness in Kevin's voice as he spoke to the Woodboy.

Jonny nodded at him and hurried off across the street toward Kevin's house. They watched him go warily.

Eddy heard Kevin cock his gun and looked up at him. Kevin was looking at him and Ed. "You dorks comin'?" But before they could sheepishly refuse, Kevin was off, jogging down the street with the gun, waving at Nazz to go back inside.

Ed and Eddy shared terrified looks, trying to read each other's expressions for excuses to stay in the Cul-de-Sac. All they saw was fear. So they ran off in hot pursuit, Eddy trailing behind last with his stubby little boy-legs.

As they hurried off around the Marcoreaus' house on their way to the Lane, old beat-up cars came fish-tailing out of the trailer park driveway much like the Kankers had several nights prior, though this looked more like a mass exodus than that excursion had. "That ain't good," grumbled Eddy.

Nazz gently lowered herself back down onto the couch, placing the black shotgun Kevin had given her to "hold the fort" on the water-damaged floor. She was exhausted. She knew in her heart of hearts if she didn't manage to catch any sleep today, regardless of whatever new travesties had reared their ugly heads now, she would be dead by nightfall. Sure, maybe that was hyperbole, but she felt like a corpse already. She bundled up with a ratty old blanket and turned to face the cushions, giving her wounded back some air.

Her heart was racing. It felt like it was pounding against her ribcage, trying to bust out of there. It felt like her whole body thudded with each beat.

Maybe if her heart hadn't been beating so fast she wouldn't have taken too long to fall asleep. And if she had fallen asleep sooner, then she wouldn't have heard the glass breaking upstairs. If she hadn't heard the glass breaking upstairs, she wouldn't have had to fucking deal with it like she did now.

She moaned softly in frustration then sat up and looked at the ceiling. There wasn't any blood seeping through it like some B-horror movie, so that was a plus. Though the heavy footfalls she heard up there weren't much better.

She could just ignore it and lay back down, but that sure wasn't any kind of hallucination. It was too vivid. And if she laid back down and fell asleep, she was liable to be murdered by whatever stupid nightmare had crashed her slumber party.

So she picked up Kevin's shotgun and followed the heavy footsteps overhead, leveling her shotgun at them. They were heading toward the stairs.

This whole thing wasn't doing Nazz's heart any favors. She thought she'd drop dead any second. But seconds kept ticking by and she kept getting closer and closer to the stairs, closer and closer to confrontation.

No, she wasn't lucky enough to die of a heart attack instead of face whatever nightmare awaited her on those stairs. If there was a higher power, it was out to get her. And she was ready to come at it herself when, or hopefully if, the time came sooner than later.

She felt like crying, because never before in her life had she ever wished she would just die. She wasn't a suicide watch sort of gal. She was a flower child. She was the source of happiness and hope. Or at least, she had been before she came back from Lemon Brook. She wished she'd never even gone. She wished she and the others could just tell stories about what had happened to their parents, no matter how scary they were. Because at least then, they'd just be stories.

Because then she wouldn't be a murderer. Being a murderer wasn't like being in cheer or soccer or dance or volleyball. You couldn't quit when you wanted to stop. If you're a murderer, there's no takesy-backsies. You're in it for the long haul, kid. There was that stupid try-hard gruff voice again.

So maybe whatever was coming for her down those stairs was what she deserved to face. It was her penance. Her punishment. Her lifetime of spiking volleyballs even after realizing joining the team had been a mistake in the first place and guys just came to the games to look at her butt.

The gun in her hands was another thing. She hated guns. If there had been a mirror on the wall at the middle landing of those stairs, she would never have recognized herself. She was so caught up in these thoughts as she rose to the first step on the staircase, she barely noticed the heavy creak of the board beneath her foot. And that the footsteps overhead had abruptly stopped.

She grew very tense, aiming the shotgun up the stairs. Halfway up there was a landing and they turned there to face the other direction. A blind corner. There was a thin wall separating the flights. There could be anything on the other side.

She waited and held the barrel on the stairs. Ready for anything. She took her eyes off the stairs only to check to make sure the safety was off. She wasn't sure if she had a bullet (or shell, or whatever) in the chamber so she pumped the shotgun to make sure. A red shell ejected.

Almost instantly, plaster erupted from overhead and a deafening CRACK issued. Wind swept across her face and the floor shook as a bullet lodged itself in the boards. She was being fired upon.

Without thinking, perhaps due to a heavy flinch, she fired the shotgun and blew a hole through the wall of the landing.

She looked up to see if she could see her adversary through the fresh new hole in the ceiling and took plaster to the eyes for her troubles. She tried to shake it out but to no avail, backing away from the stairs frantically to distance herself from trouble. She aimed the shotgun at the ceiling toward the landing and fired, tearing out a huge chunk of plaster before she backed into the living room coffee table and fell over it, bouncing the back of her head off the couch as she fell.

In a panic she chided herself for, she racked the shotgun again and fired it blindly at the staircase. She removed her hand from the pump after racking it once more to wipe plaster from her eyes.

With her vision mostly clear now but for welling tears, she eyed the stairs but saw nothing racing down them.

She kicked the coffee table away and stumbled up to her feet, limping to the tarp covering the hole in the front wall and pushing through it onto the front lawn.

She turned and backed across the lawn, aiming the shotgun at the second floor windows. She had backed up into the street by the time she heard a familiar voice calling her name from behind. "Nazz! Come help us with Double Dee!"

It was Sarah. She swallowed heavily, irritated that Sarah seemed to have ignored the gunshots from Kevin's house (So did NOBODY think maybe I needed some help back there, dudes?), then turned and sprinted across the street to Double Dee's house.

She zipped past Sarah in the doorway and pulled the door shut for her. She found herself talking down to them like she hadn't stopped coming over to babysit them years ago. "There's someone out there. Someone majorly bad. They got a gun, too, so be very careful."

She turned to face the living room and that's when she noticed all the blood and the boy with the sock on his head at the center of it, in a cold sweat and torn to bloody pieces. "Oh my God, Double Dee."

It approached the upstairs window as it finally finished bolting the hunting rifle with its remaining arm, peering out, looking for the thing that had evaded it, but seeing nothing. It felt great rage as it realized it had once again been escaped. It punched out the window with the rifle in its hand and gazed out over the Cul-de-Sac. It heard yet more shots ring out, once again from the direction of the Hellpit from which it escaped the terror of its antagonist, the one who had killed its Great King, but this time the shots came more rapidly; automatic fire.

They came upon It soon enough. It had no intention of disappearing, making Jonny look like a fool. It was there, waiting, eating. Kevin and the two Eds who'd joined him could scarcely comprehend, let alone believe, what they were seeing.

It was massive, large and expansive but short and squat in height. Every single inch of it was moving, writhing and rolling. Its hide pulsed as things within it fought to squirm to the surface. It was misshapen and looked like melted, molten flesh fused with metal and wood in places. Barbed wire lay knotted in flesh or wrapped around wicked tentacles. Limbs sprouted at random and took many hairless forms - animal limbs, human limbs, strange long limbs with three-pronged claw hands. Tentacles of all sizes danced, reaching into the air and across the trailer park. Mouths were open all across the forward folds of the massive, looming Abomination like large pores. They wailed in mismatched shapeless tunes that served no more purpose than to disorient and frighten. Eye slits split across the Freddy Krueger flesh, and eyes, large and small and everything between and beyond, searched the grounds for prey. They closed and disappeared beneath the mountains of shapeless meat. Pointed and jagged teeth punched through in places and gnawed open ragged mouths with which to chomp and scream at impossible, inhuman pitches.

The thing was hot even at their distance, like if you were standing too close to a campfire. Close enough to singe arm hairs. In the pale light of the early morning it glowed like embers. Flame and scorched earth preceded It on the grass and soil. It was pulsing, almost thrumming, rolling forward slowly but surely with each pulse, expanding with each thrum as more and more shapeless flesh rose from within the depths of the earth.

It had made ground since Jonny saw it only minutes prior. It had moved on past the first row of mobile homes and had begun tearing the second row to shreds. The previous row lay in pieces on the thing's rollicking back, being poked and prodded and torn into smaller chunks by fire-hot tentacles and arms.

Eddy noticed that the Kankers' trailer was gone with only dead, flattened grass as evidence that it had ever been there at all.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered at the sight, wishing he wasn't the one guy in the trio who didn't have a gun, clenching his fists repeatedly to comfort himself. Though what a gun would help against this...Abomination he hadn't the slightest clue. A flamethrower though, maybe. "What is this fuckin' thing?"

"It's the Blood Blob from the Outer Reaches," Ed said, mesmerized. "It planted itself down there many millennia ago, incubating in the hot, hot depths of the Earth, and now it's ready to come up and seize this planet which it believes to be its rightful property."

"Jeez, Ed, stuff it, will ya? You're giving me the creeps." Eddy looked at Kevin, hoping he would be able to offer them something, anything, but he was just staring at it with no blood in his face, looking like a ghost with a furrowed brow. For the first time, Eddy noticed the split lip where Rolf had decked Shovel Chin. Almost under his breath, Eddy continued. "Fellas, I think we really gotta get outta Dodge here."

Kevin did the only thing he could think to do when faced with such an alien thing. He put the gun to his shoulder and fired at it. Ed clogged his ears with his pointer fingers and Eddy just took the hearing damage like a man.

Bullet holes opened up across the thing's unending hide but the thing made no utterance suggesting pain and within moments the boys had lost sight of the entry wounds. They hadn't close up, healed themselves, no - they had simply been lost in the constantly squirming sea of flesh.

It wasn't even hurt.

Ed turned and looked across the dry creek bed where he could see clearly the fence of the Lane and houses - his house among them - right on the other side. "It's gonna get our houses, Eddy."

"Yeah, like I said, doofus, let's high-tail it. Come on, Kev."

Ed and Eddy backed away from the thing, afraid that if they turned a tentacle would surge out and grab hold of them and pull them backward inside a newly formed gaping maw. Kevin didn't move but to lower his rifle.

"Whaddaya, deaf? Kev? Oh, Hatty McFly?" That one shook Kevin from his daze and Kevin shot Eddy a familiar look of irritation, igniting a loving grin across Eddy's lips; for that second, Eddy felt half normal. "Let's book, shovelchin!"

Finally Kevin pried his eyes off the hideous thing and turned his back to it. Only with Kevin leading up the rear were the Eds comfortable with turning their backs to that thing.

They ran across the creek bed and Ed kicked in and tore off a couple pieces from his back fence and they slipped through into his backyard. The Eds broke off from Kevin halfway across the Cul-de-Sac. The Eds ran toward Double Dee's house and Kevin ran toward his. Eddy heard Kevin scream, "Nazz! Nazz, let's go!" before he even made it to his house. A tad bit dramatic, Eddy grumbled to himself.

Kevin burst into his house through the rear tarp and called to Nazz in the living room. He failed to notice the holes in the wall at the stairs but noticed the plaster on the floor as he entered the living room and found it empty. He turned and only then did he really recognize the extent of the damages. He hadn't even heard the gunshots going off. "Nazz? Nazz! Where are you? NAZZ!"

He surged up the stairs after her, figuring erroneously that that was the only logical place she could have gone. If he'd run up those stairs a minute prior, he would have been eviscerated. But as it stood, the one-armed demon was nowhere to be seen.

Sarah, Jimmy, Nazz and Jonny heard Ed coming even before Double Dee's front door was kicked clean off the hinges. "Sarah!" cried Ed. "We gotta get ready for school! NOW!" He grabbed her up, tucking her under his arm as she began a flurry of punches of protest.

"ED! Put me down! What's happening? Tell me what's happening!" But he was already making a move back to the front door. Eddy ducked out of the way to make room for them.

"It's coming for us, baby sister! The Blood Blob from the Outer Reaches has finally made his ascent to claim his rightful throne!"

As she was dragged out the door, she grabbed the frame and left scratch marks in the wood. As her voice retreated outside, Nazz and Jonny could hear her shouting, "Eddy, make sense of this lug, will ya?"

Jonny ran to the door and called out, "No, he's tellin' it right, Sarah! Blood Blob! It's the only thing that makes sense! I saw it with my own eyes! It's huge!"

"What?!" Sarah shouted, jostling under Ed's arm. "JIMMY!"

"SARAH! Um, wait for me!" Jimmy called, quickly following behind them. Nazz hurried to the door to watch them go. Jimmy paused in the door and glanced back at Double Dee on the floor, then looked at Nazz. "I'm sorry, I gotta go protect Sarah!" He limped out after her, calling her name as Ed hurried, baby sister in tow, back to their silent house at the other end of the Cul-de-Sac. Nazz, Jonny and Eddy watched them go.

Nazz shot a look back toward Jonny. He shrugged. Eddy eyed Nazz with warmth in his cheeks. "Hey, Nazz, I think ol' Shovel Chin's waitin' for ya back at his house."

"Thanks, dude - um…" She looked back into the house toward Double Dee. Jesus, for a second Eddy completely forgot about poor, wounded Double Dee lying defenseless on that bloody mattress. Eddy set his jaw and determination came over him, spurned by the fire that came in his belly at calling Kevin back into action with a good old fashioned taunt. He wanted to pick some things up from his house before they left, but he would be damned if he was gonna leave his best buddy model one of two to the wolves here. Double damned, in fact.

Eddy waved Nazz away and looked at Jonny. "Go. Me and the Woodboy'll deal with Sockhead. We're leavin'. The all of us. Some bad mojo is on its way. Jonny can tell you that too. It's comin', and boy oh boy, we're goin'. Jonny! Help me get Double Dee ready!"

Jonny watched Nazz run off and wished he could just go over there and help out with Kev. But, like Eddy, there was no way he was leaving Double Dee out to dry like that. Not with some great big Blood Blob from the Outer Limits or whatever Ed said it was sniffing on their trail. "Ok!" He turned and gingerly propped Plank up on the wall. "Wait here, buddy!"

Nazz had never heard Eddy speak with such confidence, nor had she known him to give orders. She hesitated a moment more, then realized she would be needing to explain the damages to Kevin's house, though, with the way Eddy was talking, it didn't seem like those damages would matter that much anymore. Not to mention - if Kevin was back in that house, surely he was alone with whatever had just been after her. She limped as fast as she could back toward Kevin's house, still exhausted and ready to fall down dead. She let out a frustrated noise as she realized just how far she was from a good night's sleep. Her body throbbed and scabs tore as she picked up speed. Blood ran down her shins and pooled on her filthy socks.

When she reached the house, she called Kevin's name. He came galloping down the stairs and faced her as if ready for a fight. Realizing it was just Nazz with no evil intruders holding her captive, his stance dropped and he ran to her, wrapping her up tightly in his arms in a way that made Nazz's cheeks burn. "Oh, dude! I was so worried about you!"

"Kev, what's going on?"

"There's something coming up outta the woods behind the Park N' Flush. Somethin' mean. It's - I don't know how to explain it. It's some kind'a big blob thing, but it's hot, like lava, and it's got tentacles and arms and mouths and shit. And just trust me, Nazz, we don't want that thing breathin' down our necks. So we gotta vamoose, and stat!" Nazz remembered for the first time since returning to the Cul-de-Sac the thing she'd encountered on Main Street with those evil dog eyes.

"Oh my God. I think I know what you mean, dude. I must'a seen it on Main Street when I was coming back into town. It was something horrible, Kevin. But I think I know what you're talking about"

"Good. Makes this easier. It's comin' after us and it's comin' fast. Jesus, Nazz, it ate my bullets like it was nothin'. We gotta get outta town before it finds us here. Trust me, Nazz. The way it was taking apart the trailer park - it is NOT safe here, not anymore. Um. We need the guns. We'll pack up the truck. We need, um, uh, what, a toothbrush? Clothes? Changes of clothes? The bike, of course. What else?"

"Food. Water."

Kevin snapped his fingers at Nazz but never looked at her. His mind was racing a million miles a minute. "Good thinking. Um. I'll pack up the guns. You get the food and the water. We got jugs out in the garage. Um - if you think you can carry that much weight. It's like fifty pound jugs."

"Don't. I got it."

"Sweet."

But as he hurried off to pick up his guns, Nazz went her own way, and felt real uneasy about how much longer she could make it going at this race. Her heart was going so fast it was liable to blow her chest out all over the walls. As she pushed through into the garage, she realized she forgot to even mention the marauder with the gun upstairs. How had she managed to forget that? As a matter of fact, how had she managed to forget that horrible thing back on Main Street? She worried about her head, about her multiple falls, and she wondered if she had brain damage. But this was no time to worry about concussions, so she went to work - but not before warning Kevin about the gunman upstairs.

As Kevin grabbed up bundles of his guns, Nazz dipped jugs into the water reserves in the bathroom and packed cans of beans and peas and packages of ramen into empty cardboard boxes. As Ed sent Sarah and Jimmy scampering off through the house to pack food and water and their clothes and dearest possessions, Eddy and Jonny set to work grabbing up medicine from both Double Dee's, Eddy's, and Jonny's houses, along with rolls of gauze, bandages, disinfectant, Flinstones gummies, Band-Aids with Clifford the Big Red Dog on them, and whatever else they could find that looked like it could maybe help fix Double Dee.

And the Amputee watched them all, hidden by hedges. The kids were moving too fast and too erratically to get a good shot off at them, it knew its time was almost upon it and there would soon be blood flowing in rivers down the Cul-de-Sac's cracked streets.

All the while, trees cracked and fell and burned in a roiling pit of living Hellfire and damnation. It spread across the earth like lava and destroyed all in its wake as it worked its way out from the fissure in all directions, engulfing the woods to the back of the Cul-de-Sac in a rollicking fire that sent what few animals that had not been scared off from the appearance of the fissure running for safety, safety they would find nowhere. Soon, the trailer park was gone and the forwardmost of the Abomination's tentacles were feeling their way across the dry creek bed toward the construction site. Time was running short for the Cul-de-Sac. Within the hour, the first half-constructed house fell to pieces under the destructive power of the encroaching Abomination. Timber crackled. Asphalt melted and was torn up by teeth and claws thirsty for blood and flesh to add to its rolling tide of horrors.

A bulldozer was lifted up off its treads, which popped and melted under the supreme heat, and carried along on the broad, unending back of the mass. Metal fused with living flesh and within minutes what was left of the bulldozer was thrust forward through the rear fence of the Lane and rolled once more, crashing into Ed and Sarah's backyard, landing on top of the ashes of Ed's impromptu bonfire and settling to a halt as whipping, burning hot tentacles tore off chunks of the Lane's fence and began to pour itself through, aimed straight for Ed's backyard.

Rolf could smell the burning flesh and hear the Abomination's many toothy jaws crying out as he packed the last garbage bag of personal possessions into the back of his Papa's pickup truck, ran through the house to double check that he had grabbed everything he needed, swept the backyard to make sure no livestock had been overlooked (alas, he was unable to take them all, especially the heavier cattle, like poor, poor Beatrice. Unwilling to leave them to their fates to starve or be eaten by scavengers, he swiftly but sadly put many of them down with either his bare hands or his father's bolt pistol), and was back in the truck, cranking it up and kicking it into gear as the Abomination began bubbling over into Cul-de-Sac's backyards, pushing in front of it abandoned cars and pieces of trailers from the Park N' Flush, engulfing the pieces slowly into its flesh.

Rolf swore and the truck leapt forward, jostling the animals stacked high in the truck bed. They squealed their displeasure at Rolf as he took off, burning rubber, and left the Cul-de-Sac for the last time. He was the first of the kids to leave the Cul-de-Sac, but was not the last. He was one of the lucky ones; he made it out at all.

Within minutes of Rolf's departure, the back wall of Ed's house began to bow and groan under immense weight and Sarah and Jimmy watched with wide eyes as flames licked up the side of the house. Ed came galloping up the stairs and grabbed them both under each arm, picking up their respective bags in each free hand and dragging their unwieldy weight back out into the hallway and down the stairs.

Ed's mind raced. He was terrified. He had watched the Abomination descend upon the house as he packed his parents' old wood-paneled station wagon to the brim. There would only be room for himself, Sarah and Jimmy. He hoped to God Eddy was taking care of Eddy and would be able to drive him without Ed's assistance. But Ed figured if (please no!) Eddy had abandoned Double Dee, he could always rig up something on the roof rack and strap Double Dee to it until they were at a safe distance from the Blood Blob - they wouldn't want to be within 50 miles of that blasted thing when the US government did its duty and dropped an A-bomb on it, nosiree. They would be in Alaska if Ed could make it there in time. They would never stop driving until they were safe, safe as safe could be, or until the car ran loose of its tires and they could ride the rims no more. Then, he'd hook Jimmy and Sarah in the crook of his arms and carry them to safety. By God, he would.

He was ashamed of himself for leaving Double Dee alone during all this but reasoned with himself that Double Dee would understand. It had come to Ed needing to choose between Double Dee and Sarah; Double Dee would know he needed to choose Sarah every time, especially now that he had nobody else left.

As they came bounding down the stairs, the Abomination came crashing through the back wall of the house and filled the kitchen and laundry room up to the counters in unimaginable horrors. Jimmy and Sarah screamed as the wall caved in and Ed ran faster, whipping into the garage and letting Jimmy and Sarah down to climb into the station wagon (Sarah and Jimmy both piled into the front seat, which overjoyed Ed because he hadn't thought of that; now he could fit Double Dee in the extra seat in back if he needed to!) and running around to the back of the vehicle to shove the final two bags into the back. He slammed the rear compartment door and ran around to the front, failing to realize that the lock hadn't engaged and the door just swung open again.

Ignoring this, he jumped in beside Jimmy (sure, it was a tight squeeze) and cranked up the car - but no, no he didn't. Because when he grabbed the keys and went to twist them, his fingers locked around empty air and his hand swiped uselessly at the ignition. "Oh, no!" he couldn't help himself but cry out, surely only frightening Sarah and Jimmy all the worse.

"I'll get the keys!" Sarah called, frantic, throwing her door open. Ed hastily reached over and slammed it back shut, jumping out and running back into the quickly disintegrating house.

As Ed turned the corner of the doorway back into the house, he was shocked to find that the Abomination had made considerable progress - it was inching down along the hallway now, nearly to the living room. "Oh, jeez!" Blinking goat's eyes saw him and whipping tentacles lashed forward, eager to ensnare him. Ed had to move fast now.

Just then, the house shook and groaned. The walls buckled and whimpered - wood split and Ed had to duck to avoid being clocked in the noggin by large, flying splinters as the house began to come to pieces around him. The roof cracked and dropped and inch or two - the Abomination was eating too far into the house, eating away the walls and supports. The second floor was getting too heavy for the first floor to support its weight.

Ed sweated and scratched his head, grunting in terror and panic. Keys, keys, where could those pesky keys have gone to now? He ran into the living room as all the windows suddenly shattered, the walls buckled further and plaster rained down. This time, Sarah and Jimmy screamed and it took Ed only moments to realize why - when he heard a thunderous CRASH as the rear portion of the house's second floor collapsed, raining down upon the Abomination. It recoiled - or perhaps just reacted to the blow reflexively - and its whipping tentacles grew more furious in their movement. One particularly large tentacle, a seam of teeth running down its entire length, came crashing through the rear living room wall and swung its massive weight right at Ed, who raised his shotgun and fired.

"Three, two, one!" called Jonny and Eddy in unison, then both lifted their sides of Double Dee's mattress, though they really didn't need to; Double Dee weighed half as much as a bag of feathers. He weighed less than he ever did before now - he had lost a whole lot of blood, as evidenced by the plethora of stains coating the bare mattress (Sarah had torn up the sheets for impromptu bandages last night).

At the door, they faced their greatest challenge: getting through the doorway with Double Dee's mattress between them. It was too wide to fit through straight. More even heads would have made plans for this in advance, but things had gotten way past the point of easy-going logic for the two young men in charge of Double Dee's life. "Shit!' Eddy hissed as he realized the trouble. After a brief moment of trying to fold the mattress with Double Dee sandwiched in the middle (God, how Eddy wished for Ed's help right about now), Eddy swore again. "Put him down!"

Jonny obeyed and they lowered the mattress. Eddy stroked his chin whiskers for a moment, then hurried over to the couch. Double Dee's parents, ever awful and generally the worst, had wrapped the furniture in couch covers, which had come much in handy since last night, considering all the blood that got everywhere. Eddy ripped the cover off the couch and dragged it back to Double Dee. "Get it under him, get it under him!"

Jonny began to see what Eddy had in mind and they gingerly lifted Double Dee inch by inch to slip the cover under him. Double Dee moaned in pain throughout the whole ordeal, but it got excruciating for both boys as they had to lift his badly injured arm to get the couch cover under it. Eddy hoped Double Dee would never remember this pain. What if he's always in pain like this? Maybe he's better off if you just let him die. The terrible thought intruded his mind. He slammed his palm into his temple, shaking it loose.

Together, and dispensing with the counting, Jonny and Eddy lifting Double Dee off the mattress and carried him out through the slim doorway with easy success. Jonny began to set him down on the lawn but Eddy whistled at him. "No, there's no time. We gotta get movin' - look!" He nodded back across the Cul-de-Sac where the Abomination was tearing into the rear of several houses - but even Eddy hadn't realized the extent of the damages until just then, as Ed and Sarah's house shifted and the back half of the second story came to literal pieces in front of his very eyes. "ED!" Eddy cried and nearly dropped Double Dee.

"No! Think of Double Dee, Eddy!" Jonny's courage shrank as Eddy shot him a furious look. But in a moment, it softened and he looked down at Double Dee's sweaty, pain-stricken face.

Eddy moaned, "No...no...godDAMMIT, Ed!" He and Jonny hurriedly carried Double Dee over to Eddy's house, where Eddy had already reversed his mom's '93 Toyota out of the garage and into the driveway, ready to receive Double Dee's prone body across the back seat. As they went, Eddy moaned again, thinking: What if this is useless and Double Dee dies anyway and you wasted your only chance to save Ed on Double Dee, who's dead anyway, and soon they'll both be dead and you're the only one you can blame for that, pipsqueek.

Eddy shook his head ferociously, like a dog getting out of the rain, freaking Jonny out, and Eddy climbed backward into the Toyota and carried Double Dee in with him, jostling him more than he preferred and knocking the injured arm into the side of the door. Double Dee moaned in agony in his sleep and Eddy could see that even that slight tap had caused the wound to start bleeding again. His hopelessness descended to full-blown panic, but he fought against it as he lovingly placed Double Dee down on the seat and connected the seatbelted around him, careful of Sockhead's mangled arm. If this really was Double Dee's final day on this Earth, Eddy would be damned - double damned - if he was gonna spend it uncomfortable or in pain. He owed him that much.

"Jimmy!" Sarah wailed, her voice cracked and wavering through tears and terror. "Jimmy, where is he?"

He shook his head, looking around, trying to see through the doorway into the house where Ed had disappeared moments ago, but couldn't - and just then, tentacles began to tear through the back wall of the garage. Sarah and Jimmy screamed and held one another.

"We gotta go, Sarah!"

"No, not without Ed! ED!" she climbed halfway out the open passenger window, beckoning him desperately. Jimmy shook his head. Even in a time like this, she was such a spoiled brat (a spoiled brat he loved dearly) that she thought she could get anything she ever wanted with a single call out the window.

And Ed burst back into the room, covered in Abomination blood, clenching the smoking shotgun, and saw the tentacles ripping out the rear wall of the garage. He shouted and ran to the back of the station wagon, bracing his back against the rear door, which he slammed shut again, and pushing with all his might - sending the car rolling slowly down the length of the garage, away from the whipping tentacles which Ed had to furiously duck.

Jimmy saw tentacles whipping through the doorway into the house and saw the big garage door shut inches ahead of the car. They were trapped. Like sardines in a can. They'd be picked clean by this Abomination in less than a minute.

Ed, sweat beading on his forehead, gave the station wagon one last push as another tentacle swiped at him. The wagon slammed into the door of the garage and Ed stopped short behind it - and a tentacle slapped against his leg and coiled quickly, quicker than quick, around it, almost up to Ed's knee.

The pain was immense, but quick - the heat of the tentacle quickly burned away the nerve endings. But he could feel the pressure, the heat from the flesh where the nerves were still there, and he screamed again. The tentacle snatched him off his feet and the back of his head banged off the rear bumper. Stars thudded around Ed's sightline but quickly receded.

As Ed was dragged on his back toward the wall of whipping tentacles, he grabbed desperately for the rear bumper, catching on with his fingers - but it was enough. He pulled himself against the station wagon and held on. He could hear Sarah crying out to him as the tentacle, apparently frustrated at its prey's vivacity, began whipping Ed back and forth, trying to loose him from the bumper. Ed felt like his leg was going to be torn clean off.

Then - gosh darn his stupid head! - he realized that he was still clutching the shotgun in one hand, white-knuckle gripping it by the pump. He let loose of the bumper and the tentacle snatched him, hard, toward the back wall. He took up aim and fired, blowing the tentacle in half and peppering his shoe with buckshot. It only hurt a little. Nothing compared to the searing agony of the tentacle coiled up his leg, which only seemed to squeeze tighter now that it had been severed from its stalk.

Frantic, Jimmy gawked around the garage for something, anything that could help them - and that's when he saw it, in the most obvious place to look.

The keys. They were hanging from a nail next to the doorway to the house. Feet from Jimmy's face.

Jimmy climbed clumsily over the driver's seat and let himself out, snatching the keys off the wall and piling back into the station wagon behind the wheel. He jammed the keys in the ignition as Ed grabbed onto the bumper to pull himself back up onto his good foot and the engine roared, filling Ed's face with exhaust, making Ed cough. But in a moment he realized that this was a good thing - the car had started by itself! He thanked his lucky stars for miracles!

Jimmy kicked the station wagon into gear as Ed began pushing the wagon again in the hope that the wagon just needed some cajoling - and, apparently, it did, because within moments the station wagon crashed through the door of the garage and out into the street, dragging Ed behind with it, running clumsily to keep up, pain clanging like deafening symbols up his leg with each horrible step.

Eddy heard the crash as he climbed out of the Toyota, whipping his head around to see the station wagon come skidding to a halt in the bulb of the Cul-de-Sac with Jimmy and Sarah driving (Eddy's heart plummeted) but with Ed's gangly limbs trailing behind, taking wide, goofy and awkward steps to keep up - and, as Jimmy slammed on the breaks, Ed crashed into the back of the station wagon and bounced off, onto the street, knocking the rear compartment door loose again and dropping bags all over the big lug.

"Oh, Ed!" Eddy shouted, eyes filling with tears.

Ed threw all the bags off himself and looked up at the sound of Eddy's voice, remembering that he may need help with Double Dee. He saw his friend coming running at him from across the Cul-de-Sac and grinned his big, silly grin and rose, wincing, to his feet.

Sarah grinned at the sight of Ed in the rearview mirror and threw her door open. Far sooner than Eddy could reach Ed, Sarah did, throwing herself into his arms as the waterworks went off. "Ed! You dummy! I thought you were dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead!" She punctuated each 'dead' with a pound of her fists on Ed's chest.

Jimmy leaned out the passenger door to watch Sarah and her brother's joyous reunion with a grin on his face, but then he noticed it. A glint across the street.

Kevin threw another armful of guns into the bed of the truck without a single thought toward weapons safety. He was panicking, terrified, and he had to get Nazz, his bike, and himself to safety - and in that order, too.

Nazz, sweating and wheezing, out of breath, dragged another jug of water out into the driveway, heaving it over the side of the truck bed where it landed on a box of canned goods. She abandoned the jug, uncaring whether or not the items accumulated in the truck bed looked neat or messy or whatever. Her heartbeat hadn't gotten any faster, but it felt worse somehow, and she saw spots in her vision she couldn't do away with, no matter how often she tried to blink them away. She was ready to be done with this - to be in the truck and riding away to safety, to anywhere but here. To her, "anywhere but here" meant "one step closer to going to bed," preferably in Kevin's arms. She saw an image then, a wonderful image, of Kevin and her driving away from Peach Creek, from Lemon Brook and all the dead men (dead by her hands, her fault, her fault, and for no good reason, too) and dead women and dead parents with tiny litle bullet holes in their eyes, and demons and parents and evil bull terriers. Driving away from everything, driving away into the sunset, just Kev and her, Kevin with a knowing smirk on his face, his jaw jutted out, ready to take on whatever the world had to deal them, baby, and ready to do it in style, too. She would be lying across the seat, head in Kevin's lap, looking up at him, in love, both of them in love, and that would be that and it would all be over and her eyes would droop, droop down, and she'd be asleep...and for what felt like the millionth time in the last three days, she heard a gunshot.

Sarah had known, just known that Ed wasn't gonna make it back out of that house with those keys or without them. She had just known he'd die and she'd be without a brother, without her parents, without anybody, with only Jimmy by her side. Not that Jimmy wasn't the one she wanted by her side, no - he was all she thought she wanted. At least, until she had thought Ed was a goner. She felt horrible; she had left him all alone these last two days while she suffered alone, forcing Ed to go at it all alone too. She had turned to sweet, loving Jimmy, who was so kind and so loving and so unable to make her furious at him, because he had been there and known what she was feeling and known her so well, and she had neglected her own brother. Dim-witted as he may be, he was hurting too; and she could see that, and didn't even care. All she cared about was herself, and it made her sick. Well, no more. She would never lose sight of how much Ed meant to her ever again. Never, not ever.

Jimmy called her name, and it annoyed her; for the first time, Jimmy annoyed her, and she turned to look just in time to see the show.

Jimmy's eyes widened and he realized just what that glint was. Oh my goodness, he thought. It was the sunshine glinting off the scope of a rifle, a rifle wedged in the crook between two sections of the roof of Nazz's house. There was a barrel beneath that scope, and it was aimed right for them. Right for Sarah. His Sarah. The one who had just realized her feelings for him and taken him into her; that Sarah. And he was about to lose her, lose her just as they finally found their happy together where nobody would ever call Jimmy a fag ever again. Wasn't that just his luck?

No, it wasn't; it couldn't be. He would do anything for her. He must do anything for her. Sarah was his woman now, his girl. You have to protect your girl, his father had told him once. When you find your somebody, Jimmy, you gotta hold on and never let go and never let her hurt another day in her life, not if you can help it.

So Jimmy threw himself over the passenger seat, ignoring the pain searing through himself, throwing open the door, swinging his legs out and rising onto them, turning to Sarah and calling out to her, desperate, needing to be heard and understood, and hoping (since she was his girl, after all) that she would hear all he needed to say just as he said that one word, the only one he had time for: "SARAH!"

And she looked at him. And, by golly, he could tell by the love in her eyes that she knew. She knew.

Jimmy's chest exploded in what Sarah could only process, in a strange, infantile way, as a flower of blood, burst-open flaps of skin making up the petals. The gunshot rang out almost simultaneously, though not quite. Not quick enough to do anything about it, either. The passenger window shattered just from the force of the shot. The bullet blew out of Jimmy's back, leaving a broad, gory crater just below his shoulder blades, and blew apart the middle seat on its downward trajectory, the same middle seat where Jimmy had just been sitting in the garage just minutes before, and hot blood splattered all over the inside of the car. Blood all over the seats, all over the windows and windshield and even the things in the backseat. A fine, even spray of it. Sarah saw Jimmy's eyes go wide, saw his mouth work like a fish out of water, and his body fold up on itself as he tumbled down to the ground below, losing grip on the passenger door as he fell despite clenching for dear life; the shot had severed his spinal cord right through the middle and his limbs no longer functioned.

If the gunshot hadn't turned Kevin and Nazz's heads, Sarah's piercing, guttural scream would have. "JIMMMMY!"

Eddy skidded to a halt, gaping in shock and horror Jonny ran smack-dab into his back and both boys went to the ground in a heap. They started fumbling immediately to get back on their feet but neither boy took his eyes off crumpled, twitching pile of Jimmy, whose eyes rolled loosely in their sockets like tilt-o-whirls, jaw working and teeth snapping. There was no visible life in Jimmy's face though he wouldn't die for another minute or so. All functioning fell to pieces and the boy's brain could no longer coordinate even those muscles it still could consciously control.

Urine spread across Jimmy's pants and, within the next couple minutes, no one would be able to loosen the stench of his shit from their nostrils, though the other tremendous scents of the Cul-de-Sac offset the smell considerably.

"Jesus wept!" Eddy shouted, crawling out from under Jonny and pulling the boy upright.

Sarah scrambled up out of Ed's lap but he quickly leapt up and tackled her back to the ground as he heard distantly a rifle being clumsily bolted. He barely processed the sound, at least not consciously, and his animal instincts took over immediately, flinging Sarah over his shoulder to cast her away from the line of fire. And it was good luck that he had moved so quickly - in the next moment, a gunshot cracked and a small bullet hole whizzed through the rear passenger door of the station wagon.

It took this second shot to snap the others from their dazes and Jonny, Eddy, Nazz, Kevin, and Ed began scanning for the source of the shots. Only Jonny, Eddy, and Ed had seen the bullet spray out Jimmy's back in a downward burst, so they knew almost as gut instinct that the shot had come from above, so their eyes shot to the rooftops immediately. For Kevin and Nazz, it took longer to identify the source.

Kevin, ducking low beside his father's truck, cocked his head up and over the truck bed, and motioned for Nazz, who stood on the other side behind the bulk of the vehicle, to back up behind the cover of the engine block, then grabbed a rifle from the pile that had accumulated in the truck bed, scanning the opposite end of the Cul-de-Sac. "Did anyone get shot? Did Jimmy get shot?" Nazz whispered frantically but went ignored by Kevin.

Eddy heard the distant noises of rifle bolt slide working and began backing up, stepping all over Jonny's shoes and nearly sending both boys falling over each other again, then turned, shoving Jonny back toward his house, back toward the Toyota where Double Dee lay. Another shot rang out and ricocheted off the pavement but no one saw where it hit, though Eddy had the worst feeling like he was about to have his ass blown clean off.

Ed grabbed up Sarah in one arm and performed a gorilla-like three-limbed crab walk around the side of the station wagon, behind the wall of bags that had accumulated in the rear compartment. He held Sarah tightly to his chest and didn't notice the trail of blood his throbbing, vice-clenched leg left behind along the pavement as he went. Though as he clutched Sarah against him, he grunted softly and his body hitched, convulsing once involuntarily as the tentacle inched its way up to his knee cap.

Eddy realized they were wasting valuable time running all the way back to the Toyota, not to mention leading the gunfire back toward the defenseless Double Dee, and looked around for alternate plans. He cut suddenly across Rolf's lawn, snatching Jonny by the back of his collar and guiding him around Rolf's cramped side yard, shoving Jonny into the crook between the back fence of Rolf's house and the wall of Rolf's house.

Kevin reversed back around the grille of his pickup, tripping over his own feet and splaying out on his butt on the concrete. He recovered quickly, partly to avoid the embarrassment of being seen falling, and took cover, shouting as hard as he could to be heard over Sarah's screams, "DID ANYONE SEE WHERE IT CAME FROM?"

Another shot went off, but there was no ricochet and no bullet hits. A broad miss. Kevin nearly shit himself regardless and clenched the front bumper of his dad's truck for dear life. Nazz squeezed his shoulder reassuredly, certain that she was about to have the roof of her head shorn off by a bullet.

Kevin caught his breath and forced himself to calm down, then inspected the rifle he'd plucked from the truck bed. A wood-stocked hunting rifle with no scope. He slid the bolt back. It was loaded; Kevin kissed the breach lovingly, thanking himself for being so reckless and paranoid as to load all the weapons in the house. The realization that the rifle was loaded caught his breathing to accelerate again and his voice caught in his throat as he tried to shout again. He doubled over and had to fight back vomiting. Nazz patted him hard as he struggled to control his panicked breathing. He'd never heard of someone working themselves up so much they nearly vomited from catching words in their throat. His cheeks burned. He took a deep breath and tried again. "DID ANYBODY SEE - "

The Amputee's rifle reported and the bullet kicked up off the driveway's concrete. Kevin jumped at the spray of sparks it caused. The bullet shattered, exploding outward in a spray of broken concrete. Shrapnel peppered Kevin's calf superficially but did significant damage to the truck's front driver side tire.

Kevin fell back in shock and kicked backward further behind the truck grille. Nazz clutched him, fearing the worst, but found him mostly uninjured except for the bullet fragments in his shin and the opened claw mark wounds on his chest under their days-old bandages. "Jesus...Jesus…" They sat there, catching their breaths for a moment, listening to the air whiz swiftly out of the truck tire. "Fuck...fuck...fuck…" Nazz squeezed him reassuringly again.

Eddy swallowed fear and stuck his head around the side of Rolf's house and counted the seconds as he looked out across the Cul-de-Sac. One...two...three…the time passed excruciatingly slowly and he was sure his head was about to pop like a zit. Failing to aid matters was Jonny 2x4, who held onto the back of Eddy's collar like pulling him back after having his brainpan scooped off was gonna do a goddamned thing...four...five. He snapped his head back, having seen nothing.

"Did you see where it came from? Did you see it?" Jonny whispered in Eddy's ear. Eddy made a hand motion to shoo Jonny away but accidentally slapped him instead. Either way, Jonny backed off. Eddy knew he had to check again, look for a gun barrel among the rooftops. But where would it be? Think: the angle of the shot meant that it came from across the Cul-de-Sac from Ed's house, which meant Nazz, Jonny or Jimmy's house. But Jonny's house was right next door. Too close. So that left Nazz and Jimmy's places.

Eddy lowered himself to the lawn and felt the cool grass on his face. He didn't want to give the shooter a clean shot when he stuck his head back out. He was taken aback to realize that lowering his head to the ground as he had done allowed him to easily hear the progression of the Abomination across the earth all around him. He could somehow sense that the thing bubbling up out of the woods behind the trailer park was not the only one coming up out of those holes. He could tell just by the reverberations in his cheek that they were all over the fucking place. Jesus…

A deafening crash; Eddy leapt into the air like a startled cat. But that was no gunshot. No - Ed's house had finally collapsed. Eddy caught his breath, squeezing handfuls of grass. Jonny patted him on the thigh reassuringly but Eddy kicked him away.

Ed watched his house come to pieces in front of him. He was holding Sarah tight, feeling her small chest rising and falling against him. He knew she was watching the house being enveloped into the Abomination too.

And he was sure she knew they would surely be eaten if they couldn't find further cover soon. The engine still huffed, pumping out exhaust...so Ed tucked Sarah under his arm and crouch-walked down the wood paneling of the station wagon. He popped the driver's door. Sarah, huffing, managed to squeak out, "What are you doing…? Don't!"

Ed clutched her tighter and leaned in, lowering Sarah to the ground carefully. He reached into the floorboard and pressed the brake down, then reached across under the steering wheel and shifted the wagon into forward. He took his hand off the brakes, grabbed Sarah back up under his arm and steered, keeping his head as low as possible, guiding the station wagon toward the end of the Cul-de-Sac. Aiming for Double Dee's house.

The station wagon trundled forward slowly, easy to keep up with even with his bum leg...the grip of the thing under his pant leg growing tighter by the moment; Ed was sure he was in pretty bad trouble, but now was no time to worry about that thing down there. It was mostly dormant, though what movements it did make made him whimper. But he could press through that, easy peasy. And for Sarah? Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Eddy scurried forward, his head peeking around, scanning Jimmy and Nazz's rooftops, counting...one...two - and there it was! Jutting over the corner of the pitched roof of Nazz's garage. A fucking gun barrel!

He shimmied back and Jonny grabbed him by the collar again and snatched him upright. The swiftness of the movement had been appreciated, despite how the collar tightening against his throat had choked him. "Thanks, Jonny-boy," he whispered. He paused, waiting for the next gunshot...but it didn't come. A moment passed and Eddy called: "NAZZ'S HOUSE! BEHIND THE GARAGE!"

Kevin heard him loud and clear. He took another deep breath and rose swiftly from behind the engine block, propping the rifle up on the hood and aiming down the sights. Hands shaking, he had difficulty keeping the sights under control, but managed to find Nazz's house and the pitched roof of the garage…where sat a sleek black hunting propped up against the shingles. The gunman was gone. Kevin took another deep breath (don't wanna repeat that almost-throw-up incident) and called out, "HE'S GONE!"

Jonny frowned at Eddy, whispering too close for comfort, "But Eddy, I thought you said - "

They flinched as, across the street, in the house between Ed's and Eddy's, something exploded, blowing out all the windows that weren't already shattered in the earthquake. The boys watched as the unoccupied house's hot water heater suddenly erupted from the roof in a blast of plaster and shingles, dropping back down with a destructive crash onto the remains of the roof. It seemed to have no effect on the Abomination steadily creeping through the home and ripping it up from its foundations.

Eddy waved Jonny away again, paying more heed this time to the proximity of Jonny's face. "Yeah, I know what I - " Something conked Eddy in the head and bounced off onto the lawn below.

Both Jonny and Eddy looked down at it, Eddy grumbling softly as he rubbed his head.

It was a broken roof shingle. There was no way that explosion could've blown that from all the way across the Cul-de-Sac...could it?

Jonny and Eddy met each other's gaze with the same thought and, in unison, turned their heads to look up at the roof.

And it came down on them in a fury, its remaining arm stretched across its torso - and striking across as it came down between the two boys, swinging its heavily muscled arm right into the side of Eddy's head, sending the boy flying down the lawn toward the street.

Jonny gaped, sticking his hand into the back of his pants to grab his pistol only to realize it was no longer there as the demon's cool, hateful gaze turned to him. Its ferociously bared teeth, long, curved, old and yellow, snapped and it was close enough that Jonny felt the hot air of its breath on his face. Then it spoke to him; what it said, Jonny would never know. No one would. But it spoke with its shrill, impossible voices, its jaws clacking rhythmically as it forced the words from its smoke-hazed throat.

It reached out for Jonny, who gasped and stumbled back, falling onto his butt on the lawn, landing on something hard and unpleasant and in that moment Jonny knew exactly what it was.

Shaking, nearly hyperventilating, Jonny kicked back from the demon, reaching under his butt as he went. If Jonny hadn't known any better, he would've sworn the thing took one look at the fear apparent on the boy's face and grinned, letting his terror wash over it in awesome waves.

Then Jonny had his fingers on the grip of the pistol, and then it was nestled neatly in his hand, and as if on autopilot, Jonny's hand came up and he fired six shots right into the Amputee's putrid face.

Kevin heard the shots instantly, swinging the rifle around toward Rolf's house - only to find a slow-moving station wagon in the way with Ed and his cowering sister crouch-walking beside it. "ED!" Kevin shouted. Ed looked but with hollow, pained eyes. Kevin saw how pale Ed's face was and how much cold sweat glistened on his brow and knew speaking to him would be useless. He looked nearly delirious.

He rushed out from behind the truck, running with the rifle outstretched as Jonny's pistol clicked empty. If Jonny died in that moment, he could have done it with some satisfaction because, while he was by no means a violent soul, the fact that the Amputee flinched as he Jonny squeezed the trigger that last time on that empty cylinder meant something great and big to the Woodboy. He had single-handedly put fear in the face of the scariest thing he had ever seen and, by golly, that made him feel pretty good.

And the smirk that spread on his cheeks must have ticked it off something awful, because it bellowed at him then, shrieking as ferociously as it could, and slapped the gun clean out of Jonny's hand.

Jonny shouted in pain, but slight pain - the power of the demon's swipe sprained his wrist. Jonny stumbled back as the awful, stinking thing with its one arm stalked forward toward him, glowering down at him with its beady glowing red eyes.

Its arm struck out and grabbed Jonny by the throat. Jonny forgot all about the pain in his wrist and grabbed the big, corded arm in both hands, holding up his own body weight with shaking arms as the terrible Amputee hoisted Jonny 2x4 off his feet and into air, digging its curved talons into the flesh of Jonny's throat, squeezing shut his windpipe.

Eddy, badly dazed and with a crook in his neck, saw this happen from a great distance he knew he could never trek across in time despite being only feet away from Jonny and that horned one-armed thing. He heard the croak that escaped Jonny's throat as the demon's claws squeezed and squeezed, blood running down Jonny's shirt. Eddy saw Jonny's eyes grow wide as the demon drew him close to its face, its horn close enough to nearly poke out his eye.

Kevin leapt up onto the hood of the moving station wagon, took aim and fired. The first shot missed the Amputee and grazed Jonny's shoulder. He tried to cry out but felt too much pain in his clenched throat, too much pressure on his windpipe. Kevin hurriedly bolted the rifle with increasingly poorly-coordinated hands and fired again, this time striking the shot off the back of the demon's head, just inches from having scooped off Jonny's big old noggin instead.

In infuriated pain, the Amputee lost grip of Jonny and the boy fell to the earth. The demon turned and faced Kevin and knew that it was going to kill that one next. And there was nothing in the world that would stop it from achieving its goal.

The Amputee turned and sprinted while Kevin struggled with limp hands to bolt the rifle.

Ed, pain shooting through his body up his leg, saw Kevin standing on the hood of the station wagon with vague awareness. He saw Kevin firing the rifle once, twice at something Ed couldn't see. Ed turned his head slowly, lackadaisical in his agony, to look across the seats and out the passenger door of the station wagon. And he saw the beast roaring at Kevin, jaws wide and one-armed grip outstretched. It was running, then it was leaping, soaring through the air, its next stop: jaws clenched on Kevin's exposed throat.

In another burst of instinct Ed's logical mind would never, especially in its current state of pain, have thought to enact, Ed thrust his hand down on the gas pedal and the station wagon surged forward, splaying Kevin heavily, painfully out on the hood and windshield of the wagon, his shoulder sending spider-web cracks across the glass.

The Amputee, already soaring through the air, couldn't stop its momentum and slammed hard into the sideboard of the station wagon, its horns punching through the back passenger door like its bullet had mere minutes ago. The door crumpled inward and sent bags flying across the interior of the vehicle. The force of its impact knocked the station wagon sideways, its tires leaving deposits of rubber across the pavement. The impact jostled Kevin on the hood, nearly knocking him off onto the hard asphalt below, and knocked Ed off his feet, falling on top of his dazed and terrified baby sister.

The Amputee roared and struggled for a moment to pry its horns out of the door. It tried to use its clawed hand but the clawed instead sank into the wood paneling and it took another long, enraged moment to tear its claws free. It shook its head violently and finally tore its head out of the wreckage.

It rose unsteadily to its taloned feet and turned again to face Kevin, huffing. Kevin's eyes widened and he tried to aim the rifle at it in a last ditch effort, only to realize he no longer knew where the rifle was; it had been knocked out of his grip in the crash.

Then a flurry of gunfire broke out and bullets bounced off the Amputee's impenetrable skin in seemingly endless barrage. It shrieked at the source of the gunfire in a rage, clenching its eyes shut against the torrent, and turned to run off for cover when a lucky shot punched through the shoulder stump of its missing arm and sent pain shooting across the demon's body.

It let out another shriek, the loudest shriek it had issued since that first night it had escaped from the depths of Hell, finished its turn, and sprinted off back toward Rolf's house. Eddy and Jonny both froze in terror, but the Amputee paid them no mind. It leapt over them, then the fence to Rolf's backyard. Then it was gone.

Kevin knew they were far from safe now, but it didn't stop all the tension from leaving his body. He went limp on the hood of Ed's station wagon and caught his breath, rolling his head back and forth - then realizing he didn't know who had been the one to fire upon the demon. He sat up on the hood and looked across the street at Nazz, who lowered her weapon, the same assault rifle Kevin had taken this morning out to the trailer park, with a heavy, racking sob.

You know, despite her tears, her wounds and how filthy she was, with the stock of the rifle propped against her hip, Nazz looked like the sexiest, prettiest girl in the world. Kevin laughed, celebrating his prolonged lifespan. "Oh, Nazz, Nazz, Nazz. I love you, Nazz."

"I love you too, Kevin." His heart stopped when he realized she wasn't being playful like he was.

But a moment's rest was not forthcoming; they were brought back to shattering reality as the unoccupied house between Ed and Eddy's houses suddenly collapsed into the chomping mouths of the encroaching Abomination.

Sarah kicked loose of Ed's grip and Ed hit the pavement, shaking, barely able to hold himself upright. Before he could rise again to his feet, Sarah was off and running back toward Jimmy's lifeless body lying in its spreading pool of blood. While the shot had not been instantly fatal, Jimmy had died in the time it took for the others to scare off the Amputee. He died listening to gunshots and screams, unable to control his own face or eyes to look around and find out what was happening. All he could think about in those last moments were Sarah and his parents, his father's words: You have to protect your girl, Jimmy. He was dimly aware that he had done just that As his body began to shut down, his cognition began to fade, and he had no idea that he was dying until he was dead.

Sarah skidded to a halt in his pool of blood and hit her knees at Jimmy's side with a splash of blood that soaked her pink pants, trying to slap him awake despite the fact his eyes were open and rolled up terrifyingly into the back of his head; Sarah could nearly see the stalks of Jimmy's optic nerves. Ed finally made it to his feet and took off after Sarah. Kevin watched him go and noticed for the first time that Ed had a pretty severe wound on the back of his head, fearing for a moment that the demon had managed to blow off the back of Ed's skull and the big dummy had failed to even realize it. But there was no gaping hole; just matted hair and blood trickling down the back of Ed's jacket. Kevin also noticed how badly Ed was limping and how slick his pant leg had become with blood, trying to remember if Ed had been injured recently. "Yo, Ed!" But the big lug ignored him or failed to hear him all together.

Kevin forced himself upright, shuffling over to Nazz and throwing his arms around her. He held her tightly. "Thank you, dude."

Nazz couldn't make herself speak, so she just shrugged. Sooner than Nazz was ready, Kevin broke off from the hug. He walked around the station wagon, found the rifle, and returned it to the bed of the truck. He hurried over to the front of his house and tore down the tarp from the front wall, dragging it over to the driveway and haphazardly covering the guns, food, and water with it. "We gotta move. Now."

He nodded toward the end of the Cul-de-Sac, where the Abomination was beginning to tear apart Jimmy's house and had made progress through Eddy's backyard. Eddy's backyard, which was right next door to Kevin's. They could just about feel the heat wavering off the terrible thing as it made its way dispassionately toward them.

Nazz nodded at Kevin and they made their final preparations.

Eddy finally forced himself back up onto his feet. He cast a glance down the Cul-de-Sac toward the badly limping Ed and the sobbing Sarah hovering over Jimmy's diminished figure, noting to himself with building nausea and horror that Jimmy looked just like folded laundry now. Like his mom had ironed and neatly folded his shirt and pants and left them on the dresser for Jimmy to wear that morning but had failed to realize Jimmy was still wearing them at the time. Jesus.

He turned his attention to Jonny, who was coughing and messaging his bloody throat with one hand, holding his other hand close to his chest as if cradling it. All Eddy saw, though, was the blood dripping onto Jonny's stained once-white shirt. "Jonny! Put pressure on that thing, man!"

Jonny shook his head, and croaked, "No, it's okay, it's okay! He didn't get my carotid, so it's okay. I think. That sure is a lot of blood though, isn't it? Oh boy." He began to feel suddenly lightheaded at the sight of the blood all over his hands. But he was pretty sure that if that thing had nicked anything major, there would be jets of it spurting out by now. This wasn't a delayed reaction sort of situation. And he was breathing now, though with some difficulty, and if he was breathing at all, it hadn't crushed his windpipe, so all in all, he had come out of that whole thing a pretty lucky fella.

More than he could say for Jimmy. Gee willikers, poor, poor Jimmy. Poor Sarah, too; her cries echoed all over the Cul-de-Sac and into Peach Creek.

Waves of horror suddenly overwhelmed Jonny and he fell forward, putting his hands out to catch himself, unsteady. He had nearly died. His throat had nearly been torn out and he'd nearly been impaled with a demon horn and nearly had his whole entire actual face bitten off by a whole entire actual demon straight from the pits of Hell or maybe from the Outer Limits. Jimmy, someone he'd known for as long as he could remember, was dead as doornail on the street not ten yards away. Double Dee was half dead with his arm hanging off and Jonny, goodness, had nearly suffered the same fate or worse. Jeez. Oh, jeez.

"Jonny. Jonny." It was Eddy again.

"Yes, Papa?" Jonny muttered hazily.

"Don't pass out. Please don't pass out."

"No, Papa." But he did.

Ed hit his knees next to Sarah and forced her up off her knees. She fought him hard and harshly, swinging slaps, punches, and kicks at her poor, bereaved brother for a moment before remembering her pact with him. He muttered, "He's gone, baby sister. We can't help him now."

She went limp on Ed's shoulder as he rose quiveringly to his feet. She whispered to him, "We can't leave him here. We have to take him with us. If we don't…" If we don't, that thing will eat him whole. But she couldn't force herself to say that.

"We don't have nowheres to put him in the wagon, Sarah!" She was jostled on Ed's shoulder now. He was run-limping back toward the station wagon, grunting and wheezing with each step.

"Ed!" she shouted in his ear. "We have to go get him! We gotta bury him, at least! It won't get him if he's under the ground!"

"It's coming from under the ground, Sarah!"

Sarah wanted to cry, scream, vomit. Her world swirling as she was jostled up and down on Ed's shoulder, she chose vomiting. It ran down Ed's back, but he barely noticed. Just like he barely noticed the steady trickle of blood running down to the small of his back and plastering his shirt to his spine.

Sarah's spell of heaving subsided and she realized Ed was taking her back to the station wagon, halfway through the process of placing her inside on the passenger seat. She threw a hissy fit. "EEEEDDD! NO! NO! I'M NOT GETTING BACK IN THAT CAR! I WON'T! I WON'T! NOT WITH JIMMY - " Her voice caught in her throat. Not with Jimmy all over the walls.

"Yo, Ed." Kevin's voice. Ed realized he was speaking to him after a long, pained moment and looked at Kevin and Nazz, who watched him with concern and sympathy. "You can ride with us if you need to, man."

"Nah, don't worry bout it, Kevin." It was Eddy's voice now, and it was coming from behind Ed. Ed grew unreasonably angry at Eddy for making him turn back around again, but he did it nonetheless. Eddy was kneeling next to Jonny, slapping the bald boy's cheeks, alternating sides, rousing him from his brief spell of unconsciousness. "That's a two-seater. You got no room, what with that whole-ass arsenal in back, there. They can ride with me, Double Dee, and Woody, here. Sound Ed, Lumpy?"

Eddy tried not to see the hollow stare in Ed's eyes. Ed nodded slightly at him.

"Alright," Eddy turned back to Jonny. "Jonny. Jonny, get up. We gotta move. We'll be right behind you, Kevin." He looked across the street at Kevin and their eyes met. Kevin saw a light in Eddy's eyes he hadn't seen in a long time. He nodded at Eddy's orders and set off back to the pickup with Nazz.

Eddy turned to Ed as he helped the dazed Jonny back up to his feet. "Let's go, Lumpy."

Ed readjusted Sarah on his shoulder, rounded the rear of the station wagon, grabbing as many bags (his and Sarah's, not Jimmy's, sadly) as he could carry in one hand, and ran-limped back to Eddy's house, swinging the back passenger door open and seeing Double Dee laying, pale and sweat-slick, stretched across the back seat. "Oh, Double Dee!" Ed couldn't believe he'd completely forgotten about his dear friend for a minute there. But there was no point in worrying over him right now. He slipped into the second row of back seats and placed the bags in the corner (the rear compartment was packed full) and sat Sarah down next to him. Within the minute, Jonny and Eddy rounded the flanks of the van and climbed in.

Ed heard tires squeal and looked out the passenger window as Kevin tore out of his driveway in reverse, squealing to a halt in the street, swinging the wheel and gunning for the open end of the Cul-de-Sac, heading toward town.

Eddy and Jonny slammed their doors. Eddy looked back at Double Dee, then eyed Sarah and Ed, his eye holding on Ed for an excruciating moment, his squinting eyes suspicious of Ed's pale face and cold-sweaty brow. After a moment: "Ok, we ready? Everybody got their shoes and booties on?" But he was already in reverse and backing out of the driveway, careful not to back into the station wagon as he went. Ed and Sarah gave Eddy's question no thought; they had more important matters on their minds than considerations of their personal belongings. But Jonny paused and thought for a moment, knowing, just knowing he was missing something.

His eyes bolted wide and he shrieked, "WAIT!"

Eddy slammed on the breaks and the minivan squealed to a halt right between Double Dee and the Marcoreaus' houses. "What!" Eddy was watching the ass end of Kevin's truck go fish-tailing around the corner and anxiety gnawed at him as he let more and more distance elapse between himself and Kevin and Nazz.

"Wait here! Just a second!" Jonny was already throwing his door open and piling out back into the street.

"Wait for what? What are you doing?"

"We gotta save Plank!"

"Oh, Jesus CHRIST, JONNY! FORGET THAT HUNK'A WOOD! We got bigger fish to fry here, you know!" But Jonny was gone, running back up Double Dee's lawn.

Jonny burst through Double Dee's open front door, frantic. How could he ever forget his bestest buddy in the world? What had gotten into him? First he was drinking alcohol like a real juvenile delinquent type, now this? And what had happened after he drank that tall boy, eh? Double Dee had nearly gotten his arm ripped off! Was he being punished for being a bad kid? And, if so, oh jeez, what would happen now that he had nearly left behind his best buddy in the whole wide world? Was it enough to have remembered him? Could he save this? Would he still be punished? He sure hoped not!

Ed, Eddy and Sarah waited patiently in the van, listening to the engine idle. Eddy flipped on the radio and channel surfed, but it was all static or end of the world evangelical types. One channel was just some guy sobbing about how stressful his life was, and Eddy kind of wanted to hear how that was going to pan out, but he figured that might not be best for Sarah and Ed to hear right now. Ed was looking pretty sick sitting back there.

He kept channel surfing, trying to cast his fears for Ed and Double Dee's health out of his mind, as well as his mounting fear at lagging so far behind Kevin and Nazz. They hadn't come back for them, like he hoped they would. They must not have noticed that they weren't behind them yet. Eddy hoped to God, Christ, Krishna, Vishna, and the Big Buddha himself that he would be able to catch up with his pals and that his nagging certainty that he would just never see them again were wrong, that they were part of his life and always would be, at least till he went off to college with Ed and Double Dee.

Ed and Double Dee. Now, Double Dee would probably need to learn how to write left handed. If the shoulder wound didn't mess up both his hands. Eddy cast that thought out too; he just couldn't accept the realization that nothing nowhere would ever be the same again, that there would be no college, that Double Dee would never be the same, and neither would Ed or Sarah or anyone, for that matter. Man, things were sure going to shit, weren't they?

Eddy grumbled. "What's takin' him?" He honked the horn.

Ed, sweating profusely now, pried Sarah from the vice-grip bear hug around Ed's neck. "Uh, Sarah…" He spoke very softly, and, don't tell nobody, but it made Sarah feel very scared.

"What? What is it, stupid?" There was no vitriol to her insult; she didn't know how else to speak and hoped the rude remark would be interpreted as loving sibling ribbing instead of hateful rhetoric.

"Um. I, uh, I think I oughta show you guys somethin'."

"What…?"

He was already lifting his pant leg. Sarah looked down and she felt her heart stop beating for a moment at the sight of the horrible, fleshy, lumpy thing winding its way up Ed's knee. And the colors of his skin down his calf and shin to his ankle. It looked like Double Dee's arm, Ed's leg was so purple and swollen yet simultaneously pale and bloodless. And goodness gracious, all that blood. It was pooling pretty significantly on the floorboard already and the simple act of raising the pant leg was like squeezing out a wet bath cloth over the sink. Blood was everywhere. Sarah had never seen so much blood in her life as she'd seen the last two days. "Oh, jeez, Ed!"

"I'm sorry, baby sister," Ed said, sounding pathetic.

"Eddy…" Sarah turned to eye Eddy in the rearview. He saw the pleading look in her eyes.

"What? What's all the hubbub?" Sarah looked down at Ed's leg and Eddy felt more and more anxiety bubbling up in his stomach. He thought he might be sick. He slipped over the center console and hovered over Double Dee, cocking his head to look down at the floorboard beneath where Ed and Sarah sat in the way-back seat. "Holy fuckin' shit! Jesus Henry Christopher Christ!"

He plopped his fat little ass back down in the driver's seat and laid on the horn, shoving his head up and out of the window. "JONNY! Get your flat, hairy ass back in this fuckin' car or we're leavin' ya AND that hunk'a wood!" Honk, honk! Two more swift jabs to the horn. "JONNY!"

Just then, Jonny came running out, Plank in hand. He had been propped up next to the door and it had taken Jonny far longer than he had hoped to realize that fact. But now he was making his way back to the minivan and everything would be alright.

He jumped into the van next to Eddy and saw the looks on all their faces. "What? Hey, I'm sorry, ok? He's my best buddy! You guys wouldn't leave Double Dee behind, would ya? Would ya?"

"Jonny, stuff it. Get in the back. They're gonna need your help back there."

"What? Need my help with what?" He looked up and saw the strain on Ed's face. Veins bulged on his forehead and blood thumped in his temples and cheeks. "Oh, gee whiz."

Kevin and Nazz tore toward downtown Peach Creek, happy to have finally put that nightmare behind them, hopeful somehow that they'd never have to go through a thing like the Cul-de-Sac ever again. Nazz didn't even think once about the thing she'd encountered back on Main Street only a couple hours ago.

There was more shit in the road now than before, even worse than it had been this morning when Nazz had walked down it back to the Cul-de-Sac. More abandoned cars and downed power lines. Kevin had to weave to avoid it all. People were also prone to running out into the road, Kevin nearly running them down. A downed tree cut the road off ahead but Kevin veered over into the yard the tree belonged to, slamming through a low picket fence and squeezing the truck between the roots of the overturned tree and the decrepit-looking single-wide trailer behind it in the yard. The truck's tires kicked up earth, grass and mud. A group of people burst out from beside the tree's canopy, shouting and waving their arms, trying to jump in front of the truck to cut off its exit. Kevin gunned it, spraying the group with a blast of mud as he shot past, and weaved back onto the road.

"Jesus! Jesus." They drove on and Kevin steeled himself up again. "Thank you, Nazz. You're a total badass, by the way."

"I'm tired, Kevin. I just want this to be over and done with."

"I know, dude. It's almost over, man. I'm tellin' ya. We're gonna get through this." She nodded at him, unconvinced. Kevin's cheeks pulsed at the thought of Nazz's words. I love you too, Kevin.

Nazz's mind must've been on the same track. "Hey, uh, listen, Kev. I uh...man, I don't even know who I am anymore."

"Me neither, Nazz."

"I mean, I've done…" She swallowed a lump in her throat. "I've done some pretty horrible things the last few days. Awful, awful things."

"Me too."

"I, um," her voice quivered, "I killed someone, Kev. Shot him dead."

Kevin looked over at her, shocked. But with soft eyes. "Yeah. Me too. It was - it was Ed's dad. Killed him. But he deserved it, Nazz. He sure did."

Nazz looked back at him with the same shock in her eyes. "Oh my God, Kevin…" She put her hand on his on the steering wheel and their fingers entwined. It was the closest they'd been since they were kids. Fat girl and little boy. "I'm not sure that mine did." Her voice quivered. Kevin squeezed her hand and for a moment there, just a moment, things felt like they might just work out alright. That was, of course, before it all went to Hell in a handbasket as soon as they reached downtown. But this moment for Nazz was one of the happiest she'd known in days.

She'd saved him today. She kept that thing off him and kept him alive. She wouldn't have been able to live with herself otherwise. Not with her best friend gone, her parents gone. Everybody gone. But she'd done it. She'd saved the day. At least, she had saved his day. His life. She had saved the possibility for their lives together. As a couple. That would sure be a great thing, a thing she could scarcely allow herself to imagine these days. Happy times. Maybe she could live with being a murderer. Maybe she could make it right. It would take much doing, much punishment, but maybe, just maybe, one day sooner than she'd thought, she would find her redemption. Her peace. She would do all the good she could manage. Fight for all the lives she could. Save people. Save days. Then, and only then, maybe she could sleep. Sleep like a little old baby.

Wouldn't that be something?

Just about then, they heard a familiar shrieking voice, and a very familiar beat-up pickup came reversing at them from far ahead, the wheels turning and rocketing Rolf's old truck around a corner going backwards.

"We gotta get this thing off'a him. Um." That was all Jonny could manage to say. He was kneeling on the floorboard as Eddy drove, roaring down the suburban streets toward downtown Peach Creek where he hoped Kevin and Nazz would be waiting for them with bells on.

"I know that, you moron. But how do we do it?" Sarah sat on the other side. Both Sarah and Jonny had their hands outstretched, as if ready to catch the blasted thing if it decided to spring off at them, or maybe as if they were warming their hands by a fire on a cold winter night. As a matter of fact:

"Jeez, it's warm," Sarah noted.

Stupid as he had a tendency toward being, Jonny reached out and grabbed the thing in a sudden surge of courage. Almost instantly, he screamed and let it go, looking at his palms, which had been burned somewhere severely.

The tendril squeezed tighter. Any tighter, Ed thought, and it would surely break his leg.

"Great work, genius," Sarah muttered. Jonny floundered for a witty response but settled with a despondent groan.

Eddy kept eyeing them in the backseat but was careful to be aware of the road. It had gotten pretty treacherous since he'd last traveled down it toward town. Things were getting worse the closer they got to town. There were sounds of gunshots. Sounds of chaos and screaming. People running every which way but out of Eddy's way. Eddy kept honking the horn. Folks must be figuring out what's been coming up outta those holes, Eddy mused with a fearful glance at Ed's leg, which was propped up on the back of Double Dee's seat.

"Wait," Sarah said, turning and rifling through the bags to her left. She pulled out two thick sweaters. One was her size, the other's Ed's. Inscriptions on the wrinkled chest portions read "MAMA'S LITTLE GIRL" and "MAMA'S LITTLE BOY" respectively. Sarah and Ed both winced at the sight and remembered better times long past.

Thrusting those thoughts away, Sarah wrapped her hands densely in the sweaters, one for each hand, forming rudimentary crab-like pincer claws. "Jonny," she said, "help me with this. Take out that stupid gun of yours. Better yet, use Ed's."

Eddy saw the upturned tree ahead and saw the group of white trash nightmares huddled around in the yard beneath the tree's uprooted stem. He swung the wheel to the left and squeezed the minivan through between a chain link fence the tree's bushy canopy, heavy branches batting against the grille, hood and windshield, cracking it but failing to impede Eddy's speed. The group of good ol' folks came running at them, waving arms as well, but Eddy paid them no mind.

Sarah hesitated, looked at Ed. Ed nodded at her severely. She wrapped her sweater-claw hands quickly around the tendril, one hand near its tapered end, the other near the ragged stump where the buckshot severed it from its body, and pulled, grunting with strain and power.

Ed grunted, then could hold it back no longer and let loose a piercing shriek as Sarah managed to unfurl the tendril just slightly, loosening its grip by half an inch, then an inch, putting a slim space between its slippery, bucking body and Ed's mutilated shin. In that space, Jonny shoved the barrel of Ed's shotgun with a wince. "Sorry, Ed!"

Sarah screamed too, her sweater mitts catching fire and a pair of long, slender jaws with jagged teeth manifesting along the length of the tendril and biting down into the makeshift mitts. Sarah snatched her hands back and pulled the mitts clean off. She quickly inspected her digits and found herself missing nothing.

Ed braced himself against the seat and roof and screamed again as Jonny pressed the barrel of the shotgun against Ed's shin and lifted up, prying against the angry tendril's powerful body - and in seconds, the thing grew frustrated and let loose from Ed's leg, all the tension leaving Ed's body instantly. He went limp against the seat. Eddy, peering at him from the rearview, thought for a moment he had gone limp with relief, then realized that Ed had instead lost consciousness.

Sarah gaped at Ed's leg. It looked horrible, worse even than Double Dee's arm. The flesh was horrifically mangled, having been burned, melted, squeezed and eaten by jagged jaws of cruel teeth. There was a clear and deep indentation swirling around Ed's leg like a coiled spring where the thing had attached itself and the wounds were deep and terrible. Ed's shin bone was clearly visible through a sheen of blood and slime, splintered at several points and blackened in others. Jonny had done well prying the tendril off Ed's leg but had snapped the bone when he did so. Now, Ed's leg jutted in two different angles, his knee pointing his leg down but with his foot angled up and still propped on the forward seat. The back of Ed's leg, the bulk of his calf, had been split raggedly in half down to the bone and strings of melted flesh hung down and held the two halves together. Fragments of the broken bone jutted and Sarah could tell that with one more swift blow, Ed's leg could easily be severed through the calf.

Sarah gaped, in awe of how long Ed had been able to suffer through the pain of that thing doing that to him, of how easily he had been running to save her and clutching her to his chest despite the clear agony this thing must have caused him at every minute.

Then Jonny started screaming and Sarah realized that just because they'd knocked the tendril thing off Ed's leg, that in no way meant that the awful, burning thing was no longer a threat to them. It was winding across the floorboard at Jonny, who snatched his legs up off the floor, flames crackling at his sneakers from the trailing tatters of the burning sweater mitt.

Jonny brought the shotgun around in the unwieldy, confined space of the minivan, took aim, and before Sarah could make a move, he fired at the thing, punching buckshot through the floorboard and blowing the sweater to flaming pieces that splattered fire all over the minivan's seats but otherwise leaving the thing unharmed.

Sarah's ears rang and she could barely hear Eddy's string of shrieked curses over the constant, droning buzz that deafened her.

"JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO MY MOM'S CAR YOU FUCKIN' ANIMALS!"

Then the tendril surged forward under the seats toward Eddy and in moments it was between his legs and sizzling against the seat cushion in pursuit of Eddy's deep-fried balls. Eddy screamed and let off the gas leaping up on top of the seat and squeezing up against the window as Jonny threw himself around Double Dee's seat and aimed the shotgun at the whipping tendril as its flesh split and an evil cat-like eyeball emerged from within, blinking at him. "KILL IT! KILL THE FUCKIN' THING!" Eddy demanded.

Jonny obeyed, but the thing saw him and slithered back beneath the seat. But before Jonny could stop himself he fired anyway, nearly blowing Eddy's foot off.

The thing came back at Jonny under the seats and Jonny leapt up on top of Double Dee, making Double Dee shout with pain from the surreal sanctity of his unending semi-conscious fever dream.

Eddy dropped back in the seat and slammed the gas, spinning the steering wheel just in time to avoid running smack-dab into burnt-out jalopy in the middle of the street.

But there it was, just ahead - downtown Peach Creek! The candy store was there, so was Cafe Fondue, the Java Hut, all the downtown shops and stores! Main Street was situated at a right angle from the street Eddy was currently travelling down, so he'd need to take a swift 90 degree turn to hook it into downtown, but it felt like Eddy was so close to victory. Because, while there was no Kevin or Nazz in sight, there was no more Peach Creek beyond Main Street and downtown. They'd be out in the country and they'd be home free.

He paid no attention to the clutter of traffic and running pedestrians. The amount of cars reversing out of Main Street and hooking sharp turns back the way they came. The shots and shouts and chaos and the fire.

Jonny stood on Double Dee's seat, carefully of the injured arm, and swung the unwieldy shotgun around. Sarah stood on top of the way back seat behind him, holding Ed's legs up off the floorboard. "Where is it?! Do you see where it went?" Jonny asked Sarah, nearly frothing at the mouth from gun-crazy delirium.

But Sarah said nothing. She was busy stomping out the fires that spread across the seats from the burnt sweater mitt. She also couldn't hear a thing, what with the shotgun and all. She shouted as embers singed her hand where she patted out a small flame on the back of Double Dee's seat.

Then Jonny saw movement squirming in the floorboard between Double Dee's seat, the way back and the sliding side door. There it was, whipping wildly, its wide oval jaws snapping and single, wide cat-like eye rotating to eye Jonny with more malice than the boy had ever known.

Jonny swung the shotgun and fired. The tendril exploded in a blast of flame, molden flesh and jagged teeth, and Jonny thrust his arms up like a Tuskan Raider, the shotgun slamming into the ceiling of the minivan and shattering the overhead light as Jonny let out a battle cry of success.

Sarah squealed involuntarily, having seen the tendril explode against the door of the Toyota.

Eddy reached the sharp turn onto Main Street and swung the wheel, pressing the brake softly to ease the turn at a slower speed but, mysteriously, felt no pressure on his foot and felt no decline in speed from the van. But he swung the wheel regardless, hearing the cries of success in the backseat and making the fatal error of turning around to look. "Did you get it?! Did we do it?"

Eddy whipped back around to watch the road and saw two things. The first was an older man, mid-60s, standing in front of Eddy's car, his open palms outstretched and motioning hopelessly for Eddy to stop. Then, the minivan slammed into the guy at full speed and the man's body crumpled against the grille, rolling up over the hood and smashing head-first into the windshield, the safety glass failing its namesake and shredding the old man's face into tatters. For a split second, Eddy gaped at the man's ruined face and saw his eyes, one of which was punctured by broken glass and running down his face like a busted egg, shift to look at him with cool indifference.

Then Eddy saw through the terrible, bloody cracks in the windshield the worst of the two things: another huge expanse of molten flesh and flaming metal was bubbling out of the street ahead, cutting off their exit as it infiltrated the Candy Shop on the left and Danny's Meat Shop on the right, a pair of jaws snapping open in the mountains of flesh along with several outstretched tendrils as if they together formed a distant aunt awaiting a great hug from a long lost nephew. And that nephew was Eddy's minivan.

Eddy slammed the brakes, had been doing so since the old guy magically appeared in front of the van's grille, and realized that there was once again no pressure against his foot where the brake pad should have been.

But before he had time to investigate that discrepancy, they slammed head-on into the Abomination in front of them, Eddy's head snapping forward and nearly punching yet another hole in the ruined windshield but instead splitting a deep gash diagonally across his forehead, splitting his left eyebrow in half.

Jonny went flying forward as well, the front passenger seat catching him in the legs and spilling him in a downward path into the seat, his back and head smashing into the dashboard.

Sarah slammed into the back of Double Dee's seat, the wind knocked loose from her.

Double Dee slid off the seat and slammed lengthwise against both the back of Eddy's seat and the front passenger seat. He screamed as pain shot through his mangled arm and the gashes began to pump steady flows of hot blood once again. Though the arm had little left to pump; the tourniquet tied at his shoulder was too tight and constricted blood flow completely. His arm was already dying.

Ed flew forward into Double Dee's seat, his leg still propped on the seat back. The bone snapped, bending his leg almost double. Just like folded laundry. This snapped him into consciousness and he was thrust forward, head hanging over Double Dee's seat. He screamed deafeningly against the seat, then fell backward, immediately unconscious again.

And the body of the old man flew loose from the windshield and was cast into the body of the Abomination.

Sarah recovered instantly, rousing from against Double Dee's seat and surveying the damage, dazed. Jonny was shifting in the passenger seat, legs splayed up over the back of the seat. He groaned in pain, rubbed his head. Eddy moaned and fell back against the seat, rivulets of blood pouring down his face in steady, thrumming streams.

Sarah snapped back into action, trying the sliding door beside her but finding it stuck. She shouldered into it and fell out onto the sidewalk. She turned and grabbed Ed by the sleeve of his jacket, dragging him across the seat and out onto the sidewalk beside her.

Jonny sat upright, suddenly terribly aware of what had just happened, and thrust himself across the center console to Eddy, shaking him awake.

Eddy's senses came back slowly. The first thing he knew was that it was night time now, all of a sudden. Too dark to see even an inch in front of his face. Then, he knew he hurt. His head hurt. He needed an aspirin, bad. Maybe a migraine tablet, even. Then he heard the screaming. It was one of the worst screams he'd ever heard in his life. It was sputtering and guttural, filled with pain and fear unlike Eddy had ever known before. Then he felt his shoulder shake and heard Jonny's voice coursing under the unending screams like hands under a blanket.

"Eddy! Eddy, come on, buddy! You gotta wake up!"

The curtains of night suddenly dropped and his eyes peeled open despite the sticky blood pasting them down. He wiped his eyes and saw what he'd done.

The old man, his body broken and face shredded as if mauled by a lion, was the one the screams were coming from, his limbs flailing and being torn off his torso with horrific cruelty. A tendril of great size ripped off one leg and cast it to the side. Another, small tendril broke off the other and waved it in the air in its coiled grip as if celebrating the fruits of its labor. Twin arms with three-pronged claws rolled up over the mounds of flesh and seized the man by his head, the claws piercing his skull with ease. Then the flesh began melting toward and soon the man had two fleshy antlers attached to his head. Another tendril had ensnared his arm but had melded with it, the two limbs now connected into one, like a horrible jump rope, whipping back and forth in competition with each other. The man's chest and crotch were in flames. The fire licked up the man's head as the arms which had melded with his head slithered down his face, pulling and rending the skin so that the eyelids, nose and mouth no longer covered the eyes, nostrils and jaws. The man's screams were suddenly muffled as his lips were dragged away from his disappeared mouth. Fire began turning the molten flesh of his head a terrible chargrilled black.

And then he realized that the Abomination was coming for him, creeping up the hood of the fucking minivan! His mom's minivan! How dare it!

Eddy gaped, ignoring Jonny's voice and shifting the minivan into reverse.

Sarah stared at the van as the wheels began to spin, leaving rubber marks scorched on the pavement. The minivan began rocking as Eddy spun the wheel one way, then the other in a mad-dash attempt to tear the van loose.

Sarah kicked back, dragged Ed with her as the van fish-tailed dangerously close to crushing their legs.

Then, the minivan shuddered and tore loose from the Abomination; at least, it tore partially loose. As it rocketed backward (Jonny being thrown forward into the dashboard again), it dragged out long strands and goopy lumps of the Abominations like strings of bubblegum.

The wheel had been cut to the left and the minivan surged backward in that direction, nearly running over Ed's foot before crashing into a parked car directly behind it. The minivan knocked the car over the curb and sent it crashing into the storefront wall beyond the sidewalk. Now, Sarah and Ed were pinned to the sidewalk between the Abomination, the ruined minivan, and the parked car that had been crushed against the storefront wall. Sarah screamed to no one in particular, "What is he DOING!"

The tires of the minivan kept spinning, leaving more treadmarks.

Eddy shifted into forward gear again, but the minivan just shuddered and remained in place. The wreckage of the car the minivan had pinned to the wall caught on the bumper and rear compartment door of the van and pinned the two vehicles together. The damage to the engine block from the crash no longer provided the vehicle enough power to pull itself loose.

Eddy tried to press the brakes to shift back to forward, but once again, found nothing by way of a brake pedal. This time, he lowered his head to look. Below his feet, the floorboard hung in tatters through which he could see the asphalt below. The brake pedal was nothing more than a stalk sticking out from underneath the dashboard, pieces of its body strewn beneath the seat. We're a bunch'a morons, Eddy thought. We blew off the fucking brake pedal. That thought finally brought Eddy out of his hysteria. He looked around and saw Jonny's bloody face. "Eddy! We gotta go! We gotta get Double Dee!"

Those were the words Jonny said, but Eddy could only hear them as if they were underwater, deep underwater. It took him a moment to realize what was going on. The shotgun blasts from Jonny's shooting spree, the victims of which being that cat-eyed tendril and the minivan's brake pedal, had deafened him. His ears rung. This disoriented him further as he had thought he could hear the old man's screams so clearly. He didn't wish to ever hear screams like that without that ringing in his ears protecting him from the true horror of those sounds, those awful sounds.

He listened through the sheen in his ears and could make out the shape of the words. "Double Dee." Eddy nodded, wiping blood from his eyes.

Jonny searched the backseat quickly, finding Plank, then shouldered into the passenger door and it flew open, sending broken glass from the shattered window scattering across the asphalt. His legs could barely support him; too much shock and horror and disorientation for one day. But he remained upright, the oppressive heat of the Abomination overwhelming the left side of his face. His vision was blurred, possibly from a concussion, but Jonny was no stranger to those. His ears also rung. Everything sounded to him as if it were being drowned out on the other side of a waterfall. He noticed there were people huddled on the street nearby but thought nothing more of them. He had to focus on his friends for right now.

Eddy, still dazed, climbed over the center console and climbed out on Jonny's side. Jonny propped Plank against the minivan's rear wheel and together with Eddy threw open the passenger side back door with some difficulty (the shotgun must've done something to the mechanism) and more glass tinkled onto the street from the busted-out window, oddly beautiful in the hellish light and thrumming nightmare noises. The men reached inside to seize Double Dee in their arms. He'd fallen off the couch cover but there was no time to bother with placing him back on top of it. They commenced dragging him out onto their side, but Double Dee's foot had gotten hooked in the seatbelt on the driver's side. They pulled and pulled on Double Dee's armpits to no avail. They could hear muffled shouting behind them.

Sarah saw Double Dee's entangled foot and rose unsteadily to her feet, trying to lift the unconscious Ed to his. He screamed as his broken, ruined leg dangled to the street. She lowered him, dragging him away from the Abomination's grasp and tucking him into a sunken entryway leading to a glass door (glass broken, of course) that led up a flight of stairs, undoubtedly leading to an apartment above the Candy Shop. Oh, how Ed would love to live in a place like that. Sarah made a pledge to save up enough money to buy that apartment for Ed once this thing was all over. He deserved better than this.

She leaned him up against the wall a safe distance away from the encroaching Abomination and climbed into the back seat of the minivan, letting loose Double Dee's foot from the seatbelt snare and helping guide his body carefully down to the ground on the other side. She could also hear muffled shouting through the noisy dentist drills fiddling around in her ears but had the presence of mind to look up and investigate.

She dropped Double Dee's legs and backed up against the side of the van. Jonny and Eddy looked at her with surprise and annoyance at her cavalier treatment of their injured friend. Then they noticed the frightened look in her eyes and turned, almost in unison, and saw the boy with the gun jabbing in their faces almost at the same time. The guy was young, red-headed, and had gaps between his teeth like they were distancing themselves from each other. He was maybe their age, maybe even younger. His face was red from shouting and from crying and he was screaming at them, but they couldn't hear well enough to figure out what he was saying.

Jonny reacted quickly, manically, whipping the pistol out from the waistband at the back of his pants and training it on the boy, who he assumed (erroneously) was trying to stick them up. The boy, who had been aiming the gun at Eddy in particular, whipped around and aimed back at Jonny, still shouting at them both. Gun upraised in one hand, using the back of the other to wipe away tears. "Put it down!" Jonny shouted, failing to hear his own voice. As a result, it came out in a strange tone, as if in slow motion, with a slur.

Eddy, at a strange distance from the whole affair, began searching the ground around their feet. He was looking for Ed's shotgun, recalled that Jonny was the last one in possession of it in the car, but had noticed that Jonny no longer held it in his hands. "Where is it?" he said to no one in particular.

The frantic boy turned the gun back on him and mouthed (actually, shouted) what looked like "What?"

Behind Sarah, the van shifted. She thought it was going to tip over on her and stepped forward, away from it. But no, it was in no danger of that. Instead, it was being assaulted by the Abomination, which had the engine block coiled in its tendrils and was shaking it back and forth, jaws tearing through the hood like a cat going at a mouse. More tendrils were whipping forward, wrapping up the van to the windshield, tendrils infiltrating the van through the mangled windshield and the open front windows. Sarah also noticed that the Abomination was surging forward quickly now, as if on a mission to rescue its separated portions, melting back into them and growing larger, filling up more and more of the street as it did so.

The others noticed the thing chewing up the van as well, but, with other matters more pressing at the moment, reacted only by stepping sidelong away from the attacking tendrils. Eddy and Jonny, then Sarah moved. Then the red-faced boy with the Glock 17 jabbing nearly into their noses.

Eddy looked at Jonny, who seemed far more aware of the situation, and asked, "What does he want?" But Jonny reacted only by flitting a brief glance at Eddy, wondering if Eddy had said anything, then setting his jaw and nodding at him as if in confident reply to whatever he'd said.

They could sense that the boy was growing more furious now. He was mimicking Eddy's words furiously. "'What do I want?' 'What do I WANT?'" he apparently said. They noticed another man, older, maybe mid-forties, and much larger, with a beard, a balding head, and broad, wrinkled forehead, was coming up behind the boy now, shouting as well, but shouting at the boy, with his hands up as if in apology to Jonny and Eddy. Eddy made out maybe the words, "KILLED HIM!" which the boy directed back at the tall, balding man behind him.

Sarah kept a frightened eye on both the encroaching Abomination and the armed boy, who paid her little mind other than cycling her through the trio of folks he was aiming his gun at. She looked from him back to the van, noticing that the tendrils had worked their way down to the open sliding door on the driver's side. Then she realized Ed was still lying semi-conscious back there in that doorway. "Ed!" she cried, turning to climb into and through the minivan in pursuit of her brother. But as she turned, she heard the vibrations of a shouting voice and felt shifting movement.

Eddy and Jonny parted, Jonny aiming the gun unsteadily at the boy, and let him snatch Sarah back away from the van door, swinging her around to face him and shoving her against the side of the minivan in front of the gas tank.

The balding man stepped forward, quickly, seeming to plead with the boy. Eddy saw the older man was wiping tears, too.

"I need to get my brother!" Sarah shouted to many deaf ears, but the red-headed boy just made a stern face at her and trained the gun on her nose.

Then Eddy made out some more of the boy's words, "You didn't have to kill him!" And all at once, he felt like he was going to cry, vomit and scream. Of course the old man they hit was of some relation, probably grandfather, to the boy and Eddy had just cold-blooded, cold-hearted killed him, sent him off to the worst death he could possibly imagine and the worst death he had even, even seen inflicted on a human being - and that was including the Liveleak videos he'd gotten into once upon a time. The boy was bereaved.

"Oh, Jesus. Oh man," was all Eddy could manage. His head began to pulse worse now than before, made worse by the subsiding drone of the ringing in his ears, which he prayed fruitlessly would come back so he wouldn't hear the bereavement in the boy's tearful, shouting voice. The way his furious words cut off every few syllables to let loose a racking sob. Every sound in the world beat against him like baseball bats against a metal garbage can, and just as loud. He wanted to coil up into a ball, grab hold of his feet and feed them into his own mouth like the ouroboros (a reference Eddy wouldn't know in a million, billion years) then send the rest of him down the chute for good measure. Just blink cleanly out of existence. Yes, wouldn't that be peachy? Peachy keen.

Eddy felt like his knees were gonna give out, so he guided himself down to the ground instead of waiting. He crouched, knees to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them, leaning forward as if to dry-heave. But no heaves came, dry or otherwise. No tears or cries or screams did either, though Eddy couldn't see why they wouldn't. He couldn't very well imagine things being much worse right now; hell, why not scream and shout and let it all out? Fuck it, why not?

But all he could manage was "Oh God, oh man, oh man, oh God, oh jeez, oh gosh, oh God oh man oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck," and the boy was looking down at him now, puzzled. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he muttered.

"You should be," the boy said, and Eddy felt more than saw the gun lowering, if only just slightly, by tiny increments. "You - should - be!" He choked the words out through heavy sobs. The balding man was right behind him now, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder and coaxing the outstretched pistol-baring arm with his other hand down toward the ground. The balding man was saying calmly, "It's okay. It's okay. Don't worry about 'em."

"Sarah?" Ed's voice. Sarah whipped around and rounded the backside of the van. Ed was conscious now, at least mostly, cocking his head to try to see what was going on and where everyone else was.

Oh my God, Sarah thought, in horror.

Hidden by the broadside of the van, the Abomination had creeped it way across the sidewalk on the other side. It had enveloped all of the driver's side of the van, blocking entrance to Ed's side through the vehicle, and it was crawling up toward the sunken entryway up to those stairs now. It had Ed surrounded; there was no way they would be able to get him out of there.

It was almost as if the Abomination had done this on purpose. Had maneuvered to cut him off. Almost as if it was intelligent enough to do a thing like that. But how could it be?

Jonny stepped cautiously over to Eddy and patted him on the shoulder as the balding man defused the sobbing boy. Eddy struck up at Jonny, grazing his jaw and making him dart back. He also knocked Jonny's gun arm down, shouting in a croning, mournful voice, "Put the fucking gun down, Jonny! Just put it down!"

Jonny looked at Eddy with bewilderment, then eyed the redhead and the balding man, who was probably the boy's father. The gun was being pulled out of the boy's hand by the balding man, who clutched it tightly in his palm in a fist. It was clear from the way he held it he had no intent to use it.

Two things happened, then, in rapid succession. First, Ed shouted, "Sarah!" and Sarah shouted back, "Ed!" Second, the Abomination tore the minivan forward, dislodging it from the car it had pinned against the wall, revealing Ed's body in the doorway where it had been hidden by the cars' wreckage.

The redhead and the bald man looked. The bald man's eyes widened and he said, "Oh my God." The redhead started laughing then in a way that made Eddy want to poke his eyeballs out with the points of his thumbs. Then Jonny and Eddy turned and looked, too. The minivan's dislodgement from the other car gave Sarah room to slip through and it looked just as if she was about to try to leap over the thing to get to her brother on the other side. But no, she wouldn't; there was no way she'd made a jump like that.

But it was beginning to look like she'd try.

"Sarah, don't!" That was Jonny, who was running after her now. He squeezed between the car and van after her, dragging a pretty deep gash across his bare thigh as he went, and wrapped his arms around her before she could make the leap, but, caught in her forward momentum, skidded forward on his sneakers, which he'd long ago worn the traction off of, and for an endless, terrible moment it looked as if they'd both teeter over and go tumbling into the many waiting mouths of the Abomination.

But Jonny's feet finally caught on the asphalt and they jolted to a stop, their faces simmering over the heat of the horrible thing.

Eddy saw Ed then, trapped as he was in that concave doorway, and nearly passed out from the horror and shock of it all. For a long goddamned moment there, he forgot all about poor Ed and his broken leg - and look where that had gotten the big lug.

Ed was drowsily dragging himself back over shattered glass toward the door to those stairs, watching the tendrils get closer and closer...

Eddy snapped to action, leapt to his feet as the bald man grabbed the cackling redhead around the chest and began guiding him quickly away from the scene. He ran to the open side door of the minivan, over which hung many snapping tendrils which Eddy kept a careful eye on (and some of them trained careful eyes of their own back at him). He searched quickly around the inside, ducking under the snapping tendrils and the jaws that had grown at the tips of several of them. He was searching for that shotgun, but where could it have gone? Jonny had it, and Jonny had been shaking Eddy awake in the front seat…

Eddy looked toward the front two seats and saw that it was no man's land up there. Tendrils were tearing out the windshield in bloody chunks and surging inside. More were piling in the open windows. But there it was - the shotgun, propped haphazardly around the front passenger seat and the dash. Right there. Nearly within reach, but certainly within reach of the searching tendrils.

Fuck it, fuck it all, I just killed a guy, that was what was running through Eddy's mind as he threw caution to the wind, crawled into the van underneath the curtain of tendrils overhead, reached between the van's bucket seats and seized the shotgun in his fist, snapping backward before even a single tendril could whip in his direction.

He turned to jump back out and got the shotgun caught between the seats, snapping him backward painfully. He turned the weapon sideways, slipped it through the space and leapt back out of the vehicle, rounding the rear of the van where Jonny still held Sarah.

"Ed!" he shouted, aimed and fired the shotgun at the sea of horrors unfolded before him. But, as was often the luck of the damned and the dumb, the shotgun was empty. "FUCK!" Eddy shook it with all his might as if it would do anything.

Ed reached clumsily into his jacket pocket with a sticky, clammy hand. From it, he produced a large Ziploc bag packed with shells. "I got the shells, Eddy."

"Lotta good that does, Ed!" He felt the weight of the weapon in his hands, weighed that against his perfunctory throwing arm. "Can you catch, Lumpy?"

Ed nodded swiftly and Jonny and Sarah parted to let Eddy through. The putrid stink and oppressive heat of the Abomination belched through them at him and he wondered how they all seemed so unperturbed by it. Eddy hefted the empty shotgun over his head, clutching it in both hands by the barrel, which was hot to the touch, but not too hot to handle, reared back with it as if about to cast a fishing line, and chucked it across the breach toward Ed, who outstretched his hands.

The shotgun barrel clattered painfully off Ed's hands but didn't bounce forward off them into the Abomination's grasp, the weight of the stock carrying it over his head, falling behind him onto the carpeted stairs leading up. Ed crawled through the doorway after it, shouting with the pain of the movement on his ruined leg, which was so intense it paralyzed him for a second. His foot jutted uselessly in a 45 degree angle from his leg, seeping blood onto the concrete which the Abomination was more than happy to lap up.

Ed dragged himself to the stairs and grabbed the shotgun while the others worried and wondered. Jonny thought maybe they could find a long piece of wood and hang one end over the top of the minivan, propping the other end on the first step, so that they could walk across it like a pirate's plank (Plank! Where was Plank?) to grab Ed and shimmy back, but realized there were no lumber yards in downtown Peach Creek that could fulfill such a request quickly enough.

Ed began loading shells into the breach of the shotgun as Sarah turned her head skyward. "Hey! Hey! Those stairs gotta lead up to the roof, right? Why don't we run up the stairs in the next building over and meet Ed halfway?"

Eddy and Jonny turned to look up to the roof. There was a problem with that plan. Eddy voiced it. "There's a fuckin' alley in the way! What're we gonna do, jump the fuckin' thing?"

"Maybe we can go to the building on the backside of the Candy Store and climb across there," Jonny offered.

The Abomination's tendrils slithered through the doorway at Ed, who dragged himself up a pair of steps to get away, groaning in pain.

Eddy shook his head. "'Nother alley between the buildings on this side and the other side. Look." They looked down the alley and saw the intersecting alley between them and the stores on the other side. Eddy wasn't fooling.

"Shit!" Sarah said.

"Oh well. Guess we're jumpin'," Eddy shrugged. "Ed! You think you can make it up those stairs on your own? It's only two floors, big guy."

Ed turned, looked up the stairs, then back at Eddy. He nodded again, face pale, eyes sunken, sweating. His leg was still freely bleeding, Eddy realized. He could die if they don't pinch off some arteries down there soon. Or maybe the tendril, being as hot as it was, had cauterized everything nice and neatly down there? That couldn't be their luck, and besides, Ed's leg was sure leaving a lot of blood behind it.

Then Eddy remembered Double Dee. "Wait! We gotta get Double Dee!" He and Jonny hurried around the side of the minivan (Jonny saw Plank leaning against the tire and quickly snatched him up into a bear hug) and picked up Double Dee's prone, cold-sweating body, dragging him further away from the approaching Abomination's waiting arms. Huffing from exertion, Eddy and Jonny both nearly doubled over onto Double Dee. "We can't get 'im up the stairs, you know." Jonny nodded. Eddy looked over at Sarah, then back at Jonny. "You take her and get Double Dee away from here. I'll get Lumpy."

"No, you won't! Ed's my older brother! If anyone's goin' to get him, it's me!"

Eddy shook his head, sending blood droplets flying off his chin. "Nuh-uh. Whoever goes has gotta be able to carry him. You're a little sister for a reason. Now, me, I may be short but I got thick thighs that can save some lives."

"Eddy, you've got blood in your eyes," Sarah simmered.

"Don't worry about it. And I'm older than you, so what I say goes. I'm gettin' Ed. You and Jonny are hoofin' it on-foot. Maybe you can find Kevin and Nazz but I got this real bad feeling like we're on our own here now."

Ed took aim at the one of the Abomination's sneering, growling appendages and blew it to pieces with a shotgun blast, startling the others from their tense deliberations. They turned to him. "Baby sister," Ed called, "go!"

Sarah was clearly hesitant. Jonny nodded, turning his revolver over to Eddy, who took it graciously. "Well, what're we waitin' for? Sarah, you, me and Plank got a job ta do."

Sarah glared at the asphalt for a moment more. Then she nodded and she and Jonny set to work picking up Double Dee.

Eddy slipped between the wreckage of the two vehicles between him and Ed and said, "You ready, Lumpy?"

Ed was already dragging his legs up the stairs, two by two, shotgun in one fist. He forced a weak, toothy grin. "Born ready, Eddy!"

"No shit," Eddy smirked back without conviction.

They set about it. Jonny and Sarah hoisted Double Dee, waif-thin as always, and began carrying him away from the destruction of Main Street while Eddy poked and prodded around the Java Hut, looking for a set of stairs.

He didn't find any inside, but there was, conveniently enough for him, a fire escape around the back that Eddy climbed up on top of a dumpster to reach. He hurried up the iron steps, which shook under his weight with each step, and made his way up to the roof.

Ed took the steps as fast as he dared carry himself. He was over-exerting himself, considering his wounds, and was seeing black spots swimming in his vision, nearly overwhelming it as he reached the landing of the second floor, which was a nice, hardwood lobby leading into an insurance office. Another, uncarpeted flight of stairs led upwards around the railing of the first flight. Ed took a break, blinking away black spots.

Ed was moving slowly. Too slowly. He knew it. And the Abomination was gaining on him. It was past halfway up the first flight of stairs after him, with several long, prodding tendrils nearly long enough to reach him. He took unsteady aim with the shotgun and fired, missing most of the first shot, racked the weapon and fired again, severing a long tendril with a bulbed head like a tapeworm halfway down its stalk.

Ed wasted no more time, dragging himself around the corner toward the next flight of stairs, which, of course, were facing the opposite direction, which meant more crawling and more awful, terrible, no-good, very bad pain.

Eddy was up on the roof now, feeling impatient and terrified something had happened to his dear pal. He had begun to fear that maybe Ed would pass out on the stairs before reaching the roof, which was a terrible likelihood, and the pair of muffled shotgun blasts from below had calmed Eddy's nerves only a little bit.

Now, Eddy had to face that space between the two buildings. His legs were short like the rest of him. No way he could jump that gap. No way in hell. He made his way up to the edge though regardless, peering across, wondering just how in the world he was gonna manage this, and realizing just how half-baked this scheme was in the first place. What had they been thinking? This wasn't some scam they could pull. If they failed, it meant Ed's life. Eddy was terrified that wasting time on this half-cocked idea had doomed Ed, that it wasn't like when a scam failed and they were out a few quarters, nothing more, besides suffering a swift kick to the ego. This, though? This was playing for keeps.

He set about hunting for something to bridge the gap to the Candy Shop's roof. He was sure he'd find something. Had to. Otherwise, Ed was dead. And there was no world where Eddy was gonna lose both his best friends. No world at all.

Ed had taken up a bad habit of looking back every so often to make sure he hadn't shaken loose the sinews and bone shards holding his foot to the rest of his leg. He was afraid he'd end up bouncing it around too much, like one of the loose teeth he'd played with too much back in elementary school and which he'd lost down his throat when he'd finally coaxed it out. He'd checked his poop for the next week hoping to find that tooth to give to the Tooth Fairy, but never did find it. That had made him very sad, but the Tooth Fairy had ended up giving him some quarters for his troubles anyways. Good Tooth Fairy.

He crawled, thinking of Tooth Fairies (Teeth Fairies?), which led to him thinking about the kind of fairies who could grant you wishes, like fairy godmothers. He wished there was a fairy godmother there to save him right now, but he had no one to make that wish with to get her there to grant his other wish, which was to be safe and warm in bed with Mom humming a song to him. It was all very confusing, so Ed stopped thinking about fairies all together and instead thought about the fake sick days he'd had, when he got to spend time with Mom away from Sarah (when she'd gotten old enough to go to school) and all the other kids. Just him and Mom. He missed Mom.

The Abomination was pouring up over the side of the balustrade to the second floor, now. Good thing Ed was making his way up the next flight. It took the tendrils a long time to figure out where he was, but when they did, they were just as mad as ever. They came around the sides of the railing at him, through the balusters to snap at his arms and head and face, and he had to roll over to get away, to get enough room between himself and them to raise the shotgun and blew them away. He missed two more times, blowing off pieces of the balusters instead. Another tendril slapped against a baluster and coiled around it, and that one had been easy pickings. Ed blew it to bits with ease, sending splinters of the baluster raining down on its buddies waiting underneath him.

One of the tendrils he'd severed, the one that looked like a tapeworm, nearly snuck up on him and got him, but he looked back at just the right time, rolled and fired. He missed the first shot, didn't miss the second. This time, he blew the bulbed tip with all the jaws in it to pieces. He'd like to see it coming after him now. He kicked the squirming remains quickly, cautiously off the steps with his good foot.

He kept chugging along. Halfway up the next flight of stairs now. When he looked up, which wasn't often now since he had to keep an eye out for more of the evil Blood Blob tendril thingies, he could see the heavy metal roof access door with its WARNING and EMERGENCY EXIT labels. There was a push bar to open it and light streamed in through the edges of the door. It looked almost heavenly. Not far, now. Just so long as his leg didn't fall off. That would be bad.

Try as he may and try as he might, Eddy could not find jack of all shit to bridge the gap between the two roofs. It was looking pretty bleak, now. All Eddy could do was peer over the edge between the two roofs, looking down the gap that would surely kill him if he tried to jump it and failed, and consider what if he could? Wouldn't that make him a pretty big damn hero? But he didn't. He was too scared. He just stood there on the edge, one foot propped up, waiting. Waiting, waiting. Ed's shotgun was still going off downstairs, so he was alive, at least.

Ed paused, pulling out his baggy of shells and reloading the shotgun. It had come as an unwelcome surprise, hearing that empty click, and he'd nearly had his brains munched on as a result. But he got away, and now he was ready and reloaded, and those things down there would see just how much it paid to trifle with Ed, the Great Lumpy. He laid out on his back for a couple minutes, aiming and waiting for more tendrils to come up after him. But none came. They must be plotting something, Ed thought. Real-deal conspiratorial-like. But I'm ready for 'em.

Then he remembered, oh yeah, wasn't I supposed to be climbing? He rolled over and kept on trucking, army-crawling with the shotgun in both hands for easy access. He felt like one of those army men toys, the crawling ones. The worst ones. But Ed felt cool enough playing pretend as one. Maybe those crawling soldiers got a bad rep, even though it was super annoying how he couldn't stand them up like the other soldiers. As a matter of fact, he felt just like one of those crawling guys. He couldn't stand up either, not just yet. But you wait. Just you wait.

The door to the roof was right there. Ed had been crawling so long he thought he might never make it. His back rested against the metal now as he pulled him up one last step.

Below, the Abomination was coming up the stairs, having filled most of the second floor landing in its sprawling hellscape form. Tendrils were coming up around the balusters now, coiling around them. As Ed reached up for the push bar on the roof access door, a gang of tendrils tore the railing off the stairs on Ed's right side. In the next few moments, the railing on the other side was yanked against and buckled through the middle, then was likewise torn away to the landing below. Tendrils were winding up onto the stairs now.

For a terrible moment Ed thought the push bar wasn't going to work. He pushed hard, or what he thought was hard, twice on the bar and it didn't budge. All the while, more tendrils were winding up around the stairs. Ed had to pull his legs away to keep them safe from the fleshy things. Then they tugged, all at once, and the staircase shifted. Ed's heart nearly dropped straight out of him.

He looked up to make sure he was doing it right, pressed his palm to the push bar and pressed. Pressed hard. The bar depressed but no matter how hard Ed pushed, it wouldn't budge. He rolled halfway over to inspect the door and noticed a locking mechanism next to the bar. The door must be locked.

The stairs lurched, wood cracking. The Abomination was about to pull the whole works down on top of it. With no time to spare, Ed raised the shotgun, took aim at the lock, and fired.

The force of the blast blew the mechanism to bits and took half the push bar with it. Ed shielded his face from shrapnel with the upraised shotgun. The door was even blown halfway open by the blast and Ed outstretched an arm to keep it that way. He didn't want it swinging shut again and getting stuck in a way he couldn't fix. Not with the stairs going. That would be very bad indeed.

He caught the door with his palm and dragged himself out through it, searching around the roof for Eddy. But he couldn't see him. "Eddy?" he called, holding the door to pull his legs out so the heavy metal wouldn't swing shut on them and hurt him real bad. "Eddy?"

"What's that, Lumpy?" called Eddy from beyond Ed's field of view. He sounded distant, dejected. Ed could imagine why. So he commenced to crawling, searching the rooftop for his pal. As he did, he heard a loud creaking, then a loud, sharp snap, and a heavy weight crashed below him. There went the stairs. But the Abomination would no doubt be pretty surprised to find no Ed on top of those steps. That would probably tick it off something awful, but Ed didn't care. He'd made it to the roof. Made it up to Eddy. But where was he?

It only took Ed a couple moments before he saw Eddy on that nearby rooftop, staring at him, looking very small and very far away. He couldn't help but grin big at the sight of his friend. This awful feeling had come over him on the stairs like he'd never make it and he'd never see Eddy again. So this was only good news. He started crawling.

The whole building shook then, shuddering as if in the midst of another earthquake. But Ed knew it was no earthquake; the Blood Blob had the whole building in its grasp and was shaking it. Shaking it like a bully turns a short, skinny kid upside down and shakes him to get all his lunch money loose. Only, Ed was the lunch money.

He crawled over to the edge of the roof across from Eddy and hung an arm over the side as if out a car window. He looked absurdly casual hanging over the wall of the roof like that, arm hooked over the side like a cool kid, smirking at Eddy, but still pale, still sweaty. Looking closer to death than life. That frightened Eddy.

"Hi, Eddy. Long time no see, don'cha agree?"

Behind him, he heard the roof access door fly open and he and Eddy turned to look. Tendrils were pouring out over the ledge. They made that climb awful fast, Ed thought. Must be some kinda bad hungry.

"Listen, Ed," Eddy began sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. "You gotta look around over there for something I can use to get over there. I can't make that jump, Ed. And especially not carrying you on my back like a fireman."

Ed peered over the edge of the roof. Whoa, now that was a long way down. He wouldn't like to take that express elevator any time soon. No siree. "You don't think so, Eddy?" He spoke casually. "Maybe I could make it."

"Yeah, maybe you could. Maybe if your foot wasn't dangling off like some loose threads."

"Oh yeah. I didn't think about that." Dang his ol' stupid head.

So, he turned and looked around the roof for something to use to cross, sure to pay no attention whatsoever to the slithering, burning tentacles making their way right toward him. Man, they sure were gunning for him. He kinda felt bad for depriving them of their food, but it wasn't like there wasn't enough to go around. They had the whole world to eat from. But, then again, being so big, you probably couldn't fill their belly up all the way even if you tried real hard. They were insatiable.

Eddy told him to check around the corners he couldn't see, so Ed did, dragging himself around behind the small concrete shack the roof access door was built into, sure to give the winding tendrils a wide berth as they belched out across the roof from the access doorway like vomit from a slack jaw.

Surely, though, Eddy had been right to suggest Ed go looking. Because, like a gift from the man upstairs, there was a rack of equipment affixed to the backside of the shack (as if hiding, being crafty) and propped up next to that rack was an old extension ladder. "Eureka, Eddy!"

The building shifted beneath him, quaked and seemed to budge backward. Nearby, Eddy cast a nervous glance over the ledge and saw that the Abomination had formed a flowing river through the alleyway now, and was spilling out into the perpendicular alley that separated the backsides of the buildings on Main St. and 2nd St. The walls of the Candy Shop were bulging like the steady rise and fall of a sleeping man's chest. It gave Eddy the willies, bad.

Ed was moving with the ladder across the roof now, pushing it ahead of him an arm length, crawling forward, pushing it another arm length, crawling forward, rinse and repeat. He held the shotgun by the pump in his other hand. Ed had to give the mounting Blood Blob accumulating on the roof an even wider berth this time and held his breath for long periods to keep the awful stink of it out of his nose. It was shrieking at him in several different voices, some of which he recognized but tried not to. One voice was particularly familiar, shrill and youthful. It sounded like Jimmy screaming, but couldn't be; Jimmy was dead.

Eddy noticed that, as Ed made it past the Abomination again, the fleshy mounds were pulsing forward to either side, not directly toward Ed. Cutting him off to either side. The fucking thing was flanking him.

Ed made it to the ledge in no time, though he could feel the heat of the awful thing nipping at his heels. Way too close for comfort. He had to get off this roof! "You ready, Eddy?" Eddy nodded furiously.

They heard glass shattering and Eddy peered down; the Abomination was pouring out of an upstairs window above the Candy Shop, hanging through the broken glass like ropes of taffy.

He looked back at Ed and motioned for the ladder. "Come on, Ed. Bring it across." Ed hauled the extension ladder up onto the ledge and had some trouble doing so, his immense strength zapped away by pain and loss of blood. He held the ladder over the ledge, balanced so it would tip back onto the roof if it fell, and caught his breath. Eddy awaited on the other rooftop, squeezing his fists anxiously, making soft mewling noises under his breath as he watched the Abomination continue its maneuver, reaching out toward the walls of the roof to cut off all chance of escape for Ed. So, Eddy thought, shivers running up his spine, this thing is smart. Maybe smarter than us.

Ed began to slide the ladder across the length and it took them only a few moments to realize, the ladder partially stretching the chasm, that it was unlikely to reach all the way. But that was fine. It was an extension ladder, after all. All Eddy had to do was get a hold of it, pulling it out, and then they would have it made in the shade. This was almost over; then, it would be on to the next horrific nightmare. They seemed to come one right after the other these days. He wondered if it was only going to get worse from here, and questioned just how that would be possible.

Ed kept sliding, holding the ladder under his arm as he did, to keep it from tipping over and falling.

He slid it out as far as he dared, shaking with the strength it took to hold the heavy ladder aloft from one end across the space. Eddy sidled up to the ledge and reached as far as he dared. Almost there. Almost! If he only had two more inches of arms, he'd have it, and he'd have Ed across in no time. But he was short, just too short to reach. "We need more slack, Ed!"

Ed nodded. Eddy thought he would haul it back, then extend the ladder a few inches, but Ed pinned the ladder down with one hand and used the other to push the extending portion of the ladder forward - but it wouldn't budge.

He paused and looked the ladder over, shaking all over. Sweating. Seeing spots again. That was bad. His feet, or foot, because the other was way past numb, were getting hot. It was right there and Ed dared not look. He could almost feel it breathing down the back of his neck, then remembered it probably didn't do much breathing at all.

The ladder had a locking mechanism, a simple clasp, fastened over the two sections of ladder to keep them from sliding apart or together when they weren't supposed to. Smart. Why hadn't Ed thought of that. He repositioned his arm to unfasten it and the ladder bobbed unsteadily. Eddy looked like he was about to throw himself off the side of the roof to catch it. If he thought it would do any good, he might would've, if it came to that.

But Ed held tight and used stiff, unwieldy fingers to unfasten the clasp. He slid one section of the ladder forward and Eddy reached out to grab it. That was at least two inches.

The building quaked again. Ed lost his grip. The ladder dropped and Eddy made a mad reach for it, but it was too little too late. He nearly went off the roof as a result. His arms pinwheeled for a heartstopping moment, then his weight settling back onto the safety of the roof.

Ed held onto the ladder with one hand, the one that had been pushing the one section forward. He hung over the side of the roof with it, clutching it for dear life as it swung slightly, scraping the brick of the wall below. The other section of ladder slid out all the way out, stopping short at the end of its tracks, sending a shudder all the way back up into Ed's arm. Ed's grip softened. He nearly lost it.

"ED! Don't let go! Don't let go, Lumpy! Bring it back up!"

Ed was already straining. "I'm...trying to...Eddy!" He was pulling with all his might, hauling it up with one hand, then reaching the other down to pull it up another rung. It was slow, clumsy work in Ed's condition.

Complicating matters were the arms and tendrils of the Abomination that hung out of the second story window of the building, their eyes turning in the fleshy sockets to look at the long metal thing in Ed's hands.

Eddy didn't see what happened next, but Ed did. It was the dumbest, easiest mistake in the world. His clumsy, cold hand surged down after the other but instead of grabbing the rung in front of him he banged his knuckles into it instead. Without thinking though, he let go with the other hand, just as he'd done repeatedly before as he was hauling the ladder up hand over hand. But this time, he messed up and didn't have a grip, not even anything close to one. And he let it go. For no good reason at all, he let it go, and he watched it fall, and he couldn't even blame the Blood Blob for it. It was his dumb ol' stupid self he had to blame.

"Uh-oh. Whoops." That was all Ed had to say about it. His vision was doing a funny thing where everything blurred in and out and back in again. Everything got fuzzy, like a nice pair of warm socks or a peach, then returned to dim definition.

Eddy shouted Ed's name hopelessly, trying to sound angry but failing. Together, both boys watched the ladder sail silently down through the air, bounce off the Abomination's tendrils, ricochet off the wall of the Butcher Shop, and fall onto the Abomination below. Limbs rushed up and seized it, and in seconds, it was twisted up into a pretzel, useless.

They watched for a moment as the thing below tore up Ed's only hope for escape. Ed could sense the building tension in Eddy from across the way from the soft noises he was making. They were the strangest sounds he'd ever heard Eddy make, and he'd heard Eddy make a whole lot of strange noises. He thought maybe Eddy was crying, or something like it. Ed felt real bad. "Sorry, Eddy."

Eddy regained composure, then muttered, not without irritation in his voice, "No, Ed, it's not - it's just…"

"I know, Eddy."

"That was it, Ed. I don't know what to do now. I really don't. Do you know what we should do now?"

Ed gave it some thought, but he was already resigning himself to his fate. His legs felt really hot now and he could hear the hoarse chorus of the Blood Blob whining at him from just over his shoulder. It seemed to him that the thing held people in it; its victims. It seemed there was no sweet release of death for those poor folks. Ed didn't want to never die, especially not if his undeath would be as painful as that all sounded. It wasn't a pretty noise. "Uh. I'm all dry for now, Eddy."

"Shit," Eddy hissed, hands on hips, pacing. "Wait a sec. Let me think. Just let me think. Just don't let it get you. Goddammit, I need to think! Why won't it shut up?"

"It's okay, Eddy," Ed forced a smile. "It's all gonna be okay." Ed pulled himself upright, propped himself up with the stock of the shotgun and leaned against the wall, his figure in profile to Eddy, looking contemplative. He knew, just knew that Eddy had run dry too. His scheming brain had been all used up, wasted on years of ineffectual scams. Or maybe his scheming brain never worked at all and that's why nothing ever turned out for the Eds.

Just two Eds now, probably. Maybe - Ed gulped down a heavy flood of emotions - maybe just one Ed, if Double Dee didn't get better. Because Ed knew that come hell or high water, he wasn't gonna make it off that rooftop. He tried to shut out the loud, loud, loud of the world and looked up at the sky. Birds flew by in an arrow formation overhead. He wondered if they were pointing him the way toward Heaven. Or maybe Hell. Though he thought maybe he had a chance at the former.

No sir, Ed was not getting off this rooftop. He knew that like he knew the sun would come up tomorrow on a world without Ed.

Ed tried to be sad at that. He really did. But all that came to mind was Oh well. Like his mother used to sing bitterly under her breath when Dad was being a butt. Oh well, oh well…, she sang. Ed missed Mom's singing.

He hoped to hear it again real soon.

He looked around at the Abomination as it closed in on all sides toward him. He drew his good leg up close to him and didn't care much about the other. He wouldn't have any more use for it. They could have it for all he cared. But they wouldn't, couldn't have him. He didn't want to suffer like that, like those voices, like those horrible face-shaped lumps underneath all that boiling, molten flesh. He was dimly aware Eddy had been speaking the whole time he'd phased out into his own little world, but decided that now was an okay time to interrupt his buddy. Now, it would be okay to be selfish for a minute. "You think God could forgive me, Eddy?"

"Forgive you for what, Lumpy? You ain't done nothin' damnable, not that I know about. You got somethin' I should know about, Lumpy?" Eddy tried to laugh at his poor attempt at a joke but neither he nor Ed found it particularly laughable.

"I mean, it's a sin to kill yourself," Ed said, matter of fact. "It's a pretty big one, too."

"Ed. Don't talk like that. Ed."

"I think Sarah will be okay. I know what you and Double Dee were saying was just trying to make me feel better. She really doesn't need me, Eddy. And that's okay, you know."

"She needs you, Ed. Now more than ever. Don't give up hope, Ed. Look - look! There's telephone lines. Maybe you could climb over - "

Ed shook his head. "I'm too tired, Eddy. I'm at the end of the road here, I think."

"Ed. Ed."

"Make sure you and Double Dee keep Sarah safe. You gotta keep her safe, Eddy, no matter what. She's gotta be okay. You guys'll get her through this, I just know it. Don't look at me when I do it. I don't want you to have to look at somethin' like that. I know how you get squeamish at the gooey parts of scary movies, Eddy."

"Ed, don't do this. Just - we'll work it out."

"I think time's up, Eddy. Time's way past up. I think God'll forgive me. I think he understands things like this. What do you call 'em?"

Eddy paused for a long time, or at least, it felt like a long time to Ed. He was just about to keep going without the words - which would've been frustrating, going out without knowing the words he was looking for, where was Double Dee when you needed him? - when Eddy spoke up. "Extenuating circumstances."

"Extremulating circumstance. I think he'll understand. I hope he's a nice guy."

"Ed. Wait. Wait, Ed - "

"Time's up," Ed said.

Ed shot himself up through the chin, careful to aim it right so he didn't just scoop his face off like a bunch of ice cream and leave it at that. That would've sucked. No, he did it right. At the right angle so it all came out the back of his head like streamers. Party streamers. It was nice to go out with some party streamers. Not just anybody can say they've done that.

Eddy didn't take Ed's advice. He watched it all happen. The way it all unfolded, Ed's brains coming out the top of his thick skull, was searing onto his eyes, burned onto the backs of his eyelids when he squeezed them shut, like when you look at the sun for too long. But this was a different kind of thing. This was so much worse.

Luckily, Sarah and Jonny hadn't taken too long finding Kevin and Nazz. When they realized that they had lost the minivan in the clusterfuck of downtown, they forced their way back through with the pickup and happened upon Sarah and Jonny, Double Dee strung between them like a banner in his makeshift stretcher, coming around the corner from Main Street. Kevin reversed the truck onto the curb, out of the way of the frenzied stream of traffic rushing past.

Nazz quickly hopped out and joined them. "What happened, dudes?"

"Eddy crashed the car," Sarah grunted, sweaty and exhausted, physically and emotionally. "And now my brother's gonna die."

"Don't talk like that, Sarah," Jonny wheezed. He was also deeply winded.

Assured by Sarah and Jonny that the van was one hundred percent out of commision, Nazz helped haul Double Dee into the bed of the truck, pushing aside the sacks and boxes of goods she and Kevin had packed inside to make room.

"Where are they?" Kevin asked after joining Nazz and getting filled in on the situation.

"Back on Main Street," Sarah said, sitting on the tailgate of the truck. "On top of the candy store."

Kevin steeled himself, jutting out his chin, which Nazz knew meant Kevin was about to do some alpha male heroing. "Okay," he said. "Everybody get in."

They reversed the truck down the sidewalk, nearing running over fleeing pedestrians and sideswiping passing cars, until Main Street was clearly in view.

It was not a good sight.

The Abomination was filling up the street rapidly. At its tallest, it was almost fifteen feet high, swinging great-big tentacles toward the sky and swatting holes in nearby buildings. The candy store looked particularly bad. It was swimming in a sea of writhing flesh, metal, and mouths. It seemed like it had even been knocked loose of its foundations. Eddy and Ed were nowhere in sight.

"Where are they?" whined Sarah. Nazz patted her hand and Jonny watched from the wall of the truck bed, anxious.

"They're probably still up on the roof. The way that stuff is pourin' out all over the street, they probably can't make it back down the stairs."

"Oh my God."

"No, no - it's okay. It's all gonna be okay, Sarah, cuz all the buildings past the candy shop are connected, see?" It was true; the alley between the Candy Shop and the Java Hut was the only one on the street. The rest of the buildings were pressed up together in a tight row. "So Eddy and Ed are prolly comin' down this way now."

Nazz pounded on the roof of the truck and Kevin slid open a section of the truck's rear window. "Pull us up to the end of the street, right under the fire escape." Nazz pointed and Kevin saw. The end of the street was capped in a two-story brick building with a rusty old iron fire escape meandering down the wall.

Kevin began the difficult task of getting across the street to the other curb. When they finally made it across, Kevin pulled up just so the fire escape dumped whoever came down it into the bed of the truck. He assumed that Nazz or one of the others had seen the Eds coming, but as minutes passed, Kevin tapping the wheel of the truck nervously, it became apparent that either the boys had gotten held up or weren't coming at all.

Kevin leaned out the back window. "What's the hold-up?"

"How're we supposed to know?" Sarah asked, depressed and stressed but still as belligerent as ever.

"We can't wait here all day. That - that - whatever it is, it's coming down the street at us right now. We got maybe ten more minutes before we got that thing breathing down our necks."

"We're not leaving my brother," Sarah said, putting her foot down.

"Or Eddy," Jonny added, as helpful as usual.

Kevin grumbled and turned to Nazz for support and was stricken by how small, harried and tired she looked. She looked almost as bad as Double Dee did in the sunlight. Nazz shrugged slightly. "Let's wait a little while longer, Kev."

Kevin, now overwhelmed with another concern on top of a hundred thousand others, nodded and turned around in his seat. He just hoped Eddy and Ed were hauling ass.

Eddy's legs stopped working and he slumped down on the edge of the roof, hopeless. Ready for death, he thought. Ed was gone. Deader than dead. Eddy would've been able to say if not for that old guy downstairs that Ed was the deadest guy he'd ever seen, but Eddy had been sure to fuck up bad enough that even that wasn't true anymore. And it was all his fault.

Ed was dead. So, Ed, Edd, n Eddy were now just Edd n Eddy. But, woah, look at that, Double Dee, the Edd from Edd n Eddy, you remember him, right? Looks like he's rapping at death's door himself, so Edd n Eddy is starting to look a lot like Just Eddy. Just poor, fucked-up, stupid, horrible Eddy. All alone in this world. Why hadn't he tried something else? Surely anything else could've been better. Maybe he could've caught that plank after all. Maybe he could've. But it was too late now. Now, Sarah was down both parents, a best friend, and a brother, all within, like, forty eight hours. And part of that was due to Eddy's mismanagement.

Eddy made a habit of making shit worse, didn't he? That was all it seemed like he ever did. Make people worse off than otherwise. Maybe it would be best to turn the surviving Ed of Ed, Edd n Eddy into Just No-Fucking-body At All. All dead and gone, who needs em? Well, Ed was Sarah's sister and strong as an ox, so he was useful. And Double Dee was smart and kind, could get you out of any kind of deep shit known to man, so he had his worthwhile qualities too. But a guy like Eddy, pfft, who needs him? He should've put a bullet where his think-place was a long time ago now. Would've saved a lot of people a lot of irritation.

Eddy was thinking about all this when suddenly the building beneath him shook, rattled and rolled. And for all Eddy's pontificating on how much better the world would be if he was dead, his body and brain were still overridden by a single imperative: don't die.

So, disoriented and terrified, Eddy rose to his feet and stumbled across the rooftop of Java Hut, back to the fire escape leading down into the back alley.

But, hey, look'a there - it was being torn up by a roiling wave of nightmare fuel. Just like he should've come to expect. If he'd just run over there as soon as Ed...did it, maybe he could've gotten down. But not now. Nope, he even made it a habit of fucking himself over once in a while, too.

He thought as fast as he could and realized that the next several buildings were sandwiched against each other. He could climb across a couple more rooftops and find a way down. But then what? Wander the streets as a depressed vagabond, scavenging liquor to dull the pain? Find Sarah and tell her all about how he couldn't save one of his two best friends in the world and now he and she alike were both all alone in this pesky world?

What was the point?

The building shook again, and Eddy decided he'd figure one out later. He didn't like the idea of being torn apart by a monster ocean from Hell.

So, he began crossing rooftops, jumping the walls between them, climbing the slight rises between one rooftop and the next. And soon, he reached the end of the line, and one more fire escape.

And at the bottom of it, like a mirage, was a pickup truck with Double Dee, Sarah, Nazz and Jonny packed in the bed. Like sardines in a can, cluttered into a corner with Kevin's arsenal and a slew of non-perishable goods. The sight of Sarah almost dissuaded Eddy from making his way down, but he talked himself into it when the whole row of buildings shook.

Nazz's head snapped back to look up at the fire escape as they all heard the sounds of someone descending. It was hard to tell through the iron, but it didn't look like two people. Barely looked like one; that meant Eddy was on his way down, and probably with bad news. Sarah knew it too; Nazz heard her moan. She rubbed the younger girl's shoulder as comfortingly as she could manage.

Eddy came down the last flight of stairs and jumped down into the bed of the truck, Jonny moving over to make room. Eddy flopped onto the bed in the fetal position, sobbing, hysterical. "Go, go, just fucking go!"

"Eddy, where's Ed?" Sarah asked, voice betraying fear. Then, steeling herself: "Eddy. Where's Ed?"

"We gotta get outta Dodge," Eddy muttered among more words that Nazz didn't find coherent in the slightest. "We gotta dip."

"Eddy…" Sarah managed.

Eddy dragged himself up to the side of the truck and vomited onto the street. Then, he finally pulled his eyeballs up from where they pointed at the ground and looked at Sarah.

"Oh God, no," Sarah said. Nazz pulled her close into an embrace as the girl lost it. Nazz smacked the top of the truck twice.

Kevin leaned back. "Where's Ed?"

"We gotta go," Nazz said, clutching Sarah.

Kevin's face went slack with realization. He looked for a moment like he was going to cry, then like he was going to kill somebody. Then, he settled back into a mostly slack expression, but with his jaw clenched tight and trembling. He turned around and kicked the truck into forward gear.

They drove off into the mass exodus and began the arduous task of fleeing Peach Creek. They would never return.

On their way to the countryside that split Peach Creek and Lemon Brook, they hit a hellish traffic jam. They inched forward for hours. They did so mostly in silence. Eddy sobbed on the truck bed, making himself as small as possible. Soon, his tears slacked off into a hollow, mindless stare into nothing. Sarah was sobbing, too. Nazz clutched her, whispered "shhh" intermittently in as motherly a tone as she could muster, and stared off the side of the road into the trees, remembering how she'd worked so hard to get back to Peach Creek just hours earlier. And with no more sleep under her belt.

Eventually, Jonny felt too awkward to stay back there any longer, pushed the rear window compartment open and slipped inside. He sat next to Kevin, who drove in silence, too. Jonny hoped Kevin would speak up and regale him with a plan, but nothing came. Kevin just stared ahead into the sea of honking horns and screaming voices. Kevin and Jonny watched a brawl break out as two men got into an argument between cars, God only knew why, and began pounding each other on the thin strip of asphalt between. Others screamed and shouted at them to get back in their cars, but they just kept swinging. A guy in a huge pickup, bigger than Kevin's, crashed into the back of one of the fighters' cars and pushed it out of the way of traffic, slamming it into a tree, and other cars did the same to the other. The brawlers got up then, surprised, and went about retrieving their vehicles.

"So," Jonny hazarded eventually. "What's the play now, Kev?"

Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. "Shut the fuck up, Jonny. Please."

Jonny felt like he was going to cry. So, he leaned his head against the window and went about it. Kevin drove, motionless, for a moment, then started eyeing Jonny from the corner of his eye. After a minute or so, he reached out and patted Jonny's shoulder, but it was too late. Now Jonny was at it. His sobs were loud and unkempt and Kevin was afraid Sarah could hear them in the back of the truck. "It's all good, man," Kevin said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, man. I'm just hurtin'."

"Yeah," Jonny said, wiping his face as he tried to collect himself, "I think we all are."

By the time they reached Lemon Brook, it was almost nighttime.

Sarah fell asleep in Nazz's arms and Nazz guided her head down to the truck bed, which surely wasn't comfortable with all its vibrations, but Nazz needed some space.

She leaned back and stretched out as much as the cramped truck bed would allow, looking at Double Dee and Eddy taking up room beside her. Double Dee looked bad. She wondered if he was still breathing, then noticed the soft rise and fall of his chest beneath the bandages. So that wasn't another dead kid to have hanging over her head for the rest of her life, which was good.

She looked at Eddy, who had hoisted himself up to hang an arm over the tailgate and watch the sea of cars build behind them. Headlights were on now. They were climbing into the cityscape.

Nazz wondered what happened up on that rooftop and couldn't help but wonder if Eddy had done something to Ed. No, maybe not done something. Not a malicious something. But she found it mighty suspicious that Eddy would show up so distraught with no Ed. But she shook that off. That was just paranoia. She wasn't prone to paranoia. But then again, she wasn't prone to killing or firing guns at Hellspawn, either, so it seemed like life in general was now a matter of "anything goes." She thought about Ed. And Jimmy.

Ed and Jimmy. Both within an hour of each other. Nine kids down to seven. It had all gone to Hell, and it had done so in less than a day. Now they were homeless. Now they were grieving. Nazz wondered if things could get any worse.

They could. And they would, sooner rather than later, for the world had begun to burn.