Three hundred pages typed. How do I do this? SIFTW is the longest story I've ever written, and I'm loving every minute of it.
I'm one review away from 50 which would absolutely make my week 333 I love all my reviewers, thank you so much. I love to know your opinions on my writing! Enjoy the chapter, I worked hard on this one-it's got some Killjoy action in it, finally, and there's definitely more like it coming ;D
CHAPTER 18: THESE PIGS ARE AFTER ME, AFTER YOU
September 20, 2013
A Motel, Somewhere out in the Mojave Desert, California
12:06 PM
"Killjoys, make some noise!" Frank exclaimed. He clicked off the microphone and turned to smile at Billie and Gerard.
"Nice," the older man said approvingly. "You guys are getting good at this."
"It's fun," Frank laughed. He ran a hand through his short black hair and pulled off the headset, laying it next to the computer for whoever got the night shift that day.
Billie smirked. "Soon you guys won't need me here at all."
"Aw, Billie!" the two exclaimed in sync.
"You're Killjoys in your own right now," he grinned. "Just cause I started it doesn't mean you two aren't just as good—or better—at it than me."
Gerard and Frank glowed. Getting their leader's approval meant a lot to them, maybe more than it should. They both looked up to Billie as a role model and a guardian.
He laughed at their excitement. "Come on, let's get back to the others. I think Mikey was saying something about wanting to paint the Trans Am this afternoon, and I'm sure you don't want to miss that."
"The Trans Am!" Gerard nearly squeaked. The car had been his and friends' main project in the past couple weeks. Slowly, with the help of a box of tools they'd found in the warehouse's office, they had managed to work the car from a barely functioning piece of scrap metal into a gleaming, bullet-fast vehicle fit for the Killjoys. It had taken Mikey's brain, Ray's strong brawn and capability with mechanical tools, Frank's knowledge of cars and engines from his father's workshop, and Gerard's artistic skills to bring the vehicle back to life—but bit by bit, they'd reshaped it into an almost entirely new vehicle.
"I can't wait to see what that epic Killjoy logo you've been telling us about is," Billie said as he led the two younger men out of the motel.
Gerard smiled. He had worked hard on the design for that logo, drawing and re-drawing the symbol over and over again. He'd ran through quite a few precious pieces of paper perfecting it—but it was worth it. It was going on the hood of the Trans Am that afternoon with a can of spray paint they'd brought back from Battery City.
"It'll be unveiled tonight," he promised, climbing into the passenger seat of the convertible. Frank protested loudly as he was herded into the backseat , Billie taking the wheel and gunning the engine.
"Why do you always get the front seat?" Frank grumbled.
Gerard smiled smugly. "I'm older."
"But that's not fair," his best friend whined. "You're—hey, what's that?"
"What?" Billie glanced up into the rearview mirror. His eyes locked on the pure white spot on the blue horizon behind them, speeding towards them at an incredible rate.
"Recruits!" Gerard gasped. "They've got to be! That's the only reason people come out here!"
"We've got to be careful, Gee," Billie warned, but he was already slowing their own vehicle in anticipation.
"I wonder what they'll be like," Frank said excitedly. "How many do you think there'll be?"
"I bet it's a lot. Maybe it's that group of teens we met at the rally last week."
"Maybe it's a girl!" Frank's eyes gleamed with curiosity.
"Ooh, yes!" Gerard cheered. "I fucking hope there's a girl!"
"Or even—"
"That's a BL/ind car," Billie cut in grimly.
Gerard and Frank's mouths snapped shut, and they glanced back at the car together. Sure enough, the white vehicle currently gaining on them had Better Living's new logo—even the company had adopted the ironic moniker of BL/ind as their own—painted on the doors.
"It could still be runaways," Gerard said nervously, watching the vehicle as it moved inexorably forward.
A white-gloved hand stuck out of one window, clutching something indistinguishable from that distance.
"What's he holding?" Frank questioned.
The answer became clear when the hand lifted it and aimed a moment later, a beam of light zapping by his window and shooting off the side mirror.
"Shit!" he squealed, throwing himself back.
Billie emitted a loud string of curse words as he pounded the gas pedal, sending the car careening off down the desert road. But he'd lost precious distance slowing down to see who they were. The BL/ind vehicle had no difficulty matching their speed, and two more hands had joined the first at the windows. A storm of light rays were flying towards their vehicle. They hit the back of the car with metallic screeches, flurries of sparks flying off the places where they made contact. Above Frank's head, the back windshield shattered, blasting the teenage boy with shards of glass.
"Frankie!" Gerard shouted, twisting around.
Frank cowered in the backseat, bent down with his hands covering his neck. The top of his dark head was covered in sharp fragments and the back of his hands were bloody, but he looked back up at his best friend and his face was thankfully unharmed.
"We're almost back to the warehouse," Billie growled.
"That's a good thing, right?" Gerard exclaimed frantically.
"But we can't lead them back to everyone else!" the leader yelled, his face grim as he jerked the steering wheel. "We have to lead them away or something!"
"There are at least five of them and three of us!" Gerard argued. "It's suicide!"
Billie said nothing to this, just staring even more grimly out the windshield.
"We have to get backup from the base!" the younger boy continued.
"I'm not condemning everyone else to death, too!" Billie finally shouted, his eyes manic. "It's better if three of us die than twelve! Do you want Mikey and Ray killed too?"
This effectively shut Gerard up.
"We'll double back towards Battery City," the older man decided. "We'll lead them to that diner we found a couple weeks ago—make them think that was our base, and that there's only three of us. Maybe the rest will find our bodies sometime and figure out what happened."
"Well we better go soon, cause I can nearly see the warehouse," Frank interrupted.
"Fuck." The large building was indeed appearing over the horizon, now visible to the three Killjoys. In a moment the people in the BL/ind car would see it, too.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Billie muttered, jerking the steering wheel as hard as he could. It sent the vehicle into a tailspin, launching it onto the dusty sand on the side of the road.
"Billie, what are you doing?" Gerard shrieked in fear.
"It's the only way!" the leader yelled.
At that moment, there was a loud sound, almost like a gunshot, and the car jolted. Gerard, Billie and Frank were thrown into the air as the car toppled off the side of the road. The car nearly flipped as it fell off the lip of the pavement, slamming to one side and finally righting itself as it hit solid ground.
"Fuck no!" Billie yelled, pounding his fist on the steering wheel. This only served the purpose of setting off the loud car horn. It blared across the desert, alerting probably everyone within a mile radius of their predicament.
"They're coming!" Frank gasped. He pointed back up at the road, where the group of five Draculoids was swarming over the ridge.
Billie smiled grimly. "Then it's time to stand and fight."
He wrenched the dented door open, raising his head high as he exited the car. Gerard turned back to Frank.
"Love you, Frankie," he muttered. "See you in Heaven."
"Or hell," Frank smirked.
Gerard made an impulsive grab for Frank's hand as they exited the car, and his best friend squeezed tightly. "We're not going down without a fight," Gerard whispered.
"How are we supposed to fight them?" Frank murmured hopelessly. "They've got rayguns. We have nothing."
Gerard glanced around their surroundings, and his eyes landed on the car. He grasped the fender, which was hanging off the busted vehicle by one bolt, and pulled with both hands.
"Now we do," he smirked.
And so the three men charged, holding jagged pieces of the car aloft. It was a suicide charge, and they knew it. But maybe they could take some of BL/ind's people down with them.
Shots began to fly once again as the Dracs reached the bottom of the ridge. The three ignored them, continuing their crazy sprint towards the group of imposing white-suited men. Frank dropped to the ground and began to crawl, ducking the lasers.
Gerard reached them first. With a yell, he brought the mangled piece of metal down on the head of one Draculoid. The man staggered under the blow but didn't fall, instead backhanding the boy's arm and throwing Gerard to the sandy ground.
"You didn't think you could actually beat us, did you?" he sneered. "Three puny, unorganized rebels against five of Better Living's fiercely trained fighters? Look at you, you don't even have weapons!"
Gerard tried to back away, scrambling backwards with his hands, but the Draculoid followed, laughing. He trained his gun on the boy's temple, smiling cruelly.
"Resistance is futile. BL/ind will create perfect order," he told the fallen man.
"BL/ind is a cruel dictatorship that will never rule the world," Gerard growled.
The Draculoid's lip curled, and he stared down at Gerard in disgust. "Say goodnight, Killjoy," he rasped.
Gerard braced himself, waiting for the shot that would end it all. He refused to close his eyes. He would die with all his senses, remembering everything.
But that shot never came.
An odd look passed over the Draculoid's face, and he dropped his raygun before he could pull the trigger. His body crumpled, losing control of its muscles as a dreamy expression filled its eyes. His head cocked to the side to reveal Mikey, one hand pinching the base of the Draculoid's neck.
"Jesus," Mikey muttered, stunned, as the Drac fell to the ground.
"M-Mikey?" Gerard stuttered. Then he noticed the men swarming down the hill, every other Killjoy running towards the battle with fierce, determined expressions on their faces.
The older boy shook his head. "H-how…?"
"Good thing we learned about pressure points in karate," Mikey grinned, glancing at the fallen enemy.
Around them, though, the battle still raged. Frank was managing to shield himself from the worst of the weird rays shot from the Draculoids' guns, using the dented fender as a guard. Gerard could see he was tiring quickly, though. Billie had managed to knock the raygun out of one Draculoid's hands and was swinging punches, but two more were surrounding him. He would be done for.
But at that moment, the other eight men reached the fray, leaping straight in. Mike and Tré led the charge, each holding what looked to be a hammer for a weapon. Gerard scrambled to his feet as they reached the spot where Billie had just vanished behind three Dracs. They wasted no time in attacking, felling one immediately and engaging the other two.
"Looks like we might not be dying today after all," he muttered, stunned.
It took a one-two blow to fell one Drac, Mike slamming it over the head with the hammer and Rob following with some heavy piece of machinery. The second enemy fell, and the Killjoys made short work of the other two. Gerard had barely gotten to his feet by the time the fourth hit the sand, taken out by a crushing blow to the back of the head from Ray. But the fifth was nowhere in sight.
He barely had time to register the warning shouts before he heard Frank's tortured yell from beside him. He turned to see his best friend seized around the throat by the evil policeman, the air slowly being compressed from his lungs as his eyes bulged out grotesquely.
"Fuck! Frankie!" Gerard screamed, throwing himself at the grappling pair. The Draculoid knocked him to the side with a casual swipe of his hand, the other fist still clenched around Frank's neck. The boy's face was turning blue.
He would be dead in a matter of seconds. The other Killjoys were still too far away from the pair. Gerard was the only one who could do anything.
Blindly, he reached out, clutching at the sand in hope a weapon would magically reveal itself. The car was too far away, he didn't have time to run for it. He had to find something now. Frank was fucking dying.
His hand landed on something cold and smooth. It felt metallic in his sweaty grip as he seized it.
The other Drac's raygun, he realized in surprise.
Gerard had never shot a gun before, never even held one. The closest he'd ever come was a laser gun at Ray's twelfth birthday, the kind that wouldn't hurt anything if you shot it wrong. But this wasn't a fake kids' gun. This was an actual pistol, capable of hurting or even killing.
But Frank was fainting, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as the Drac crushed his windpipe. This couldn't happen. It wouldn't happen. Gerard wouldn't let it.
So he raised the gun, trying to still his trembling, and wrapped his hands around the cool metal handle. The safety was still off from when the Drac had dropped it. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
Gerard aimed at the Draculoid's head, putting the ugly black mass of hair attached to its' mask right between the crosshairs, and fired.
The gun kicked back in his hands, jerking as a high-pitched zap emitted from the futuristic weapon and something blue-white and deadly flew from the end. Time seemed to slow as it cut through the air, slicing a path towards Frank and the Draculoid in slow motion. Gerard was sure he had aimed wrong, that the laser would hit Frank instead of the Drac, that it would miss entirely. But it didn't.
The Draculoid reared back almost comically, his fingers loosening from Frank's throat as he fell back. Both men crumple to the ground without support.
Gerard didn't allow himself to think about what he'd just done. Instead, he ran for his fallen best friend, throwing himself down next to Frank frantically.
"Frankie, Frankie, wake up!" he begged desperately, grabbing the smaller boy by the shoulders and shaking him. His eyes were lightly closed and his lips were parted, but whether air was entering his body, Gerard wasn't sure.
"Please, Frankie!" he gasped. "C'mon, breathe! You are not dying on me!"
In desperation, he slammed a hand on his friend's back, forgetting that the action only helped if something was lodged in his throat. But it seemed to do the trick, because Frank sputtered and his chest began to rise and fall in quick and shallow gasps. His eyelids fluttered with each breath.
"Thank fucking God!" Gerard sobbed. He grabbed Frank's shoulders and drew him into a tight hug.
"Wassappening, Gee?" Frank mumbled.
Gerard shook his head. "Don't you ever fucking scare me like that again, you bastard."
The sound of running feet became audible, and soon the boys found themselves in the center of a ring formed by their friends, all staring down on them concernedly.
"We're okay," Gerard choked out. "We're both okay."
Billie reached down and laid a hand on Gerard's shoulder comfortingly. "You did amazing, Gerard. How'd you learn to shoot like that?"
"I didn't," he muttered. "I've never shot anything before."
The leader raised an eyebrow. "Wow. Lucky shot."
"Really lucky," Frank agreed sleepily. "Thanks, Gee."
"It was just adrenaline," the boy muttered, staring at his feet as his face turned red. He blatantly refused to look at the crumpled body of the Draculoid he had shot lying only a few feet away. "C'mon, let's get you back to the base, Frank. You need to rest."
"Gerard—" Rob protested, but the boy had already slung his friend's arm around his shoulders and was hauling Frank back up the hill towards the warehouse.
"Leave him," Billie advised. "It's a bit much for all of us to deal with."
"What do we do with them?" Mikey nudged the Draculoid Gerard had shot with his toe, repulsed.
Billie sighed. "We make sure they're all dead."
The comment drew gasps from the group of men, and Mike S begged, "Can't we just take them back to the city or something? I mean, this might not be their fault, they could be brainwashed…"
But the older man shook his head grimly. "They've seen our hideout, and they've seen our faces. We can't run the risk of letting them go back to Battery City and tell BL/ind about us."
As much as they hated it, the others knew he was right, so they reluctantly branched off to feel for a pulse on each body. Mikey crouched down next to the Draculoid that had only a minute ago been squeezing the life out of his friend, repulsed but fascinated at the same time. The man wore a rubber Halloween mask made to look like that of some sort of black-and-white monster. There was a small, clean hold in his forehead, the edges of it burned brown and smoking.
Tentatively, the boy placed his fingers on the man's neck, pushing the mask up slightly to access the carotid artery. The vein was still under his fingers. The figure didn't breathe.
Sighing with relief, Mikey stood again. "Dead," he called out.
"Same here," Tré yelled from where he stood over another body.
"And here," Brad confirmed while Phoenix stared down at the enemy's body in disgust.
"And here," Ray added.
"Rob?" Billie called out, raising an eyebrow at the drummer who kneeled next to the last body.
Rob's fingers were still pressed to its' neck, his eyes scrunched shut tightly in concentration. He muttered something under his breath before looking back up and catching Billie's eye.
"Alive," he said.
With a shocking amount of calmness, the leader walked over to where Rob crouched. He bent down and retrieved the Draculoid's raygun from beside the body. He didn't allow himself to wince as he aimed the gun at the man's chest and squeezed the trigger.
"Now he's not," Billie said simply, and began to walk back up to the warehouse too.
The Killjoys ended up burying the five Draculoids in a mass grave in the spot the battle had taken place, marking the spot with a large piece of metal from the destroyed convertible. They checked the bodies over for any information or useful items before throwing sand on the grave, sick to the stomach at the thought of such harsh treatment to the five men. None of them could bear to remove the Draculoids' masks. It would make everything worse, give faces to the mindless killing they had just performed—because even though they were the enemy and obviously had no qualms about killing the Killjoys themselves, the rebels still had emotions, and more specifically, remorse.
They did their best to forget about the day's events that night as all twelve sat in a large circle after dinner, staring instead at the objects laying in the center of the ring.
"What are we supposed to do with them?" Ray asked finally.
"Keep 'em," Mike D answered grimly. "Who knows how many more Dracs BL/ind is gonna send out here."
"We have to protect ourselves somehow," Joe agreed.
"I say every group that leaves the warehouse, no matter what reason, has to have at least two with them," Mike S suggested.
Billie nodded. "Good plan. We still need to figure out how they function, but for now, they'll work."
General noises of agreement burst from all sides of the circle, but still none of them moved to actually touch one of the rayguns.
"They look so…so BL/ind-ish," Frank said finally, shuddering. "They're…sterile. It's creepy."
Gerard pondered his friend's comment for a few moments, feeling the same way as Frank as he stared at the rayguns. It was the lack of color, he decided. That, more than anything, made them look so scary. It was as if they, like their previous owners, were incapable of emotion. If only they were brighter…
The young man was struck with a sudden flash of inspiration, and he stood, grinning. "Back in a minute," he called out, already jogging off to one of the small offices and storage closets along the back wall. Mike D shot Frank a questioning glance, but the smaller boy could only shrug, just as mystified.
It took a few minutes for Gerard to return, hauling a heavy can in each hand. "They had paint in the storage closet," he panted happily. "God knows why…"
The group watched, intrigued, as he pried the lid off the first can to reveal vivid banana-yellow paint. Gerard poked a paintbrush in and stirred it, then lifted one of the rayguns from the pile. Carefully, he began to paint, dragging the brush down the metal and leaving streaks of bright yellow.
After a few minutes, he dropped the paintbrush and held the gun aloft again. Instead of its' original stark white, it was now the shade of sunshine on a summer day, bright and pure.
"Better," he smiled.